If you dug February House at the Long Wharf Theatre last month, you’re probably intrigued by some of the projects being worked by the based-on-real-life inhabitants of the titular literary boarding house of the new musical.

One you hear quite a lot about is the ill-fated 1941 youth opera Paul Bunyan by February House residents Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden. Paul Bunyan was not well received and has rarely been revived, but you can amazingly find a production of it in Boston today. It’s Paul Bunyan’s first Boston production ever, for a mere four performances at the Paramount Theatre. The work was written to be performed by high school groups but has been refashioned for students at New England Conservatory and directed by the NEC’s new Artistic Director of Opera, Stephen Lord.

A review of Paul Bunyan by Jeffrey Gantz appeared in today’s Boston Globe, here.

Other projects mentioned in February House include Gypsy Rose Lee’s mystery novel The G-String Murders, edited (and presumably co-written) by the house’s owner George Davis. The book is currently out of print, but it’s the kind of thing that used book stores love to keep around, and it is regularly republished; mass-market publisher Penguin reissued it as recently as 1984. The 1943 film version, Lady of Burlesque starring Barbara Stanwyck, is even more readily available—as a bargain-priced DVD and streaming at such video-on-demand sites as Netflix and Amazon.

Two vulnerable forms of popular culture—newspaper comics and live theater—have an affinity for each other, as our latest selection of the stage-minded strips from GoComics and Daily Ink proves.

Ethan Heard, just-named Artistic Director of the 2012-13 Yale Cabaret.

At its final show of the 2011-12 season this past weekend, the Yale Cabaret announced who will be leading the student-run, experimental, underground, 44-year-old theater space at 217 Park Street next year:

Ethan Heard, Artistic Director

Jonathan Wemette, Managing Director

Benjamin Fainstein and Nicholas Hussong, Associate Artistic Directors

Xaq Webb, Asssociate Managing Director (Fall semester)

Serving on the Board of Artistic Associates:

Margot Bordelon (Directing)

Eric Casanova (Technical Design & Production)

Lauren Dubowski (Dramaturgy)

Alyssa Howard (Stage Management)

Martha Kaufman (Playwriting)

Jenny Lagundino (Theater Management)

Jack Moran (Acting)

Matt Otto (Sound Design)

Masha Tsmiring (Design)

So farewell then to the 2011-12 team of co-Artistic Directors Kate Attwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Michael Place. Managing Director Matthew Gutschick, Associate Managing Directors Jonathan Wemette (Fall) and Lico Whitfield (Spring),  and community board members Margot Bordelon, Ken Goodwin, Teddy Griffith, Kristin Hodges, Karena Fiorenza Ingersoll, Martyna Majok, Adam Rigg, Anne Seiwerath, Adina Verson, Karen Walcott and Hannah Wasileski.

You’ll see many of these students at work before the next Cabaret season begins, since May brings the Carlotta Festival of New Plays (written, directed, designed and performed—as are most things at the Cabaret—by Yale School of Drama students) and June/July/August is the Summer Cabaret at Yale, a repertory season whose theme this summer is 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories.

As for Ethan Heard, hopes are high for another diverse, multi-disciplinary, envelope-pushing season. Heard directed Trannequin! The Musical at the Cabaret in the spring of 2011 and Basement Hades: Songs from the Underground there just last month. Some of us even recall him as a Yale undergrad in the mid-‘00s. His extensive bio is here.

Betty’s thrift-store tap shoes.

Carnival/Invisible

Through April 14 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566.

Created by the Ensemble. Written and directed by Benjamin Fainstein. Lighting & Scenic Designer: Edward T. Morris. Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme. Dramaturg: Caroline V. McGraw. Stage Manager: Jenny Schmidt. Technical Director: Daniel Perez. Producer: Shane Hudson. Performed by Merlin Huff (Barker Masterful Majestic), Hannah Sorenson (Dustbowl Diana), Carly Zien (Applejack Amanda), Tim Brown (Cotton Candy Cameron), Chris Bannow (Popcorn Peter), Whitney Dibo (Terracotta Tina) and Brandon Curtis (Sausage-on-a-Stick Sebastian).

It’s hard to see any show based on the Chautauqua variety-show stylings of the late 19^th century without recalling the brilliant, spellbinding show Chautauqua! devised by New York’s National Theatre of the United States of America, which played at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas two summers ago. The NTUSA show was notable for respecting the full traditional Chautauqua menu of guest speakers, local content, melodrama, clowning and moral turpitude—then deconstructing itself before your eyes.

