After an extended silent-movie montage - one featuring clips from F.W. Murnau's horror classic Nosferatu - and the appearance of the show's title, the Timber Lake Playhouse's Sunset Boulevard opens with screenwriter Joe Gillis (Brandon Ford) at the bottom of a swimming pool. Granted, the water, like that montage, is a multimedia projection, and Gillis is standing (and singing) rather than floating face-down. But the Act I prelude is still enough like the opening to Billy Wilder's beloved Hollywood noir that fans of the Sunset Boulevard movie will likely smile in recognition and appreciation, and we're returned to this scene of a future crime at the start of the musical's second act.

These are the two, and only, times that Timber Lake's production will find itself underwater.

Adulterous lovers. Women and men in drag. Mistreated orphans. Nuns sniffing glue. Grandmas peddling racy underwear.

But enough about my upcoming birthday party.

These are just a few of the stage sights that audiences will be privy to over the next three months, as our area's theatre venues and companies open, at last count, an intimidating 62 productions between June 2 and August 26. As usual, the summer season will be filled with musicals, comedies, and blends of the two. But we theatre-going masses will also be treated to a number of classical and Shakespearean titles, challenging Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winners, and even - gasp! - the occasional intense drama, for those who aren't afraid to spend a couple hours of their summer, you know, thinking.

New Era Dinner Theatre's Once Upon a Mattress is flat-out delightful. It's not the perfect production, but it's so amusing and well-sung that I left Saturday night's show with a giddy feeling that's sticking with me even as I write this review a day later.

For the final production in her company's 10th-anniversary season, New Ground Theatre Artistic Director Chris Jansen chose to direct a rather epic piece: the debuting period drama Under the Radar, which features numerous plotlines and changes of locale, and concerns our area's gay scene in the late 1970s, with particular attention paid to the relationship of one long-term gay couple.

Based on that description, it sounds as though Jansen is tackling a Quad Cities-based, pre-AIDS version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Yet when, with a good-natured laugh, she says of the mammoth undertaking, "Some idiot wrote 11 characters into it," know that Jansen isn't being derogatory. At least, not toward anyone but herself.