Some of us measure time by the careers of stage stars. It has been 50 years since Donna McKechnie’s Broadway debut, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where she appeared as an office worker dancing Bob Fosse’s quirky steps.

It has been 35 years since A Chorus Line opened on Broadway, winning her a Tony Award as the quintessential musical theater dancer. And 10 years since she appeared at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre with her one-woman act of reminiscences, Inside the Music.

This weekend, McKechnie returned to South Florida with an in-development new act dubbed My Musical Comedy Life, for three performances at The PlayGround Theatre in Miami Shores. Like that earlier cabaret act, it is chiefly an anecdote-and-song stroll through her career which would appeal to anyone with the Broadway habit.

By my almanac, McKechnie is now 68, but she looked smashing in a flowing, low-cut red gown. No, she does not dance much in the act, the singular talent which rocketed her to stardom, but she sings pleasantly enough, has some enjoyable stories to impart and wins over the audience on her personality and endearing charm.

After a shaky opening with faux-spontaneous patter that felt too written, McKechnie scored with a recreation of her first Broadway vocal audition (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’s I’m Lovely), her three-part approximation of her showstopper from Company (You Could Drive a Person Crazy) and a couple of affecting numbers from Follies (Don’t Look at Me, In Buddy’s Eyes), which she performed in a Paper Mill Playhouse revival.

Of course, A Chorus Line was the show’s centerpiece, represented by a rendition of Inside the Music, the “rangy” first draft of what would become The Music and the Mirror. That number followed, but the dance at its core was reduced to a few spins and poses.

Also conspicuously absent from the evening was any mention of McKechnie’s marriage to her prime choreographer, the late Michael Bennett. She made a fleeting reference to the pains of “arthritis and divorce,” but had obviously made a decision to not go into her relationship with Bennett, as she had in her earlier act and her autobiography.

That’s too bad, because the omission was all too evident to those familiar with her life, who are surely the act’s target market. Still, My Musical Comedy Life is sufficiently entertaining and deserves to hit the cabaret or performing arts center circuit, and to come back to the area for a longer engagement.

MY MUSICAL COMEDY LIFE, The PlayGround Theatre, 9806 N.E. 2nd Ave., Miami Shores. Closed Sunday.

* * *

Too many plays are only about what they seem to be on the surface, while the better ones rise to the level of metaphor. Martin Casella’s support-group comic drama surely wants to be among the latter, but never persuades us it has more on its mind than the male member.

Yes, The Irish Curse has a penis fixation and, while that is an organ of considerable fascination, it turns out not to be interesting enough to fill a 90-minute evening of theater.

According to Casella, the titular curse is a ethnic tendency of Irish men to have abnormally small sexual organs. From there, it is a quick leap to envisioning a support group where guys congregate to express their feelings of inadequacy over their, um, shortcomings. OK, even if the stereotype were true, it would still be a stretch to imagine a handful of dudes sharing their innermost thoughts on the subject.

Or maybe it could be a satisfying evening of theater -- there were, after all, those Vagina Monologues, weren’t there? -- but Casella may not have been the right writer to manage it. Instead we get a lot of one-note jokes on the subject early on which segue into maudlin hand-wringing over how five characters with a teeny-weeny problem have let it damage their lives.

The site is a Brooklyn Catholic church community room, effectively designed by Douglas Grinn, where Father Kevin Shaunessy (Barty Tarallo) meets each week with a rotund lawyer separated from his wife (Ken Clement), a young sports doctor-in-training who fancies himself a ladies’ man (Ryan Didato) and a gay undercover cop (Shane R. Tanner), united by the same malady. Naturally, as plays like this go, a new element is injected into their midst, a relatively recent immigrant from Ireland (Todd Allen Durkin) with his own tale of woe to spill. About to be wed, he is driven to harm himself to avoid matrimony because of his tiny johnson.

