Lyle Zimskind

With "Phaedra's Lust," Archway Studio/Theatre Artistic Director Steven Sabel has skillfully adapted this classic story from the ancients Seneca and Euripides, by way of 17th-century French playwright Jean Racine, in an enjoyably unmodernized new production that lets the drama hit us over the head on its own terms.

Paul North's new play "The Gambler's Daughter," now running at the Eclectic Company Theatre in Valley Village, does center its tale of family redemption around a career card shark living in the far suburban outskirts of Sin City, but the result is more like a soap opera than a "Diceman Cometh."

The straightforward "Butterfly" production that Los Angeles Opera has brought to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion moves a bit too heavily on its feet to jerk every last tear in the house, its characters more often arranged in passive set pieces than engaged in a convincingly modulated show of love won and lost. But what the performers lack in physical demonstrativeness and personal dynamism they largely make up for in vocal power.

Everybody's favorite up-and-coming L.A. theater company, Rogue Machine, has hit pay dirt again with the highly dynamic West Coast premiere production of Samuel D. Hunter's Obie Award-winning play "A Bright New Boise."

Less than half a year after the unusual LA Phil production of "Don Giovanni" this past spring, Mozart's murderous cad is back on Grand Avenue, just one block north, in a more straightforwardly traditional staging presented by LA Opera. And if our city's audience gets to experience two notably different takes on this most essential work, both of them charismatically sung and thoughtfully conducted, just five months apart...well, that's nothing but lucky for us, is it?

Created by the legendary "South Park" brain trust, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with "Avenue Q" co-author Robert Lopez and theater director Casey Nicholaw, "Book of Mormon" offers a ribald ribbing rather than a mean-spirited bashing of the Mormons' myths of origin and global missionary culture.

In her new, perhaps still-developing "Focus Group Play," now running at the Skylight Theatre as part of its LAbWORKS series, though, Carrie Barrett ingeniously hits upon a perfect setting in which greater external forces can be seen impinging on the lives of the people on stage.

Andrew Osborne's new play "No Love," now running at the Eclectic Company Theatre in Valley Village, iterates the uncompromising worldview of FM rock classic "Love Stinks" with a dramaturgical format straight out of the Arthur Schnitzler Viennese belle epoque provocation "La Ronde."

LA's theater season doesn't take a summer vacation, as new productions keep popping up all over town. Here's a round-up of three just-opened shows we caught last week in three different neighborhoods.

In advance of Center Theatre Group's upcoming production of the new Jon Robin Baitz hit "Other Desert Cities," The Group Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood is now reviving Baitz's messy melodrama "The Paris Letter," which premiered at CTG in 2004 before opening in New York the following year.