Seldom these days does one see a show in which a four-poster bed takes center stage and nothing visibly sweaty takes place in it.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s 1966 I Do! I Do! plays through March 25 at Moonlight Stage Productions’ Avo Playhouse in Vista, directed and choreographed by Don and Bonnie Ward.

I Do! I Do! chronicles the events in the 50-year marriage of Agnes (Marci Anne Wuebben) and Michael (David Grant). Beginning in 1900 with the nervous anticipation of the wedding night, the show takes us through the worries of child rearing, the fear of affairs, the fact of brief dalliances, feelings of neglect, the empty-nest terrors and moving from the too-big family home to a smaller place.

It’s a captivating, rather innocent show that charms with clever songs and the utterly endearing performances of Grant and Wuebben who sing beautifully, dance engagingly, change costumes, move furniture and props, age 50 years and do it all without notable exhaustion.

Jones and Schmidt are best known for The Fantasticks, which ran a record-breaking 42 years in New York and taught us all how to deal with our kids. I Do! I Do! boasts songs reminiscent of that earlier show (“Nobody’s Perfect” reminds me of “This Plum is too Ripe” and is just as much fun) and some that are lovely in their own right. My favorites are Agnes’ soliloquy, “What is a Woman?” and the lovely waltz, “My Cup Runneth Over,” which became a successful single.

Starlight Opera stalwarts Don and Bonnie Ward direct with a sure hand and add their own brand of varied choreography, from the stately two-step to the “Flaming Agnes” vamp in response to Michael’s assertion of the “well-known fact” that “men of 40 go to town; women go to pot.”

Flaming feminists may bristle at Agnes’ contention that “a woman is only alive when she’s in love,” but every parent will guffaw at the assertion that “one day the kids will grow up and get married and we won’t have to worry about them anymore.” Michael’s exasperated complaint that “my daughter is marrying an idiot” leads inevitably to the observation that “suddenly this is the biggest house in the world.” Life goes on.

I’ve seen a lot of shows about marriage lately. First Cygnet’s lovely The Matchmaker (see review this issue), then a new film called The Namesake, and now I Do! I Do! Is this a trend?

If so, and there’s more of the quality of Wilder and Jones and Schmidt to be seen, I say bring it on.

I Do! I Do! plays through March 25 at Moonlight Stage Productions’ Avo Playhouse in Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 760-724-2110 or visit www.vistixonline.com.

That irrepressible yenta Dolly Levi is back, but this time she’s not making a dramatic entrance down a long staircase to the strains of “Hello, Dolly!”

The source material for that legendary 1964 musical was Thornton Wilder’s own successful 1955 Broadway play The Matchmaker. Wilder, in turn, had combined elements of several other plays, including a British and an Austrian one and his own unsuccessful piece, The Merchant of Yonkers.

The Matchmaker plays through April 8 at Cygnet Theatre, directed by Sean Murray.

Set in Yonkers in the 1880s, The Matchmaker is a parody of 19th century Viennese farces and a classic story about loves lost, thwarted, gained and brokered. Yes, Dolly (Sandra Ellis-Troy) has been hired by widower (and richest man in Yonkers) Horace Vandergelder (David Gallagher) to find him an appropriate wife. Though, without her help, he’s already found attractive Irish milliner Irene Molloy (Amy Biedel).

Meanwhile, young love is in bloom between Horace’s niece Ermengarde (Jeanine Marquie) and penniless artist Ambrose Kemper (Andy Collins). Uncle Horace has, of course, forbidden this liaison.

Yonkers is a nice little town, but Vandergelder’s young clerks Cornelius (Sean Cox) and Barnaby (Jason Connors) long to put a little excitement in their lives and contrive an escape to the big city. By a clever set of plot points, practically the whole Vandergelder household ends up in the Big Apple at the same time – and in close proximity – leading to farcical situations, mistaken identities, people hiding in closets and under tables, and just plain silliness.