Squint and you can sort of see how the situation could stand for a more universal sense of inferiority or low self-esteem, but the writing remains so prosaic that the audience will have to do the work to get there. The cast, under the solid direction of Avi Hoffman, does what it can, but there is not enough here to hold interest for an hour-and-a-half.

THE IRISH CURSE, Mosaic Theatre, 12200 West Broward Blvd., Plantation. Through Sunday, March 6. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.

Santa Sangre (MPI)

Release date: Jan. 25

Standard list price: $21.99

So Santa Sangre, one of cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most controversial films, is finally released on a beautiful Region 1 DVD, ensuring all of the red paint spilling forth from the body orifices will look as vivid as it should.

Jodorowsky has an intensely devoted following of adventurous aficionados of horror and experimental cinema – a cult that never included me. Reviewing El Topo – the director’s influential 1970 “hippie Western,” to quote J. Hoberman – at the time of its Anchor Bay DVD release a few years back, I rather decimated it: “A curious and pretentious bit of nostalgia that strains for relevance or even basic entertainment … He gave us a movie so of its time — filled with bare breasts and penises, scandalous scenes of guys kissing guys and gals kissing gals, rape, old-time religion, flagellation and self-immolation as a mirror to Vietnam — that the ostentatious importance he attaches to his spelled-out surrealism comes off today as a dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.”

Santa Sangre is another beast entirely. After nearly a decade of inactivity in the movie business, the 1989 psychological slasher found the director embracing the Grand Guignol poetry he excelled at, only this time with an extra helping of Gothic expressionism. Best of all, the film is, for the most part, absent the leaden religious symbology that weighed down his 1970s antiestablishment jumbles.

Flashing backward and forward in time, the story centers on Fenix (Jodorowsky’s son Alex), a young boy who, while growing up in a Mexican circus, watches his adulterous father – the circus’s knife-thrower – dismember his mother’s arms and slit his own throat after being caught in the act with the tattooed woman. Sent to a mental institution after the traumatic experience left him in a mute and animalistic state, Fenix eventually rises as an adult, Christ-like and apparently cured (some religious symbolism remains, but it’s only peripheral to the film’s appeal).

Except he’s crazier than ever, hallucinating harrowing scenes from his childhood as well as current terrors such as a python emerging from his trousers. He spends his days shadowing his armless mother, acting as her appendages for everything from walking to eating to murdering people. Serially killing a series of women – most of whom inhabit a freak-show milieu similar to Fenix’s circus upbringing – at his mother’s bidding, Fenix believes he has no control over his hands. Only the salvation of a deaf-mute girl from his past (played by Sabrina Dennison, an actual deaf-mute) can save him.

Influenced as much by the giallo horror excess of the Italian masters (Cluadio Argento, brother of Suspiria’s Dario, co-wrote the screenplay) and Roger Corman’s exceptional Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, Santa Sangre does not appear to be “about” anything other than the masterfully directed horror-camp we see on screen, and it’s all the better because of it.

Still, no praise of Jodorowsky’s directorial intensity or visual poetry can be offered without acknowledging the head-shaking silliness of his English-dubbed dialogue. None of Jodorowsky’s movies has the screenwriting chops to match his visual ambition, a flaw his supporters never seem to concede.

Because Jodorowsky is such an eccentric character, and the stories behind his films are so unorthodox, the extra features on his discs are more worth your time than most studio-packaged supplemental fluff. MPI’s two-disc Santa Sangre release is a generous package, anchored by the feature-length, seven-part documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre, featuring all-new interviews with cast and crew. Even better is a 1990 documentary show from the United Kingdom titled For One Week Only: Alejandro Jodorowsky, in which a straight-forward, non-reverential film journalist exposes some of Jodorowsky’s flaws to his face.

These documentaries reveal fascinating trivia about the director: Santa Sangre’s circus plotline is in part inspired by his own experience growing up in a circus; he liked to dress entirely in purple; as an aspiring artist, he studied mime under Marcel Marceau; and in his 10-year absence from moviemaking, he became one of Paris’ foremost masters in the mystical art of tarot reading.

