Romance, death and Johann Strauss meet in John Patrick Shanley’s Sailor’s Song, the latest New Village Arts Theatre production on the boards through April 29 in Carlsbad. Kristianne Kurner directs a story rife with quirky characters, frequently funny dialogue and flights of fancy that often lead to dance (wonderfully choreographed by Robin Christ).

Dreamy-eyed commercial fisherman Rich (Manny Fernandes) comes to a small southeastern seaboard town to visit his Uncle John (Doren Elias) and his dying Aunt Carla (Robin Christ). Rich is at a crossroad himself: Fishing has been good to him, but he’s getting itchy for a change – or maybe he just needs to fall in love. “I gotta hope my heart has a fate that’s gonna jump out at me,” he says.

A detour to a seaside bar brings him a romantic choice many men dream about when he meets sisters Lucy (Amanda Morrow) and Joan (Amanda Sitton). Lucy is lovely and very much grounded in reality, offering safety and security. Joan is a bit of a space cadet, a droll, automatic writer currently channeling a Punjabi salesman who died in Atlantic City. Each beguiles Rich in her own way.

Will he choose? Should he? Must he? Uncle John, coping with the sad reality of Carla’s imminent death, offers Rich this insight: “For every man there are two women: the one you’re with and the one you could be with … possibility. But you must pick one.”

But Rich prefers the happy haze of romance, where a walk with Lucy is magically accompanied by a Strauss waltz and they find themselves dancing. In fact, dance features prominently in Sailor’s Song. Rich’s first lines are: “If you could dance with the days of your life; if you could take life by the wrist and dance, I think it would be a waltz. Forward and back, sad and happy, high and low.” Everyone dances here, even the dead Carla, in moves strong and beautiful, magical and sexy.

It’s fitting that this show, the last New Village Arts production in the jazzercise studio they’ve called home for the past year, should feature dance. Kurner has found a terrific cast of dancing actors. Morrow is a particular wonder; for someone making a first stab at dancing, she looks like a pro. Christ and Elias both were dancers, sidelined by injury; they still look great.

In the acting department, Sitton’s comedic talent is in high gear; her portrayal of Joan’s whacked-out psyche is both howlingly funny and irresistibly seductive. Morrow maximizes her girl-next-door role, and Fernandes plays the wide-eyed initiate with considerable charm and dancing talent.

Shanley, best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt and the charmingly romantic screenplay for Moonstruck, takes us on an odyssey (there’s even a rowboat that moves) into the human desire for love and connection, even in the face of death and separation.

I suppose one could carp that Sailor’s Song is lightweight fare, but Kurner’s deft directorial touch and Christ’s lovely choreography create a delightful evening of enchantment. At a time when political and social realities impose a soul-crushing load on all of us, it’s good to be invited to the dance of life.

New Village Arts Theatre’s production of Sailor’s Song plays through April 29 at Jazzercise Studio Space in Carlsbad. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 760-433-3245 or visit www.newvillagearts.org.

Rules observed and broken are central to Eve Ensler’s The Treatment, Moxie Theatre’s new production in its West Coast premiere through April 29 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Moxie’s artistic director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg directs.

A returned Iraq War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and known only as Man (Matt Scott) meets with a military psychiatrist known as Woman (Jennifer Eve Thorn) in a cheerless room bereft of all but essentials: a desk, chairs, a filing cabinet, windows with blinds drawn.

Man maintains that his “precipitating symptom” is his wife and that he does not want to talk to a shrink, but has agreed to in an attempt to silence the noise in his head. He holds onto the notion that “the war required new rules,” but doesn’t seem to quite believe it.

The duo spends most of the time in verbal fencing, Woman advancing and Man parrying. But this “shrink” seems more than a tad hostile to her charge, leading one to wonder whether tough love is the new military psychiatric mantra.

Soon we learn that involvement in the torture of prisoners has reduced the soldier to a quivering mass of guilt and erectile dysfunction. But the shrink hammers away, more interested in the details than in the effects of torture on the soldier, until the drama degenerates into a wholly incredible romantic interlude and moves from there to a political screed.

Let it be said that Ensler is a political writer, beginning with her best-known effort The Vagina Monologues and continuing with Necessary Targets (about the aftermath in the former Yugoslavia). She began this play after reading an article about a psychiatrist in a Serbian newspaper, but only found out what she wanted to say after the flap about Abu Ghraib.

What she wants to say is that torture is bad and torturers should be held to account. Yep, that was clear from the early portrayal of the soldier’s condition. Pounding away at the politics (“People at the top don’t have nightmares”) doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

Thorn is terrific as the starchy military dominatrix intent on finding out what happened. Scott is equally good as the perpetrator/victim whose complicity has perhaps ruined his life. Kudos also to Sonnenberg, whose intelligent direction maintains audience interest in this talky play.

Moxie Theatre’s production of The Treatment plays through April 29 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m.; pay what you can on Monday, April 23, at 8 p.m.; closes Sunday, April 29, at 2 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 544-1000 or visit online www.moxietheatre.com.

A light-and-sound overture for office machines opens Annie Weisman’s Hold Please, an office comedy playing through May 6 at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Four typewriters and four copy machines alternately “blink” to the amusing accompaniment of office sounds.

Hold Please is San Diego native Weisman’s take on life in the secretarial pool for two generations of women “in the clerical arts.” Kirsten Brandt directs.

Agatha (Kandis Chappell) and Grace (Starla Benford) represent the workers of seniority. These women learned their jobs and their places the hard way, at a time when women were more valued for staying home with the kids.

Agatha and Grace are alternately amused and appalled by their young colleagues Erika (Stephanie Beatriz) and Jessica (Kate Arrington), who have known none of the difficulties that shaped the lives of their older comrades, but claim their jobs as rights.

That the business world is dog-eat-dog is hardly news. That it trickles down to the secretarial pool isn’t exactly a revelation either, so you will forgive me if I fail to find office politics in this secretarial pool particularly fascinating. Each character represents an office type: Agatha, the bossy take-charge woman; Grace, the faded beauty with a secret she’s very willing to share; Jessica, the blonde Valley girl type; and Erika, the girl with ambition higher than her too-short skirts and tight tops.

The issues Weisman raises are the usual suspects: the old guard typewriter sort vs. the computer geek; who’s going to try to sleep her way to a better job; thwarted ambition; discrimination; and the old familiar bugaboo: Who used my cream from the office fridge?

But the real question remains a mystery: Why did the women in this law firm feel it necessary to get a man fired for sexual harassment that, apparently, never took place?

The cast deals with this so-so script as best it can. Chappell can always be counted on to go beyond, and she does so here. Her Agatha is a bit of a dragon on the outside, a tightly-wound bundle of thwarted ambition on the inside. Benford speaks for the woman who makes a big mistake and pays for it forever. Beatriz and Arrington manage to be both amusing and horrifying in attitude and style.

Hold Please has its moments, but my companion and I left the theater asking ourselves why people should want to spend time with these women or this play.

Hold Please plays through May 6 at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call (619)23-GLOBE or visit www.theoldglobe.com.