ReAct isn’t content simply to abbreviate two classics. By relocating them to India, surrounding the stories with culturally resplendent design choices and asking the same repertory company to inhabit both worlds, WILDE! finds another way into material audiences may think they already know. Wilde’s words and ideas remain at the center, but the frame around them has changed, and in that new frame, there is still plenty worth looking at.

After Lavender Melodrama, Olympic Theatre Arts has once again found a production particularly suited to a company willing to be big, broad and unapologetically silly. The 39 Steps doesn't take itself seriously, but this company takes the business of being funny very seriously indeed. The result is an inventive, self-aware farce in which Hitchcock supplies the chase, Barlow supplies the framework, and Olympic Theatre Arts supplies the controlled chaos.

There is something fitting about a story centered upon the Winter Wren being told this way. The bird is tiny but carries an enormous mythology on its back, both king and quarry, celebrated and hunted, something ordinary enough to be overlooked yet important enough to inspire traditions that have survived for centuries. Kat Eggleston takes those contradictions and finds within them a very human story about the people who briefly cross our paths, the memories they leave behind and our need, sometimes decades later, to sit down and finally figure out how to tell their story.