Over the weekend, Florida Stage unveiled its new roomy, yet still cozy home at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, inaugurated with a shapeless musical revue imported from Chicago, Low Down Dirty Blues.

The show is enormously entertaining, thanks largely to its powerhouse four-member cast, but as with last summer’s erroneously named Some Kind of Wonderful, the nation’s largest company devoted exclusively to new and developing work demonstrates that it is far less rigorous when it comes to showcasing musical material.

Low Down Dirty Blues plunks us down in a South Side Chicago blues club, ’round midnight, after the tourist trade that keeps requesting the same old, predictable songs has gone back to its hotels. That is when the local blues singers and musicians arrive to sing and play for each other, reaching for some of the bluer -- as in off-color -- blues numbers, revealing their affection for songs based in double entendres and innuendo.

Typical is My Handyman, growled and winked to perfection by Sandra Reaves-Phillips as Big Momma, proprietress of the club. As she sings the praises of a guy who can “churn my butter … cream my wheat,” we quickly understand that his real talents are not culinary. Reaves-Phillips gets the party started, lifting her voice in songs that are blue, but definitely not downbeat, as she keeps time with slaps on her beefy thighs.

She is soon joined by Mississippi Charles Bevel, a slight, dapper, low-key performer, adept at his acoustic guitar and a punch line, as he demonstrates on a number called Jelly Roll Baker. Next up is hulking Gregory Porter, who booms out the ominous Born Under a Bad Sign. All three are terrific, and yet they seem mere preface to the arrival of Felicia P. Fields, a mountainous woman with the sound to match. Fields, prominently in the original cast of The Color Purple, arrives announcing in song I Got My Mojo Workin’, and the spell she casts over the proceedings is palpable.

Low Down Dirty Blues was created by Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman, who also co-conceived the Tony Award-nominated It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues in 1999. The only dialogue between the 22 songs is a few biographical lines, taken from interviews with actual blues singers and dealt out here to the cast in an unpersuasive attempt at character development. There is plenty to enjoy in the musical numbers, but they never manage any dramatic synergy.

The first-rate sound bodes well for Florida Stage’s future in the space, though much of it is probably due to the acoustic design of Victoria DeIorio.

The attractive club set by Jack Magaw, decorated in regional beer paraphernalia, is located far from the three-sided audience, with a few club tables and chairs on the floor where subsequent plays will presumably be staged.

The Rinker in this new configuration has great potential for Florida Stage’s future, and Low Down Dirty Blues is likely to make the company plenty of new fans.

LOW DOWN DIRTY BLUES, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Sept. 5. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.

* * *

Celebrating its 20^th anniversary, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival dips into the Bard’s bag and pulls out a bloody good crowd-pleaser, the tragedy of that ambitious, murderous Scot, Macbeth, a play the company debuted with and revisited 14 years ago.

Directing the production and playing the title role is Kevin Crawford, long the company’s best asset. His performance dominates the evening with his signature skill with the Elizabethan language, rendering the text with clarity and attention to the poetry.

In a reprise of the Festival’s production from 1996, Crawford is again partnered by Heidi Harris as his goading wife, who pushes him to take control of the political situation and realize the royal prophecy of the witches. In the intervening years, Crawford has grown burlier and Harris more buxom, but they still make a combustible couple, striking sparks of passion onstage while rendering these two towering roles with greater maturity and nuance.

Fourteen years ago, the festival was more inclined towards gimmick production concepts, and that previous Macbeth borrowed heavily -- and pointlessly -- from Braveheart, the hot movie of the day. Crawford places the new production in contemporary times, but is relatively restrained with references to the times.

True, Lady Macbeth first hears from her spouse by text message and the final showdown between Macbeth and Macduff is a duel by pistol rather than swordplay -- an update that drains the scene of its theatricality -- but otherwise the production is straightforward and conventional.

Concentrate on Crawford and Harris, because the performance quality drops off substantially when it comes to the supporting players. As Macbeth’s buddy Banquo, Andre Lancaster fights a losing battle with his lines of dialogue. You are unlikely to mind that his death renders him a mute ghost. Better are the three “weird sisters” -- Krys Parker, Trinna Pye and Greta von Unrue -- a trio of Goth babes who crawl about Daniel Gordon’s steeply raked stage. Either Crawford had a thematic notion or he was trying to save on salaries, but these witches keep popping up as members of Macbeth’s court and as his homicidal henchmen.

The festival is already crowing that its opening week set a new attendance record for Seabreeze Amphitheatre in Jupiter’s Carlin Park. For the past two decades, the company has become a fixture in the community and probably the main opportunity for many Palm Beach County residents to brush up their Shakespeare. That is commendable, but the troupe could still use a few more classically trained actors.