Jodorowsky is also refreshingly blunt and non-hypocritical. “I don’t care what the public thinks!” he exclaims about his controversial films, a clarion call to artists everywhere but a philosophy rarely adhered to in the movie-making establishment. And when the British reporter probes him about the misogynistic nature of his movies, where the male characters are always more three-dimensional than the females, he responds by saying, “That’s because I hated women!” Needless to say, Alejandro Jodorowsky could never expect to succeed in politics.

Broadcast News (Criterion)

SLP: $19.49

Release date: Jan. 25

Word has it Aaron Sorkin is working on a new series set in the backstage world of a prime-time cable news show (with Keith Olbermann rumored to be a contributor). If he’s looking for drama, romance, humor and social commentary in a television news setting, Sorkin couldn’t find a better blueprint than this 1987 classic from James L. Brooks, reissued in a scrumptious double-disc set from Criterion. Set long before the encroaching obsolescence of the network news telecast, Brooks’ behind-the-scenes love triangle doesn’t feel at all dated, having the prescience to predict the dominance of infotainment over hard news years before the development of the Fox News Channel. Brooks’ script is witty and elegant, and the casting – Holly Hunter as a feisty but damaged news producer, Albert Brooks as a passionate but meek reporter, and William Hurt as a vapid but telegenic anchor-hunk – have become indelible landmarks of a an era and a culture. The bonus disc includes a documentary about Brooks’ career, an alternate ending, deleted scenes and an interview with a CBS news producer who inspired Hunter’s character.

The Prowler (VCI)

SLP: $14.99

Release date: Feb. 1

For years, this 1951 kitchen-sink noir, written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and directed by art-house favorite Joseph Losey, has become something of a “lost classic” thanks its out-of-circulation status. The character of a prowler, snooping outside the home of dishy housewife Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) is essentially a red herring: We never discover the so-called prowler’s identity, but his presence incites the appearance of Webb Garwood, a smitten cop (Van Heflin). Webb returns to the house again and again to seduce Susan, whom we learn is slaving through a loveless marriage to a local disc jockey. Webb hatches a plot to make Susan’s husband go away, but the plan falls apart, as noir plots are wont to do. The Prowler is a very good noir, if elevated erroneously to the level of suppressed masterpiece by circumstances outside of its control.

WUSA (Olive Films)

SLP: $22.49

Release date: Feb. 8

WUSA has, for years, been one of a small handful of Paul Newman pictures not released on DVD; in fact, it’s never even been released on any home video format until now. It’s easy to see why. Though stocked with an all-star cast – Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey and Cloris Leachman – and directed by Cool Hand Luke’s Stuart Rosenberg, WUSA is dreadfully dull. Its pacing is like watching concrete form. Basing the movie on Robert Stone’s novel Hall of Mirrors, Rosenberg offers up a dreary, somnambulistic depiction of America – and New Orleans, in particular -- as a decaying corpse of titty bars, run-down five-and-dimes and ghettos of abject penury. In this squalid 1970 milieu, failed musician Rheinhardt (Newman) lands a job on a homegrown, right-wing hate-talk station espousing hard-hat values to Richard Nixon’s silent majority. What sounds like a prophetic study of a proto-Glenn Beck is anything but, particularly because Stone (as screenwriter) and Rosenberg choose to ignore any on-screen depiction of Rheinhardt’s on-air talent; we’re supposed to assume that he’s whipping up the unwashed masses into a psychotic frenzy, while we waste time watching him develop a sluggish relationship with Woodward’s abused trollop. Curiously, Newman once said this is the most important picture he ever made, but compared with a film as compelling and decade-defining as Nashville or The Parallax View, WUSA has not an iota to say about the times we lived in. Olive Films’ transfer is fine, but the sound on this disc is abysmally bad; the roar of ambient noise is deafening, while intimate conversations are inaudible.