This Chautauqua effort, Carnival/Invisible, has less spectacle and and a narrower focus, but no less irony and analysis. Boffo clowns turn on each other. Suggestive puns are left to simmer. There’s dancing, and Greek tragedy, and hurled popcorn, and a goat-urine elixir. Chaos ensues, so that calm can be dramatically regained.

Given the trad formats and earnest appeals of classic Chautauqua, it’s natural to want to pull the thing apart, I guess. But what does that say about the jaded nature of modern American theater, when these same styles of presentation and entertainment are still packing them in to churches and community centers nationwide without any snarky elements?

The late Thursday night performance of Carnival/Invisible was particularly enlightening because it behaved so much like a true tent show of a century ago. The audience was volatile—generally respectful, but vocal and abrasive. The show followed a ceremonial changing-of-the-guard at the Yale Cabaret, with the just-announced slate of artistic and managing directors toasting the current holders of those positions on the “YSD Night” performance of the last Cabaret show of this school year. Much beer and wine and bourbon had been consumed at a party just before the performance. The merriment surrounding the ceremony, which involved Yale School of Drama Dean James Bundy in a fireman’s outfit, would not subside. The show’s interlocutor, Barker Masterful Majestic played by Merlin Huff, maintained imperturbable cool but also withdrew the promise of one sensitive scene because “Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, you are too unruly.”

The performers dealt with the raucous crowd just as real touring Chatauqua companies might. They exercised patience and forebearing. They occasionally shushed the louder folks. They made gentle fun of hecklers. And they got on with it. There are tender moments to this fragile display which nearly got steamrolled by the crowd’s oversized reactions to everything. But the cast’s intensity, and its anxiety, added emotional depth and kept the show on track. In any case, conceiver/director Benjamin Fainstein understands the power of unleashing several verses of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

This was a nice show to end the current YSD season on. It dovetailed nicely with other ensemble-devised works the Cabaret has showcased this season, hearkened back to simpler times of minimal design, and to longtime Cabaret-goers like myself it evoked a time in the 1990s when just about every season ended with a circus-type affair.

The evening, from the passing of the torches to the incendiary response to the performance, showed what an important place the Cabaret has become. I recall when it really was mainly an experimental lab for student’s extracurricular projects, with the audience and the food service kind of an afterthought. In the past decade it’s become a key part of the Yale School of Drama experience, not just ground zero for important new theatrical statements but a proving ground for performers—especially when faced with their exuberant classmates.

So…. Smash? Is there some stigma attached to watching this show? I don’t think I’ve heard a single theater friend of mine mention it. Nobody’s alerted me to any watching parties. Sure, Backstage and Playbill offer weekly plot recaps, but that’s not the same.

But I’m unashamedly, unabashedly stuck on the series, old 42^nd Street tropes and all. This despite the fact that I’m not generally a Broadway baby. Put me on a train and point me directly to the Great White Way, and somehow you’ll find me instead in a garret in the Village watching a guy doing performance art out of a shoebox.

I’d love there to be a major TV series about struggling actors where fame wasn’t such a large part of the equation. I’d love there to be more series about non-Broadway theater adventures, like Mark McKinney’s exemplary Slings & Arrows.

But Smash has plenty for “outer critics” like me.

Think Smash doesn’t apply to the regional theater? Check the credits. The show’s created and executive-produced by Theresa Rebeck, an acclaimed  writer and producer of TV dramas who has never forsaken her theater roots. Long Wharf Theatre workshopped  Rebeck’s Loose Knit and Sunday on the Rocks in the early ‘90s, put Abstract Expression on its mainstage in  1998 and Bad Dates in 2009. Hartford Stage also did Bad Dates (in 2005), then followed it with Rebeck’s The Scene in 2008 and had a Rebeck one-act in 2010’s Motherhood Out Loud; the theater also staged Rebeck’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Dollhouse in 2001.

Smash’s consulting producer is Michael Mayer, who’s regularly done try-outs of his Broadway-bound shows on regional stages, including Yale Rep (Triumph of Love) and nearly Long Wharf (which announced but then scuttled a pre-New York run of Spring Awakening).

The co-executive producer is Rolin Jones, Yale School of Drama alum and author of the Pulitzer-nominated Off Broadway hit The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, which had its world premiere at South Coast Rep in 2003; it was staged at Yale Rep in 2004 with the same director and some of the same cast that later did it Off Broadway.

Smash’s cast is overstuffed with familiar regional stage names. Kristen Nielsen just turned up as the director of a high school production of a musical written by Borles and Mullaly’s characters. Nielsen’s doing the same bespectacled schoolteacher stereotype that comes with the High School Musical movies, but with genuine warmth and understanding for the character; she’s on for just moments, but radiates.

