THE LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS | Gloucester Stage continues its 2009 season with this 1969 Neil Simon comedy. Gloucester artistic associate David Zoffoli directs and stars as the middle-aged and married Barney, who’s hoping to join the sexual revolution; ART stalwart Karen MacDonald plays the three women he tries, and fails, to seduce. | Gloucester Stage Company, 267 East Main St, Gloucester | 978.281.4433 | July 2-19 | Curtain 8 pm Wed-Fri [7:30 pm July 3, with fireworks] | 3 + 8 pm Sat [no performances July 4] | 4 pm Sun | $32-$37
THE LOMAN FAMILY PICNIC | Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre opens its 2009 season with Pulitzer Prize winner (for Dinner with Friends) Donald Margulies’s uncharacteristically offbeat 1989 work, a likable tragicomedy set in 1965 Brooklyn and merging Margulies’s own history with that of the family in Arthur Miller’s iconic Death of a Salesman. The youngest member of the dysfunctional clan on which Margulies focuses is writing a musical version of Miller’s play called Willy!, and when things get too painful, the family are thrust into singing, hoofing scenes from this imagined work. Olivia Benowitz directs. | Loeb Drama Center Experimental Theatre, 64 Brattle St, Cambridge | 617.496.2222 | July 9-18 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Fri | 2:30 + 7:30 pm Sat | 7:30 pm Sun | $10; $8 students, seniors, Harvard ID
MAME | Lee Meriwether — Miss America 1955, not to mention Catwoman in the 1966 Batman (the movie, not the TV show) — has the Angela Lansbury role in the Reagle Players’ production of the 1966 Broadway musical based on the 1958 Rosalind Russell–starring Broadway play (in turn based on a 1955 novel) about the wealthy and eccentric Mame Dennis and her life during the Great Depression and World War II. The songs include “If He Walked into My Life” and “We Need a Little Christmas.” | Robinson Theatre, 617 Lexington St, Waltham | 781.891.5600 | July 16-25 | Curtain 2 pm [July 16] or 7:30 pm [July 23] Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 2 pm [July 18] + 7:30 pm Sat | 2 pm Sun | $32-$54
OTHELLO | Like its Hamlet, this is a Shakespeare & Company “encore presentation,” from last August, with John Douglas Thompson as Othello, Michael Hammond as Iago, and Merritt Janson as Desdemona, all from the 2008 production, and Tony Simotes again directing. Cuckoldry, real or imagined, is a potent thing in the very masculine world of this Othello, and it strands Janson’s Desdemona as an island of innocence. And though the actors’ tongues race as swiftly as the production does, you hear every word, and the imagery sticks deep. | Shakespeare & Company, Founders Theatre, 70 Kemble St, Lenox | 413.637.3353 | July 3–September 6 | Curtain times vary | $16-$60
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY | New Century Theatre serves up Jerry Sterner’s 1989 comedy, in which Larry the Liquidator casts a greedy eye toward floundering New England Wire & Cable, whereupon the company’s founder hires a hot-shot lawyer to stop him in his tracks. Keith Langsdale directs; Ed Jewett, Marianna Bassham, Dick Volker, Manfred Melcher, and Jean Koester are in the cast. | Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, Smith College, Northampton | 413.585.3220 | Through July 11 | Curtain 7:30 Tues-Thurs | 8 pm Fri-Sat | 2 + 7:30 pm Sun | $28; $26 seniors
