As suggested by the title, the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's current offering, Sex Please, We're 60, involves men and women of a certain age and their libidos, but thankfully it maintains a modicum of decency by placing the "action" off stage. The piece also features many clichéd jokes and absurd situations, but while I cringed at the images conjured by the title, it's when the work is at its (relatively) raunchiest that the play and the cast work best.

"A guy once sent me this story," begins comedian Tim Bedore. "He had a great muscle car from the '60s, and he had it all waxed and polished to this beautiful shine, and he had it parked under a tree. And this squirrel started dropping nuts onto his hood, over and over again.

"He finally moved the car underneath a different tree, because he wanted to keep the car in the shade and not ruin his perfect wax job. But after he did, the squirrel jumped over to the other tree, and started dropping nuts on the hood. It could've dropped them anywhere, but it had to drop them onto the hood of his car. It was a purposeful thing.

"Now, biologists could probably come up with some explanation for this. It liked the sound. Or it thought the car was an enemy. Or," Bedore suggests, "it just wanted to piss off a human. I mean, why not just go to the simpler explanation?"

I really like Chicago. Its tuneful score, uniquely vaudevillian presentation, and delightfully naughty nature make it one of my favorite stage musicals. There's one number in the show, however, that tops them all for me: "Cell Block Tango," which is sexy, fun, and what I consider the benchmark for the overall production. And on Friday night, my entertainment needs would've been met, and then some, had the District Theatre's production actually ended after this number, even thought it's only the fourth song in the piece.

"Most of our students work jobs when they're not at school," says Scott Community College (SCC) theatre instructor Steve Flanigin. "So when you say, 'We're going to do a play - who'd be interested?', you have to see who's available before you decide what play you can do. Because if they have to go to a job when we normally rehearse - Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from three to five - then they can't do the show.

"I think that's one of the challenges of doing theatre at a community college that a lot of people don't realize," he continues. "What we do depends on who is here in the fall or the spring, and what their schedules are like. I mean, I'd love to do Hello, Dolly!, but not with four people."

Happily for Flanigin, he was able to secure roughly a dozen student participants for the school's latest production. And while that number wasn't large enough for a Hello, Dolly!, it was perfectly appropriate for the show that he and fellow SCC instructor John Turner did choose: a new adaptation of author H.G. Wells' alien-invasion classic War of the Worlds, running October 20 through 30.