Peijun Xu (Feb. 10, Steinway Gallery, Boca Raton)

If the concertgoing world doesn’t fully appreciate the variety that a viola can bring to a recital, that won’t be the fault of Peijun Xu.

The Shanghai-born musician performed two local recitals this week for the Kronberg Academy, an organization based in that German town near Frankfurt (the city that Xu now calls home) that helps accomplished violinists, violists and cellists build viable concert careers. The Kronberg has been raising money in Palm Beach County for its programs since August 2009.

Xu played recitals at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall on Wednesday night, and at the Boca Steinway Gallery on Thursday night. Her recital at the gallery was sparsely attended, but she and her accompanist, Spanish pianist José Menor, stinted not a bit, and the result was a rewarding evening of fine music, beautifully played.

The viola’s special sound can be tricky to realize, but Xu has a wide variety of qualities that she brings to the instrument, from a chocolaty darkness in the lowest registers to a breathy lightness that has a plusher, fatter sound than the same kind of passage on the violin. A good example of this came in the second work on her program, the Viola da Gamba Sonata No. 3 (in G minor, BWV 1029) of J.S. Bach. In the first two movements, her tone was focused and pure, and in the third the repeated notes of the main theme had a strong sense of lift that moved the music along smartly.

She has a good sense of Baroque style, and she and Menor worked very well together, smiling at each other throughout, and finishing phrases such as the trill suffixes in the second movement of the Bach with precision togetherness.

The Brahms Viola Sonata No. 2 (in E-flat, Op. 120, No. 2), originally for clarinet, also is a staple for violists, and indeed the music works well for the instrument. Here, too, Xu’s sound had purity and nobility from the first bars, and she handled the more virtuosic elements of Brahms’ late writing deftly. She demonstrated as well a welcome intensity in the minor-key sweep of the second movement, and the 32^nd-note variation in the third movement had a lovely delicacy.

The second half of the recital showed more of the Romantic side of Xu’s art, beginning with the two Chansons (Op. 15) of Edward Elgar. For both of these pieces, Xu offered a bigger, more expansive sound, as if she were more relaxed, and the Chanson de Nuit, which she played second, benefited much from her digging more deeply into the strings. Xu is a highly physical player as well, swaying and leaning as she performs, often with her eyes closed tightly.

Her immersion in the music continued with a Chopin set: the posthumous C-sharp minor Nocturne (arranged by Yehudi Menuhin and Xu herself), and the celebrated E-flat Nocturne, Op. 9, No. 2, in an arrangement by Pablo de Sarasate. The tiny audience adored these intense readings, especially the E-flat, which could have used a bit more breadth in the cadenza before going to the brief coda.

The Paganini La Campanella (the Rondo movement from his Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7) that followed came off with great gusto and admirable accuracy, and demonstrated Xu’s considerable finger technique as well as the agility of her bow arm. The recital closed with a William Primrose arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango, which she played with power and verve, swinging into the music with obvious enjoyment.

For an encore, Xu paid homage to her homeland with Fisherman’s Serenade, a Romantic-style arrangement by Li Guoquan of a Chinese folksong, which she played prettily.

After the concert, Xu talked about her concert career, which has included much playing of the viola concertos of Walton, Hindemith and Penderecki. Just 25, she has a fine career as a violist ahead of her, with the proviso that repertory for this beautiful instrument is always something of a challenge.

And so, this call to composers: Write some music for Peijun Xu. You won’t be sorry. – Greg Stepanich

Next up in the Kronberg Academy recital series is the Japanese cellist Dai Miyata, whom Menor also will accompany. Miyata’s recital is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, at the Boca Steinway Gallery. Call 283-1815 for more information, or visit www.usfriendskronbergacademy.org.

