Bloglander

It's like Opening Day of baseball season: By tomorrow, three local theaters will have opened their first shows of the year. So crack open some Cracker Jack and root, root, root for the home actors.

First, plug a quarter into the jukebox and select F-11. You just might hear "Johnny B. Goode" or "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." In other words, Buddy is a jukebox musical, and if you go to The Buddy Holly Story (at the Civic on Friday-Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, and continuing through Oct. 24), you're going to hear '50s songs sung by a lot more people than just Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

The father of the bride: He gets no respect. As it was for Spencer Tracy and Steve Martin, so it is for Reed McColm as Max Frobisher (in Interplayers' Together Again for the Next Time on Friday-Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2 pm). Max is running out of money, has to deal with a harridan of an ex-wife, a perfect-hostess-type current wife, and five unruly adult children from his not-so-chipper Brady Bunch of a blended family.

If Princess Diana had been Hispanic, born 42 years earlier, and could sing, she'd have been Eva Peron. So think of Evita as having yet another connection to the '80s: not just all rock-musical-y, but focused on a beautiful and quasi-ambitious blonde who died too young. Alyssa Day sings the hell out of "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," so catch it at CdA's Lake City Playhouse on Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 pm or Sunday at 2 pm.

And if trapeze artists are the handsome leading men of the circus world — they get the flashy roles, but they're subject to great falls — then contemporary circus is a kind of theater. Cirque du Soleil: Alegria leaps and tumbles at Spokane Arena, with seven more performances through Sunday.