Walnut Street Theatre

THE RESTAURANTS and merchants of Rittenhouse Row are gathering again on Walnut Street this Saturday, and that means about 50,000 area residents and guests will be joining them for one of Center City's largest street fairs. The Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival will close Walnut from Broad to 19th streets (from noon until 5 p.m.) and feature food, fashion, entertainment and fun for children. It's big. It's crowded. It's fun. And this year there's a lot of new stuff. * Dunkin' Donuts will be giving out free iced coffee on the 1400 block of Walnut.

David Lindsay-Abaire's Broadway hit play Good People , at Walnut Street Theatre, is about class. It is a sociological cliche that the American inclination is always to root for the underdog, which often means, as it does here, the unlucky, the uneducated, the unemployed. "Un" is the fact of life in "Southie," a thickly accented rough and tough neighborhood in Boston. The plot centers on Margaret (Julie Czarnecki) who, fired by her nice-guy boss (Jered McLenigan) from her job at the Dollar Store, faces eviction from her not-so-nice landlady (Sharon Alexander)

Go inside the phobic world of 10-year-old Sheila Tubman, who is scared of everything, at the Walnut Street Theatre for Kids' stage production Saturday of Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great , based on the 1972 book by Judy Blume. While at day camp, Sheila meets an adventurous girl named Merle "Mouse" Ellis. Sheila covers up her fears with bravado to be friends with Mouse. Meeting Mouse, combined with a family vacation to Tarrytown, forces Sheila to overcome some of her secret fears, including being in the dark, swimming, spiders, dogs and more.

Three one-act plays: "One for the Road" and "Applicant," by Harold Pinter, and "Audience," by Vaclav Havel. Directed by Andrew Lichtenberg, costumes by Christine A. Moore, lighting by Rebecca R. Klein, sound by Jeff Chestek. Presented by the Walnut Street Theatre Co. in the Studio 3 Theatre, 9th and Walnut streets, through April 12. By arrangement or coincidence, two contemporary plays dealing with the interrogation of political prisoners have opened in this city within three days of each other.

Another season and another show at the Walnut Street Theatre, and still another hearty slap on the back of Bernard Havard for his keen assessment of the largest, non-profit theater subscription audience in Pennsylvania. The Walnut subscribers like their shows corny, cliche-ridden, easily digested, happily ended, devoid of distressing surprises and preferably over in time for a leisurely nightcap before snuggling in their cocoons for the 11 o'clock news. "Social Security," the season opener which Havard served up for his people last night, meets the Walnut standards about as well as any production in the company's brief and prodigiously successful history.

With a $5 million grant from the state and a purchase agreement on a parking lot next door, the Walnut Street Theatre is poised to launch a campaign to build a 300-to-350-seat theater adjacent to its historic building at Ninth and Walnut Streets. Bernard Havard, the Walnut's producing artistic director, said the state grant - part of $43 million that Gov. Schweiker awarded to area cultural groups Tuesday - was a major initial step toward the construction of a second performance space.

Buy a single ticket to the Walnut Street Theatre - just one ticket for a specific show - and you'll be asked to be a theater critic. "How did you like the show?" someone will inquire in a phone call a few days later - and then tell you what subscription options you have for more shows at the nation's oldest working theater. Tomorrow - the actual date it opened in 1809, as a circus - the theater company celebrates its bicentennial with an invited audience and some performers who have appeared there over the decades.

Through June 2 at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, Ninth and Walnut Streets. Tickets: $17-$22. 215-423-0254 or www.simpatico.org

Through April 14 at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio on 3, 825 Walnut St. Tickets: $30-$40. 215-574-3550 or www.walnutstreettheatre.org

Iconic crooners don't get any more comfy than Dean Martin, who ambled through his performing life with supreme ease and deceptive artistry, most apparent when he wasn't making fun of himself. Supposedly, he was so cool that his heart beat only five times a minute. But that's not what you see with Dino! An Evening With Dean Martin at the Latin Casino , now playing to full-ish houses at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio. The show's conceit is that Martin arrives at Cherry Hill's Latin Casino in 1978 amid a snowstorm and without his band.

Theater A Little Night Music Award-winning Sondheim musical. Closes 6/30. Arden Theatre, 40 N. 2d St.; 215-922-1122. $36-$48; $15 children 12-18. American Sligo Regional debut, written by Adam Rapp. Closes 6/23. Adrienne Theatre, 2030 Sansom St.; 215-563-7500. www.newcitystage.org . Pay what you can. Barcelona Late night in Barcelona. An American woman leaves her own party with a tall, dark stranger, an older Spanish man. Is it a carefree one-night stand or an invitation to danger?

Let's pretend for a moment that Grease , receiving a main-stage airing-out at Walnut Street Theatre, isn't about slut-shaming and prude-shaming or the days when bullies were the cool kids. We can celebrate an era when we had the freedom to mock "Polacks," "Japs," and "pansies" at will, but didn't have to acknowledge African Americans because they were still invisible. We might even be OK with all that if director Bruce Lumpkin allowed this 1971 musical to take its original form: a hand jive at America's best-beloved 1950s myths presented by a bunch of working-class teenage scrappers all grappling for the bottom rungs of the same (gender-specific)

So often in the fine arts these days, everything has to be called a "project," always sounding a bit more like research or fact-finding than anything creative. But in the case of Simpatico Theatre Project's premiere, The Lysistrata Project, at Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, the creators perhaps didn't know what else to call it. Part update, part adaptation, part new play, part political theater, this Aristophanes play is no longer about Greek women withholding sex until their husbands make a peace treaty to end one of their eternal wars.

Through June 2 at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, Ninth and Walnut Streets. Tickets: $17-$22. 215-423-0254 or www.simpatico.org

THE RESTAURANTS and merchants of Rittenhouse Row are gathering again on Walnut Street this Saturday, and that means about 50,000 area residents and guests will be joining them for one of Center City's largest street fairs. The Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival will close Walnut from Broad to 19th streets (from noon until 5 p.m.) and feature food, fashion, entertainment and fun for children. It's big. It's crowded. It's fun. And this year there's a lot of new stuff. * Dunkin' Donuts will be giving out free iced coffee on the 1400 block of Walnut.

Iconic crooners don't get any more comfy than Dean Martin, who ambled through his performing life with supreme ease and deceptive artistry, most apparent when he wasn't making fun of himself. Supposedly, he was so cool that his heart beat only five times a minute. But that's not what you see with Dino! An Evening With Dean Martin at the Latin Casino , now playing to full-ish houses at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio. The show's conceit is that Martin arrives at Cherry Hill's Latin Casino in 1978 amid a snowstorm and without his band.