***

Amernet String Quartet (Feb. 2, Stage West, Duncan Theatre, Lake Worth)

At the rear of the Duncan Theatre, there’s a gem of a space called Stage West, and on Feb. 2, that’s where the exceptional Amernet String Quartet performed works from the last three centuries to a full house.

First came the Haydn Quartet No. 67 (in F, Op. 77, No. 2), written in 1799. Here was
the ultimate in a form thought to have been invented by Papa Haydn and improved upon by others, notably Mozart, who dedicated six such works to the master.

The Haydn quartet, which was the last one he completed, opens with a strong cello voice in the first movement, beautifully played here by Jason Calloway. The Menuetto of the second movement opens with a throbbing , surging melody that is passed around each instrument. Then cello and viola engage in a duet with a very catchy tune, picked up by the first and second violins, who finish it.

An amusing two-note harmony, repeated once, ends the movement. The blend and balance of the third movement, marked Andante, was superb, and all four players gave of their best as they moved into the Finale with a forceful attack. The melody skipped along endlessly, closing with an unexpected suddenness. A fine performance, and one that left the audience in a good frame of mind.
The next piece on the program was six short adaptations of preludes from Shostakovich’s Op. 34 set for piano. These were transcribed by Yuri Vitenson, father to the Amernet’s principal violinist, Misha Vitenson, at the urging of his mother. Yuri Vitenson thought long and hard about adapting these piano works and decided that a string quartet would suit best. All are in the original key, and Misha Vitenson led his three colleagues with dynamism and incredibly strong expressive playing.

For me, it was over too quickly, and I wonder whether the elder Vitenson would consider doing all the other Shostakovich preludes in the set. They have great drama, and they are representative of many trends in 20^th-century music.

The lone String Quartet of Claude Debussy, written in 1893, opened up the floodgates for the next 100 years in terms of a new approach in composing for the string quartet, primarily through exoticism. “We get to pull our instruments apart in this,” Callaway told the audience with a grin.

The first movement opens with what sounds like an express train racing down the rails. It builds and builds until it stops, and one feels as if one has fallen off a cliff. Ending with rising crescendos, the music fades to nothingness. Plucked strings begin the second movement with tuneful melodies rising and falling until they return to plucked strings of the opening.

A soft, elegiac mood starts the third movement, which was led by violist Michael Klotz, who played exquisitely, producing some lovely romantic sounds, warm with expressiveness. At the last, the express train returns with edge-of-the-seat sounds reminiscent of music in a film noir. A real sense of urgency distinguishes itself in this movement, which has a triumphant ending. Rapturous applause greeted the magnificence of the Amernet’s interpretation, and deservedly so.

I have heard many string quartet groups over the years, few as business-like or intense as these four talented musicians. No histrionics attend their playing like some I’ve encountered. Their sound has a strength and vibrancy unique to them, and it was a rewarding experience to see and hear such fine artists at the top of their game. – Rex Hearn

***

Fry Street Quartet (Jan. 30, Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach)

Performing one of the last extraordinary string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven is always a special event, but it doesn’t hurt to explain to an audience just why that is.

Rebecca McFaul, the second violinist of the Fry Street Quartet, took her audience at the Four Arts on Jan. 30 carefully through the seven movements of the C-sharp minor quartet (Op. 131), demonstrating along with her colleagues various sections of the work and generally demystifying it. It was carefully done, and no doubt much appreciated, though the audience was already on the quartet’s side before it began to play.

The Fry Street is a fine professional quartet, based now at Utah State University, and also a veteran of the Beethoven cycle, and the foursome offered selections from both ends of it at the concert. Opening the afternoon was the very first quartet (in F, Op. 18. No. 1), and the Fry Street delivered a masterful performance of this early work.

The first movement had plenty of tightly coiled energy while being light on its feet; Beethoven’s motifs climbed and yearned like they should, but without overdoing it. First violinist William Fedkenheuer played with intensity and feeling in the long-breathed second movement, but the deliberate ritards at the ends of his solo figurations before leading back into the tuttis were somewhat on the stagey side.