One of my all-time acting heroes, Lewis Stadlen Jr., has appeared several times as a potential producer of the Marilyn musical. Stadlen spins gold out of throwaway lines like “But all your assets are in escrow!”

Doug Hughes, the former Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theatre, appeared as himself in the April 2 episode, with Angelica Huston’s producer character Eileen asking if Hughes would like to take over as director of the Marilyn musical (now titled Bombshell). Hughes was an odd casting choice, since he’s never in fact directed a Broadway musical—he’s known for doing revivals such as Born Yesterday, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Inherit the Wind and A Man for All Seasons, and for new non-musical dramas with one-word-titles: Frozen, Doubt, Mauritius, Elling. (He blended both reputations when he did the first Broadway production of David Mamet’s Oleanna in 2009.)

My favorite lead character on Smash is undoubtedly Christian Borle, whom I first saw when he played Riff in a non-Equity tour of West Side Story at New Haven’s Shubert in the late 1990s. He was back at the Shubert a season or two later, having got his Equity card, as Willard in a tour of Footloose. That got him into Footloose’s Broadway cast a few weeks before the show closed. He was in the original Broadway productions of Spamalot and Legally Blonde and played Prior Walter in the 2010 revival of Angels in America. Borle got a New York Times profile today. Having wrapped the first season of Smash, he’s starring in the Broadway transfer of Peter and the Starcatcher this week.

For those of us who know him as an acrobatic and comical singer/dancer, the pay-off of this week’s Smash episode was seeing Borle do the first big showy number he’s had since the series began. His character, the composer of Bombshell, stands in for an absent actor and nails a patter-song in the role of Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck.

Not a week goes by when Smash doesn’t have an “Oh, that’s so-and-so” moment for me—not the obvious Broadway names (Bernadette Peters appeared as the mother of central character Ivy and even sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”), movie stars (Uma Thurman) and daughter-of-Meryl-Streep Grace Gummer but wonderful lesser-known talents who’ve worked steadily in Connecticut and the regional theater realm for eons. I delight in the Westport Country Playhouse references and small-town theater asides.

That’s a much more comforting way to watch the show than all the sniping and factchecking I see on the Broadway-biased websites. The show delivers a deeper and grander celebration of the American theater than it’s given credit for.

Latest batch of stagey strips culled from GoComics and Daily Ink, including Pab Sungenis’ The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, Will Panganiban’s Frank & Steinway, Salpino’s And Now…,” Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla and Leigh Rubin’s Rubes.

The Yale Institute for Music Theatre has named the two shows it’ll workshop this summer. The two-week “intensive lab setting” development process culminates in a staged reading of each new musical, presented in association with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Mighty Five’s Infinite Funk Odyssey concerns “Fuzzbot, a robotic dance instructor without a soul” out to reactivate his “Soul Circuit” and restore “the greatest dance party in the universe.” Music and lyrics are by Zach Abramson and Derek Munro, both of whom attended the Manhattan School of Music. The book is by current Yale School of Drama Theater Management student Xaq Webb and the late poet/musician/comedian Phil Aulie (an Austin-based artistic whirlwind who died in January at the age of 25). An earlier version of the show was staged at the Blue Theatre in Austin, Texas, from whence this video clip comes:

Mortality Play, about a frustrated 14th century rock musician, has music by Scotty Arnold and book and lyrics by Alana Jacoby, pictured here:

Mortality Play was staged last year at Ars Nova’s AntFest with a four people in the cast and another four in a live rock band.

Both Mighty Five and Mortality Play will workshop at Yale from June 4-17; the readings happen at 1 &5 p.m. June 16 & 17. Tickets and info here.

The Yale Institute for Music Theatre is overseen by director Mark Brokaw, whose own new-musical credits include directing the Broadway production of Cry-Baby and the acclaimed Huntington Theatre try-out of Marty. He also directed Pop!, the Andy Warhol Factory musical which was workshopped at one of the first Institute for Music Theatre labs and later became part of the 2009-10 Yale Repertory Theatre season.

Updated the NHTJ calendar page at long last; a few dozen listings to get us through the spring and into the Fall, with more to come once the summer season heats up.

Send your listings and audition notices to me at chris@scribblers.us and I’ll post ‘em, I promise.

Archie and the gang have mistaken this poor man for a Hollywood agent or somesuch. I like the concept of football star Moose Mason as Tennessee Williams’ Stanley Kowalski. (For local readers: A Streetcar Named Desire had its world premiere at New Haven’s Shubert Theater, as a pre-Broadway try-out.)