The Dina Martina Christmas Show

On the Boards

Through Dec 22.

Dina Martina is the crowning angel on the Tannenbaum of my heart. She's a melting, malaproping Mater NoËl from the planet Holy Crap, and Christmas just wouldn't be kreesh-mish anymore without a Yuletide extravaganza à la Dina.

The great genius and joy of Dina Martina (brainchild of Grady West) is that you love her so much you'd never dream of letting her in on the secret that she sucks. Her sincerity is heartbreaking: If she suspected that she was anything other than a much-loved celebrity of renowned talent it would wipe the magic powder from her gaudy gossamer wings and--splat!

However, there's a darkness streaking through Dina's misguided optimism and clueless largesse this year, a melancholy bee buzzing in her satirical holiday bonnet. There's a flame-licked visit to hell, earthquakes, the séance-style return of Dina's dead mother, and a depressing (but hilarious) glimpse into Dina's future. Still, it's all in good, tragic fun, and you'd be a fool to miss it. ADRIAN RYAN

HappyPants!

ACT Theatre

Through Dec 29.

Absurdity is alive and well in Scott Warrender's delightfully cruel send-up of third-rate "Up with People"-type musical revues. When a clown named "Happy Pants" died, his chorus group promised to keep his namesake show spreading musical happiness to every small town across the country. Ten years pass and the group's enthusiasm has waned, but a curse keeps the singers as prisoners of glee. The tunes they sing through painfully forced smiles have morphed into demented pleas for help. A combination of pure desperation and sweet music from the supremely talented ensemble make the show heartbreakingly funny.

Pushing them to the limits of humiliation are the group's new hosts, Don and Fluff LeQwape (Colby Chester and Kit Harris), two over-the-top entertainers with the kind of optimistic charisma one might find in Branson, Missouri--and the cultureless talent to match. They've latched on to the doomed chorus, ignorant of the group's plight, to showcase their songs about Velveeta and their championship talent for chair dancing.

HappyPants! teeters at the far edge of camp--where the act of mockery begins to overshadow the object of mockery and everything becomes garish and muddled--but the show pulls some tricks of sincerity out of the American Musical Handbook to create a splendid evening full of real talent. GREGORY ZURA

Mule

Northwest Actors Studio

Through Dec 21.

Now in its second onstage incarnation, local playwright Lois Mackey's Mule comes tantalizingly close to excellence, but misses the mark by several hairs' breadths. Almost a tight legal mystery with interesting musings on blackness, whiteness, and wealth, the script frequently loses its way, tries to cover too many bases, and ultimately devolves into a dramatically confused fog.

Mule follows Vera Traylor, a (black) software engineer who has joined Seattle's young tech elite. One night, two (white) cops come calling and find two kilos of cocaine beneath Vera's floorboards. The audience is convinced of her innocence, even if no one else is, least of all the maniacally zealous (white) prosecutor, through whom the play promises some compelling mystery. Instead, the train of Mule's plot jumps the track, crashing into a series of rambling, mediocre monologues about romantic and familial relationships.

Several worthwhile dramatic themes--the canny reversal of predictable rich-white/poor-black stereotypes, for one--emerge through the text, but Mule routinely abandons its best elements, falling short of potential greatness and leaving us with a blurry, unfocused drama. BRENDAN KILEY

True West

Insight America at Chamber Theater

Through Dec 21.

I had my doubts. Could Sam Shepard's classic tale of the American West's strangulation by an encroaching suburbia be brought to life by a company whose mission statement boasts "innovative solutions"? Innovative solutions are what rapacious developers promise right before they build a housing tract on Indian burial grounds. But when the lights rose on that familiar lake of linoleum in that fabled family kitchen, I forgave the grant-speak and allowed myself to get swept away--for about 10 minutes.

Maybe I'm still under the sway of the galvanic PBS broadcast of Steppenwolf Theatre's 1984 True West. But evidently, so is Insight America, which appears to have cast the hapless actors solely on the basis of their passing resemblance to Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.

In the first act, actors Alan Becker and Matt Slinger stuck all their beats and motivations and actor-y crap in all the right places, in what promised to be an anemic but acceptable interpretation. Then suddenly, the second act came lurching around. And in that testosterone-and-whiskey-slick abyss of identity and loss, it was quickly apparent that these guys were hopelessly, horribly out of their depths.

Has either of these people ever been drunk? Or even angry? If so, they've forgotten. Slinger took a golf club to his brother's typewriter with a polite precision designed to keep the flying keys from injuring anybody. And any time Becker stretched for desperation, he short-circuited into an angry elf in the throes of a tantrum.

True West is a powerful, transcendent, and deeply comic work of art, but I'm afraid this production packs all the wallop of a knock-knock joke. TAMARA PARIS