The trio of the third movement had a good sense of shock and vigor, and the easy briskness of the finale was a good compensation for slight ensemble miscues here and there in the three-note figure that answers the triplet runs in the main theme. All in all, a strong performance, and one with an appropriate early-wine style.

Samuel Barber’s only String Quartet (in B minor, Op. 11) is too rarely heard in its original form, though the slow movement is known around the world as the Adagio for Strings. The Fry Street’s reading of the Barber was much like its early Beethoven in that it was clean, thoroughly prepared, and well-executed.

The first and third movements were suitably peppery, and the restraint with which the quartet played the celebrated Adagio made it more affecting.

The Op. 131, which occupied the second half, requires a steady narrative line as well as strong musical chops, and the Fry Street has these. It showed good ensemble throughout, notably in the final movement, with its many rapid changes of dynamics, its gruffness and bluster, and its sudden shifts in mood and tempo.

No part of this work got an exceptional reading, and the group’s steady control of its interpretation came at the cost of some emotional temperature. But then again, the boisterousness of the fifth movement brought generous applause from the audience, which showed that this admirable foursome had succeeded in keeping the crowd’s attention through one of the most demanding works in the literature to play and hear. – G. Stepanich

Like Tracy and Hepburn, or Charlie Sheen and blow, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are the most unsurprising of pairings.

They are the master and mistress of middlebrow mirth, for whom the three-star review is an unattainable plateau. In fact, it’s hard to believe these two forces of rom-com mediocrity haven’t met-cute over some 15 years of shepherding penis jokes and treacle into our multiplexes. In Just Go With It, the stars finally align, and the result is like watching Frazier and Ali … synchronized swimming.

To be fair, Sandler and Aniston are both perfectly acceptable in this thing, in the same way a machinist is acceptable at snapping together widgets on an assembly line. At no point does either actor challenge him or herself; preparation might have consisted of watching tapes of their old schticks and imitating them.

Their performances are effortlessly banal, and their characters are inexorably shopworn: He plays plastic surgeon Danny, yet another commitment-fearing Sandlerian man-child who exploits a wedding band from a previous botched marriage to lure gullible hotties into one-night stands. She plays Katherine, Danny’s “homely” personal assistant, apparently desexified with librarian glasses.

When Danny’s latest sexual conquest (supermodel Brooklyn Decker, a Barbie doll with a name like a New York sub shop) becomes something more, he needs to realize his mountain of lies to keep her. Katherine and her two kids thus become Danny’s temporary ex-wife and children, all of whom end up joining Danny and his buxom bimbo on a Hawaiian sojourn.

The plot becomes a succession of ludicrous, uncomfortable comic set pieces, each one more implausible than the next (including a scene pilfered from Charade, in which the two leads having to move a coconut up their bodies without using their hands), and we wait with impatience for Sandler and Aniston’s inevitable arc toward real love.

The filmmaker is Dennis Dugan (Grown Ups, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry), a sixtysomething director-for-hire with the sense of humor of hormone-driven 14-year-old boy. Once again, he looks squarely at depth and maturity and proceeds to kick them both in the balls. Most of the juvenile humor in Just Go With It involves either emasculation -- testicular harm, erectile dysfunction and secretly gay macho men all rear their clichéd heads – or scatological cheap shots.

Example: Nicole Kidman adds some class to the picture as the nemesis from Katherine’s old sorority, even though her name in the movie, Devlin, has been established as a synonym for excrement in Katherine’s poop-happy family. Her son Michael’s (Griffin Gluck) only apparent personality trait is that he defecates a lot.