MACBETH, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival at Seabreeze Amphitheatre, Carlin Park, A1A and Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday, July 25. Tickets: Free, donations accepted. Call: (561) 575-7336.

Broward Stage Door Theatre has a tendency to overreach with its musicals, biting off a beloved, not-quite elaborate show and not quite delivering on the pleasures we once enjoyed with it.

Now, however, it is presenting a modest little show, the intermission-less The Drowsy Chaperone, a multiple Tony Award winner from 2006 that is bound to be new to most of its audience, and renders it very capably with just the right touches of affection and whimsy.

Much of the credit goes to the company’s former artistic director, Dan Kelley, who stages the production deftly with a perpetual wink as well as playing the show’s central character, known simply as Man in Chair, with complete commitment to his musical comedy world. Every now and then one sees an ideal match of performer and role like this. If Man in Chair were not written as a wedding gift for Bob Martin, one of the show’s co-authors, you would swear it was tailor-made for Kelley, fluttery hands and sly comic takes and all.

You see, Man in Chair is an avid fan of musicals, preferably from an earlier era, long before they were lazy copies of popular movies or before Elton John began attempting to pen theater songs. And when he feels a little blue, nothing brings him out of his funk like putting on a record -- yes, a vinyl record -- of a cherished, bygone, fictitious show from the 1920s, like Gable and Stine’s The Drowsy Chaperone. And as he narrates and annotates the show, it comes to life in his otherwise drab apartment.

As students of musical theater know, shows from the ’20s were one degree removed from vaudeville, a series of specialty numbers for variety performers that were barely connected to a storyline. Dramatic logic was beside the point and that is the world that The Drowsy Chaperone -- the show, not the show-within-the-show -- celebrates.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the imminent wedding of celebrated stage star Janet Van De Graff, who is about to make the supreme sacrifice of giving up her career for domestic life with her beau, Robert Martin. Trying to prevent the nuptials is her producer, who would hate to lose such a lucrative meal ticket.

For no particular reason other than daffiness, the groom is soon careening about the stage, blindfolded and on roller skates. Perhaps it is a metaphor for marriage. In any rate, the stage is soon filled with pun-slinging gangsters posing as bakers, the title tipsy matron charged with looking after the bride, a dense, but harmless Latin Lothario, a ditsy dowager prone to spit takes and a few other stray comic types.

The Tony-winning score by Broadway newcomers Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison is well attuned to the sound of the period and highly democratic in the way it provides everyone -- even a barnstorming aviatrix, so tangential to the show, she should have bought a ticket to get in -- with a spotlight number.

Among the standouts are Laura Oldman (Janet), who opening anti-want song, Show-Off, puts her through a dizzying display of narcissistic talents, from plate-spinning to snake-charming to ventriloquism. Matt Ban’s Adolpho is, by necessity, broad, but he earns his laughs with surprisingly precise comic timing. And Kelley is truly ideal as Man in Chair, holding together the mayhem with an effortless hand while supplying the show’s emotional heart.

The ever-inventive Chrissi Ardito supplies the vintage feel-good choreography, Ardean Landhuis gives solid support with his scenic design and lighting and David Nagy’s music direction is adroit, although the orchestra is pre-recorded.

The Drowsy Chaperone is not a great show for the ages. It seems unlikely that Man in Chair’s great-grandson will be listening to it 80 years from now. But it is a lot of fun, and Kelley’s production delivers on every wacky bit of schtick it contains.

THE DROWSY CHAPERONE, Broward Stage Door Theatre, 8036 W. Sample Road, Coral Springs. Through July 25. Tickets: $38-$42. Call: (954) 344-7765.

Tom Bloom does not give up on a play easily.

The New York actor-turned-director began helping to develop Bob Clyman’s Secret Order, a drama of ideas about a cure for cancer that runs into a buzzsaw of research politics, some 15 years ago. He not only directs the production that opened at the Caldwell Theatre this weekend, but when featured actor Gordon McConnell was hospitalized unexpectedly with symptoms of disorientation Saturday, Bloom subbed in the role by Sunday, script in hand.

“I started reading early drafts of it, and was involved with it all the way up to its aborted Broadway run,” Bloom said during rehearsals. The play, which has not had much luck, medically speaking, was on track to open on Broadway in 2005, until John Spencer (of TV’s The West Wing) succumbed to cancer, scuttling that commercial production.

