Northampton Community Colleges Theatre Department mines the laughs with a broadly comedic production of William Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." On the colleges Lipkin Theatre stage, 3835 Green Pond Road, Bethlehem Township through April 16, the production playfully uses physical comedy to accentuate Shakespeares witty wordplay.

Director William Mutimer has set the comedy in the flirty Roaring Twenties to good effect.

Max Wetherhold as the musician Balthasar sets the scene, crooning popular hits from the 1920s like "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue," and "Bye, Bye Black,bird," while accompanying himself on the ukulele.

Father and daughter Bill and Anisa George give a sometimes touching, sometimes harrowing look back at their relationship and their lives in theater with their stunning original piece "The Last Play" through April 2 at Touchstone Theatre, 321 E. Fourth St., Bethlehem. Wrenchingly honest, "The Last Play" is part family retrospective and part creative expression of what it means to be a theater artists.

Bill George, a co-founder of Touchstone Theatre, has spent his life creating theater. Anisa George has been on stage with her father since she was a baby. Now 40, Anisa is contemplating moving away from theater to focus on other pursuits, and that prompted the creation of "The Last Play" with her father. However, as she noted on stage, she has tried before to leave making theater but has always returned.

"Trouble in Mind" is about racism and sexism in the theater. These are up-to-date topics, but this work by Alice Childress debuted Off-Broadway in 1955. Considered too controversial for its time, it did not have a Broadway opening until 2021. In working around restrictions of the fifties, Childress constructed a play with a message that is powerful but never too strident. It is scrupulously fair, critical of both black and white characters, and giving time to present the viewpoints of the white antagonist. There is a sympathetic side to all of the nine participants in the story. It is rare to see a show that succeeds with both humor and intense drama, but the cast at the Civic Theatres Theatre514 pulls it off with remarkably strong performances. The setting is the backstage of a New York City Broadway theater in 1957. It opens with Wiletta Mayer (Veronica Cummings) arriving to play yet another stereotypical role, this time in an anti-lynching polemic set in the Deep South. She is greeted by the elderly, addled Henry (Michael Daniels).

At 100 years old, "The Ghost Train" may be showing its age a bit, but is nonetheless a fun and spooky, if slightly wacky, ride.

The 1934 thriller is at Pennsylvania Playhouse at 390 Illicks Mill Road, Bethlehem through April 2.

Things are not as they seem in the story of a group of travelers who find themselves trapped overnight in an isolated old railway station where a local legend tells of a haunted train that comes through at night, leaving death in its wake.