One thing’s unbeatable about Tacoma: how you can drive downtown in ten minutes, find a free parking place one minute’s walk from a cool black box venue, pay just $15 and see contemporary dance that Seattlites would kill for (or at least, pay through the nose.)

There is something homey about community theater that invites audience members to feel like they have a stake in the performance.

For a good contemporary dance concert, there was an awful lot of bad nostalgia. The Barefoot Collective’s second annual “Footfalls” evening of original dance featured two well-thought-out works by Tacoma choreographers, Katie Stricker and Stephanie Kriege Pederson, danced wholeheartedly by the Collective’s dancers. Yet, bizarrely, the evening also included some mediocre cabaret singing completely at odds with the rest of the program.

They may not be the greatest plays ever written, but “The Greatest Plays Ever Written By Nick Stokes!” are certainly the best plays to be seen around Tacoma in the last few months. And produced as they are in the dim, haunted recesses of Old City Hall, they definitely take the prize for the most inventive venue. The two new one-hour plays, “The Sound We Make” and “Whiteout” by local playwright Nick Stokes, deal with tricky issues (homelessness and deathly reality) in clever ways with some strong acting.

What: “Daughter of the Regiment” by Gaetano Donizetti

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has adapted or written many horror and mystery stories for the stage, including “Murder by Poe” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” He also wrote the play based on the immensely popular “Tuesdays With Morrie.”

Morrie Schwartz’s wisecracking saves “Tuesdays With Morrie” from being maudlin. But the play now being performed at Lakewood Playhouse is still a tearjerker.

I’ve seen “Nunsense” before but never like this. This performance is not only rolling-in-the-aisles funny and deliciously irreverent, it rocks.

Three years ago, Harlequin Productions put on a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that was the most elaborate and outrageously funny Shakespeare comedy I had ever seen. I would not have believed they could match that performance, but they have with their current show, “As You Like It.”

“Curtains” at Tacoma Musical Playhouse is a murder-mystery musical comedy that played to mixed reviews on Broadway as recently as 2007. It garnered major awards, but also was panned by a number of critics.

“Carl Sagan’s Contact” at Centerstage is the world premiere of an exciting new musical based on Sagan’s novel, with book by Centerstage artistic director Alan Bryce, music by Peter Sipos, and lyrics by Amy Engelhardt. It is directed by Bryce.

There are two things that make murder mysteries – especially of the British variety – insanely popular: complex and surprising plot structures and oddball characters. Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” at Lakewood Playhouse has both in spades.

Olympia Little Theatre has updated Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy of manners “The Importance of Being Earnest” to the swinging England of 1968, the era of such popular British films as “Georgy Girl” and “Alfie.” This play, performed in the round, has much of the flavor of those films. Other than a florid manner of speaking, which may have been the height of fashion among pretentious Brits in 1895 but which seems stilted today, the update seems perfectly fitted to the affectations and love of fashion in Wilde’s comedy.

New Tacoma Little Theatre artistic director Scott Campbell promised a season of comedy, and the revamped 91-year-old theater is starting the new season with a laugh-out-loud glance back at the ’60s, Neil Simon’s “The Star-Spangled Girl.”

“Mating Dance of the Werewolf” by Mark Stein is unlike anything seen on Puget Sound stages. It is a beautiful, moody, hilarious love story, and it’s a murder mystery/comedy about one of the rarest creatures in literature or entertainment – a female werewolf.