Dugan adds some strange spices to his puerile cauldron, with Dave Matthews, Kevin Nealon, Rachel Dratch and sportscaster Dan Patrick (why?) peaking nominal interest while they’re on-screen. Nick Swardson, a genuinely funny character actor, is saddled here with the thankless Rob Schneider role of the buffoonish sidekick. For Danny’s invented life, Swardson pretends to be a Eurotrash Internet sheep salesman wearing mad-scientist spectacles. Yeah, unfortunately, you read that right.

There are three or four actual chuckles in Just Go With It, a couple of minutes’ worth of material aimed at thinking adults. The rest is strictly ear and eye candy for pubescent males. Say what you want about Dugan, but he really knows how to make boobs jiggle.

JUST GO WITH IT. Distributor: Sony; Director: Dennis Dugan; Cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Nick Swardson, Brooklyn Decker, Dave Matthews; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Today

Film: It is a complaint have heard so often I can anticipate it returning every Oscar season: “Where can I go to see the short subjects, both animated and live action, that are nominated for an Academy Award?” The answer used to be a big shrug, but now you can head to Emerging Cinemas. This week, at the funky art cinema called Mos’Art in Lake Park, you can see all five animated shorts in competition, including Day & Night, Pixar’s tasty amuse-bouche that you have probably already seen, since it was attached to the same projection reel as Toy Story 3. Next week comes the live action shorts. – H. Erstein

Theater: This is the final weekend for Palm Beach Dramaworks’ acclaimed production of Mark St. Germain’s cerebral two-character fictional history play, Freud’s Last Session, a meeting of the minds between Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and a staunch atheist and novelist-lecturer C.S. Lewis, a recent fervent convert to Christianity. At St. Germain imagines it, they meet politely and soon lock horns over the existence of God and the meaning of life, as the world teeters on the brink of World War II. Dennis Creaghan as Freud and Christopher Oden as Lewis are very engaging, but don’t take my word for it: Go look up the recent rave review the West Palm Beach company got from The Wall Street Journal. Through Sunday only. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Music: Paul Bowles is an unusually interesting American writer, an expat who went the distance, and not in Paris or London, but in Tangier, Morocco. But as a young man he was a composer first and foremost, and tonight at the DeSantis Chapel on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University, Bowles’ rarely heard Concerto for Two Pianos gets a hearing at a concert of the student PBA Symphony. Duo Gastesi-Bezerra will do the honors for this 20-minute, four-movement work that conductor Lloyd Mims says reminds him most of Milhaud. The Bowles is joined by a world premiere: Rayos de Esperanza, for two pianos and strings, by PBAU faculty member Marlene Woodward-Cooper, a fine composer. The orchestra shares the stage with the PBAU Symphonic Band under David Jacobs, who will conduct music by Holst (the Suite in E-flat), Grainger (Lincolnshire Posy), Piston (Tunbridge Fair) and Hovhaness (Suite for Band). Tickets are $10; call 803-2970 or visit www.pba.edu/performances.

Also tonight: Violinist Elmar Oliveira hosts a concert of chamber music at Lynn University featuring a number of his colleagues at the Boca Raton school. On the program at the Wold Performing Arts Center are the Sonata No. 3 of Bach (BWV 1005), the Piano Trio No. 4 (in E minor, Op. 90, Dumky) of Dvorak, the too-rarely heard Septet for Trumpet, Piano and Strings of Camille Saint-Saens, and the lovely String Sextet No. 1 (in G, Op. 36) of Brahms. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20-$35. Call 237-7607 or visit www.lynn.edu/tickets.

And speaking of chamber music: The Delray String Quartet introduces the third concert in its seasonal series starting this Sunday at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach. After the last program’s survey of Russian music (Shostakovich No. 7, Arensky No. 2), the foursome plans music by Mendelssohn (Quartet No. 3 in D, Op. 44, No. 1) and Dvorak (Quartet No. 10 in E-flat, Op. 51), along with an arrangement of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, in honor of the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Colony on East Atlantic Avenue; tickets are $35. Call 213-4138 or visit www.delraystringquartet.com.