At heart, The Matchmaker is a charming, old-fashioned story of love conquering all. Even Dolly, widowed lo these many years, gets her man – the richest one in the room (she’s no fool) – and at the end four couples are together.

Murray directs his fine cast with a discerning eye for the physical humor. Ellis-Troy lights up the stage as Dolly, the good-hearted schemer who has little trouble twisting the gruff and penny-pinching Vandergelder around her little finger.

Biedel is irresistible as the Irish Mrs. Molloy (despite an inconsistent accent on opening night), and Rachael Van Wormer properly wide-eyed and giggly as her young assistant.

Cox and Connors, always fun to watch, get to play fast and loose with the farcical elements of the plot. And Antonio “TJ” Johnson is perfect as Vandergelder’s philosophical gofer, who advises all not to give in to multiple weaknesses, but to “nurse one vice and let the virtues grow up around it.”

Murray and Co. score again with this delightful production.

The Matchmaker runs through April 8 at Cygnet Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets, call 619-337-2525, ext. 3 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

A grieving figure in jeans and a warm-up jacket sits hunched before a bier on concrete blocks flanked by photos, candles and flowers in the back “yarda” of a barrio home in the “city of Los, the East Side, by the river, that house at the end of the street over by the freeway.”

The figure is Electricidad (Andrea Galvez), mourning her gang leader father Agamemnon, murdered by his two-timing wife Clemencia (Andrea Snow) so that her lover could become “the king.”

Sound familiar? It should. It’s Electra in the barrio, Sophocles for cholos, written by Luis Alfaro and playing through March 18 at SDSU’s Experimental Theatre, directed by Peter Cirino.

Electricidad, like her Greek counterpart, is mired in the past, eaten up by sorrow, reduced to murderous rage and determined to avenge her father’s death. Despite the intervention of the youngest and hottest Abuela in history (Bianca Chapman), who urges Electricidad to “make a choice for the living” because “your grief will kill you,” Electricidad continues to rage and to plot her mother’s demise. One begins to wonder why she doesn’t just do it.

Upstage in the living room, the ice-cold Clemencia (who harbors thoughts of business success “como la Oprah”) leafs through magazines, checks her nail polish, watches TV and worries that son Orestes (Jason DeSantiago) might come back to claim the crown. Clemencia just wants to sell the house and blow the barrio. “I’ve got Century 21 on speed dial,” she tells her daughter, “but they won’t sell it until you take him [Agamemnon] back to the cemetery.”

Electricidad tries to enlist her formerly troubled little sister Ifigenia (Carolyn Henderson) in the revenge plot. But Ifigenia has found God and is now living in a Fresno convent. Her goal is to “save la familia.”

While Electricidad seethes, barrio life goes on. Alfaro’s chorus is a broom brigade of vecinos, wisecracking and gossiping while they add humor and humanity to the playing out of this tragic story.

But that’s one of the problems: Alfaro can’t seem to decide whether this is low comedy or tragedy. Another is that Electricidad’s kid brother, Orestes, spends most of the play working out with a punching bag and getting tattoos, both of which actions seem unnecessary and distracting, especially given that his verbal exchanges with Nino (Ian Casselberry) offer no insights or plot points. Also, presumably because Cirino has placed Orestes’ scenes far to stage right, where some patrons have to crane their necks to see, he has video projections of the characters at a previous time, so that patrons watch a movie but the words they hear don’t match the mouths they see. It looks amateurish.

The best-drawn characters deliver the best performances: Galvez’s Electricidad rages like a wounded animal; Snow’s ice queen Clemencia is spot-on and Chapman’s sexy grandma is a pleasure to watch.

A Spanglish Electra? Well, why not? But Alfaro may want to take another look at some of the things that make his script less than it might be, and Cirino may want to rethink the placement of Orestes’ scenes and the videos.

Electricidad plays through March 18 at SDSU’s Experimental Theatre. Shows March 14-17 at 8 p.m.; March 18 at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-594-6884 or visit http://theatre.sdsu.edu.