Spencer was to have played Robert Brock, a formerly promising research scientist turned abrasive laboratory administrator, McConnell’s role at the Caldwell. When Brock reads a paper by naïve but talented young scientist William Shumway on a new approach to killing off cancer cells, he brings him to New York and lavishes attention and resources on him. But as Shumway’s lab results start going bad, he hides the data, putting the cure and his career in jeopardy.

“I’ve always been interested in science,” says Bloom of his attraction to the script. “Bob (Clyman) is a psychologist and he’s always written about things with a scientific connection. In Bob’s plays there is often a central character who is in a situation that spirals downward out of control. Not through a tragic flaw, unless you can consider innocence a flaw. In this play, his naïveté is what allows the younger character to go down the hole. When he wrote this one about cloudy ethics that get murkier, it just sort of took my interest.”

If science is not your thing, Bloom feels you can still enjoy Secret Order. “Yes, the science is important, but what we’re really watching is the relationship between a very naïve, almost literally fatherless, young scientist and this mentor who runs an enormously powerful organization. There’s a kind of father-son relationship that develops between them that gets threatened. So there’s a potential scientific loss as well as a personal loss.”

Coincidentally, Bloom and the Caldwell’s new artistic director, Clive Cholerton, worked together as actors 20 years ago at a summer theater in Monmouth, Maine. They had lost track of each other, but when Bloom heard of Cholerton’s new position, he sent him a copy of Secret Order and it quickly landed on the Caldwell’s summer schedule.

Bloom has seen other regional productions of the play and feels that some of them have erred by “going to the sentimental side.” Massachusetts’ Merrimack Repertory Theatre brought the play off-Broadway three years ago, but as Bloom puts it, “That production, for my money, was a little soft. It didn’t have the bite that the play can have. The young scientist should really find himself in a shark’s world.”

* * *

The unfortunate medical mishap of Gordon McConnell aside -- and let’s hope it is not any more serious than that, the problems with Secret Order are not with the Caldwell production. Yes, it felt under rehearsed by Friday’s opening performance, but that seems minor next to the overwritten and under-edited script. Instead of the much-massaged and tested 15-year-old script that it is, it comes off like an early draft, which often bogs down in the minutiae of scientific methodology.

There are plenty of ideas worth pondering here -- science versus commerce, personal interests versus community welfare, adhering to accepted work standards versus saving lives -- but they are introduced so inertly, buried in verbiage. There is a natural interest in these topics, but you are likely to have your patience tested over the course of the two-and-a-half-hours-plus running time of Secret Order.

The script centers on young William Shumway, played by Nick Duckart (The Whipping Man) initially as a Midwest bumpkin. His performance grows more subtle, as the character becomes more acclimated to the urban environment. If Shumway remains in over his head, Duckart never is. In the past year, he has done a handful of major roles at theaters throughout South Florida, an important addition to the area’s acting pool.

McConnell was having noticeable trouble with his lines at Friday night’s opening performance and some of that may have been due to his medical condition. Still, he is well cast as Robert Brock, projecting an impatient arrogance, bullying his way through all situations, with a gruff exterior that he gradually lets us see beneath.

Katie Cunningham and Howard Elfman fill out the company as Shumway’s eager student assistant/prospective love interest and as an aging scientist in Brock’s corral whose stock keeps falling as Shumway’s rises. Both characters are little more than dramatic contrivances, underlings who eventually get the upper hand a bit too predictably.

We need plays like Secret Order that tackle big themes and issues, but Clyman seems to have stuffed his script with too many ideas. Oddly, the Caldwell insists on labeling the play “a comedic thriller,” when it is neither comic nor thrilling.

SECRET ORDER, Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Aug. 2. Tickets: $38-$45. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

Although he must have been absent in playwriting class the day they covered creating enticing titles, Stephen Karam demonstrates his skill with contemporary dialogue and the angst of today’s youth in the breezy, comic Speech and Debate.

While more lightweight than GableStage’s usual fare, the production demonstrates the company’s continued interest in new talent -- introducing Karam to South Florida as well as three fresh-faced performers who have recently graduated from Miami’s New World School of the Arts.

They play unpopular misfits in a Salem, Ore. High school, geeks who have gravitated to the debate club and taken it over by default. The club and the school newspaper become forums for their crusades, particularly against Salem’s conservative mayor, who opposes gay adoption but apparently has homosexual designs on underage boys himself.

Then there is Mr. Healey, the school’s drama teacher, who has made sexual advances on both male characters -- online chat-obsessed, openly gay Howie (David Dearstyne) and Solomon (Ryan Didato), an investigative reporter wannabe. The female apex of the debate club triangle, a little dynamo named Diwata (Jackie Rivera), also has it in for Healey. Not for his unprofessional indiscretions, but because he cannot see that she deserves to be given the leading role in the school play.

