If George Bernard Shaw had taken it into his head to write a sequel to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, with an assist from William Shakespeare, he might have come up with something much like Liz Duffy Adams’s A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World.

H2O will leave you dealing not only with your feelings about the characters, but also reconsidering art, life, and The Meaning of It All.

During the Broadway run and the professional tours, Spring Awakening tended to be too expensive for young audiences. I wondered how this show about and for youth would affect young audiences. I finally found out.

A first-rate production of a second-rate show. The astonishing cast delivers song after song that sails out of the park.

The thing about really great farces is that once they wind up, they become like three-ring circuses, with physical comedy (pratfalls and double-takes), character-based comedy, and the sheer geometry of exits from impossible situations being closed off, one by one, contributing to constant hilarity and nearly non-stop laughter. Of course, even in the case of the most beautifully-constructed farces, this requires a deft directorial touch, because the whole thing is always a soufflé of improbable coincidence, of characters missing unmissable cues, of perfectly-timed entrances and exits, of unbelievable ingenuity preventing inevitable disaster, of insults taken where none were intended, of passes made and, against all probability, not rebuffed. And keeping soufflés from falling is hard work.

This is not great drama or great comedy, but it is an enjoyable evening of theater. Of course, in the end none of it matters if Powers does not deliver, but no one can deny that she knocks it out of the park. It may be a tinier park than some, but knock it she does.

True, the conclusion that Tom is gay, closeted, and alienated thereby from his family is not absolutely compelled. The failure of the script to “go there” arguably leaves room for actors and directors to interpret. But any other conclusion than that Tom Wingfield, like Tom Williams, is gay would be misinterpretation. And it is a misinterpretation with consequences.

Fiddler traffics in the safest kind of nostalgia, reminiscences of a world no one would want to return to. It’s a lovely flirtation with a way of life that is safely dead. Naturally, none of that would have mattered, had the songs not been so infernally catchy, the dancing not so athletic and exotic, the sentimentality not so powerfully schmaltzy, and the love-stories, even perfunctorily sketched, not so appealing.