For the past 16 years Joe Chvala has melded diverse forms of percussive dance into dramatic spectacles. He's created everything from Scandinavian epics with pagan Nordic heroes reconfigured as post-industrial punk stompers, to plainspoken Appalachian folk tales with the hardscrabble fatalism of Walker Evans's Depression photos. Now this master of percussive fusion goes all Gallic with an international dance/theater pastiche inspired by vaudeville, tap dance, cabaret, follies, opera, hambone, and clowning. Imagine a foppish French monarch slapping out rhythms on his fancy brocade, or decadent Parisians rhythmically seething in underground nightclubs. The show serves up an eclectic brew of new (live) music, dance, and comedy, and old favorites including the mad madrigal medley "All Creatures Great and Small," a piece that does for English madrigals what Savion Glover did for Bach in "Classical Savion." And all performed by un ensemble extraordinaire, the Flying Foot Forum, which includes Chvala, his muse Karla Grotting, rhythm-wizard Peter O'Gorman, and a host of performers who beautifully blur the line between music and dance. — Linda Shapiro

I'm usually not one for recounting tales of great shows seen (memory is fickle, and mendacious), but in 1996 I found myself at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a production of Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night that insinuated itself into the way I see life. It's a tough pill to swallow, this story of a family in thrall to addiction, bitterness, and the ash-end of great passion, but it's told with astonishing depth of feeling, and a sense of a great talent throwing all caution to the wind (it was never published during O'Neil's life, per his wishes, so intense were the truths it contained about his own life). This Theatre in the Round production features Maggie Bearmon Pistner in the role of Mary, the drug-addicted mother of the Tyrone clan, with direction by Lynn Musgrave. — Quinton Skinner

Choreographer Mathew Janczewski first unveiled this full-length dance work for his ARENA Dances troupe in 2002, and it certainly deserves a second viewing. Inspired by Gustav Klimt's lush paintings, the piece takes place in an evocative world where the dancers look to one another to fulfill a tenuous combination of tender understanding and aggressive release. Janczewski is known for his innovative partnering, and "waterBRIDGE" is a good example of his imaginative, complex style. It is an ambitious dance theater experience that pays off in well-crafted choreography, strong performance values, and the dancers' own willingness to embrace Janczewski's daring physical experiments. — Caroline Palmer