Healey may not see it, but GableStage theatergoers will. Rivera has genuine star quality, a charismatic bundle of energy with terrific comic timing and an underlying vulnerability. These qualities are particularly evident in Diwata’s hyperactive rendition of her musical version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and a nude (well, with flesh-colored leotard) interpretive dance. Karam certainly has some offbeat comic notions, but it is the way Rivera puts them across that is most memorable.

By comparison, Dearstyne and Didato come off far blander than desirable. In the only two visible adult roles, a put-upon teacher and a clueless reporter, Patti Gardner manages to make something of the sketchy assignments. In a rare sidestep, artistic director Joe Adler hands over the staging chores to Amy London, who makes some headway in giving the episodic tale some dramatic shape.

The play’s focus is on awkward teens, but the script is more disjointed and awkward than necessary. The alienation of youth is a common theme of young writers, and Speech and Debate does update the topic with references to texting, Google and podcasts. The script feels up to the minute, but it seems likely to become dated soon.

Still, Karam is a writer to keep an eye on and Rivera is the reason to see the production at GableStage.

SPEECH AND DEBATE, GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Through July 18. Tickets: $37.50 - $45. Call: (305) 445-1119.

When you consider what a mediocre season it was on Broadway, did anyone really think the Tony Awards show would be any good? Sunday night’s ceremony was, as expected, just like the season for musicals – loud, punk and uninspired.

As I previously reported, however, it was a terrific year for plays, but CBS and the people who assemble the Tonys show have no patience for showcasing plays. They would rather stuff the program with filler from the rock band Green Day (creators of the score that became the musical American Idiot) and pointless solos by Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele (former Broadway performers who are now deemed worthy of Tony time because they star on the TV show Glee).

In the same way that the misguided revival of Promises, Promises could not attract a bigger star than Sean Hayes, nor could the Tonys attract a more interesting emcee. Hayes started well with a display of his piano virtuosity (who knew?) that segued into a disheartening jam session from the show Million Dollar Quartet, including a piano duet with Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the musical (and won a supporting actor Tony later in the show.)

Hayes gamely went along with the comic bits written for him, including dressing up as a well-endowed dancer from Billy Elliot, as Little Orphan Annie and as the biggest no-show of the season, Spider-Man. The elephant in the room, though, was an inane Newsweek article that slammed Hayes’s performance in Promises, Promises as hard to swallow because he is an out gay man. Hayes never referred to the article directly, but he locked lips and exchanged tongues with his painfully thin co-star Kristin Chenoweth in a winking attempt at heterosexuality, a kiss that would make even Al and Tipper Gore envious.

But the good sports award for the evening surely goes to Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, the (justifiably) snubbed stars of the dreadful The Addams Family, who were asked to present the awards for (gulp!) best actor and actress in a musical. Still, it was good to see them at the Tonys or, as Lane says it is referred to at his house, “Passover.”

The Tonys have notoriously low ratings and Sunday night’s numbers should be no better than usual. There is a perennial tug-of-war between those who think the Tonys should be populated by and about theater people and those who think that widening the profile of presenters will increase viewership. I am staunchly in the former camp and get actively annoyed by TV executives who think pulling in New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez or former American Idol judge Paula Abdul to lend their name value will get anyone beyond the small, core audience to tune in.

It will be interesting to see if American Idiot or Million Dollar Quartet -- which won a few minor awards -- get a boost at the box office from their exposure at the Tonys. They only confirmed my decision not to see them while I was in New York last month. The big winner among musicals was Memphis, which collected statuettes for best musical, book, score and orchestrations. The pre-show guessing was that its win for the top award over Fela! would be engineered by the road presenters, who need a sellable hit for their performing arts centers. Too bad, because Fela! was the only innovative new musical in the field.

I couldn’t be more pleased that Red, John Logan’s script about abstract artist Mark Rothko and the art of making art won for best play, director, supporting actor (Eddie Redmayne), scenic design and sound design. A fine play, superbly performed.

I haven’t heard how many visitors to Palm Beach ArtsPaper beat me in my Tony prognostication, but it is a shame that we did not just ask you to guess best play, musical and the eight performance categories. In those I went 10 for 10. (Hint: When in doubt, go with the movie stars who will be thanked with a Tony for the sacrifice of doing a play.) In all, I got 19 out of 26, well enough to not be embarrassed.

And as they say in baseball, “Better luck next season.” Maybe a year from now, we’ll be talking about the brilliance of Spider-Man. But I kind of doubt it.