If anyone can get their act together, it should be musicians, storytellers, actors, puppeteers, acrobats, and the like. That’s proving true for the third year in a row, as the performer-run Bright Night Providence celebrates New Year’s Eve in 17 venues around downtown Providence, with more than 125 entertainers presenting more than 50 performances on the afternoon and evening of December 31 — from poetry slams to belly dancing.

Plenty of flash and bang will grab our attention, with a special mini-edition of WaterFire Providence blazing around the Waterplace Park basin, and two fireworks displays — one concluding the 5:30 pm opening ceremonies at the skating rink across from City Hall, and a larger display at midnight, both cascading over the State House.

Children’s activities have been increased, beginning with fiddle music and stories by Mary King and Melanie Cabell at 12:30 pm at the Providence Children’s Museum, and continuing with music and storytelling by Keith Munslow and B

We laughed, we cried. The thespian year around here can be represented by the icon of theater, that pair of Greek masks symbolizing comedy and tragedy. Most significant events have happened on-stage, though some have happened off. Here are a few lessons learned.

1) how to win a top-notch artistic director

First of all, build a company that first-class second-in-commands at other good theaters would give major organs to be offered. Second, give the search plenty of time. By the time Oskar Eustis, artistic director at Trinity Repertory Company for 11 years, was grabbed up by the legendary Public Theater late last year, Trinity Rep certainly had made a national name for itself. As for being able to make a leisurely search for someone to fill the spot, Trinity was in the enviable situation of having associate artistic director Amanda Dehnert — obviously a top candidate — take care of the 2005-06 season.

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers has been working its way through the creative pipeline for years and has finally arrived at Trinity Repertory Company (December 2-January 8). Yellow Robe, 45, is African-American as well as a member of the Assiniboine Nation, which is located on the Fort Peck Sioux reservation in Montana. He has written more than 45 plays, including Better-n-Indins, which was staged at Perishable Theatre in February.

The Buffalo Soldiers referred to in the play were the members of black Union army regiments that fought after the Civil War, mostly in the western Indian wars. The play deals with the race issue that has been troubling three generations of a family and which comes to a head when a man considered too black to be native comes home.

In 2001 the play got a staged reading at Trinity Rep, where Yellow Robe was a playwright-in-residence until last year. It is being produced in association with Penumbra Theatre Company of St. Paul,

Racism is set and subset in William S. Yellow Robe Jr.’s heartfelt if wooden drama Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, whose world-premiere production is at Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company through January 8, in a co-production with Penumbra Theatre Company. An examination of minority-on-minority ostracism, the play is rooted in the dramatist’s personal history as an enrolled member of the Assiniboine Nation who is also of African-American heritage — a descendant, as evoked by the title, of mixed marriage between Native Americans and the post–Civil War black cavalrymen who were their sometime subjugators. The bitter Orwellian irony of the piece is that, as Native pride moves in a positive direction, some "Indins" are considered more "Indin" than others.

The Robe clan of Yellow Robe’s family drama copes in different ways with its racial heritage — ways determined in part by the extent to which each member wears its earmarks. After some year’s absence, oldest sibling Craig has returned

With fame often comes overexposure. But in Steve Martin’s The Underpants, which he adapted from German writer Carl Sternheim’s 1910 farce Die Hosen, the fame is over exposure. Before the curtain goes up, attractive hausfrau Louise Maske has suffered a wardrobe malfunction: her bloomers fell to her ankles as she strained to watch a passing parade with the king as its main attraction. As the play opens, her blockheaded bourgeois husband, Theo, a civil servant, is berating her over the incident, whose notoriety he fears will bring the luster of scandal to his cherished dullness as a cog in the government machine and possibly lead to his unemployment and ruin.

What actually happens is that a couple of swains, captivated by the dropped drawers, show up dueling to occupy a room the Maskes have recently advertised for rent. As the romantic poet Versati sets out to seduce Louise (with the cheerleading aid of voyeuristic neighbor Gertrude), the sickly barber Cohen vows out of jealousy not

When Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi for his ill-fated costume party, most of the world was shocked. But Aquila Theatre Company associate artistic director Robert Richmond saw parallels to the Melancholy Dane. "We’re all looking at Harry and saying, ‘That’s mad, that’s crazy behavior,’ but that’s Hamlet when he goes to Ophelia’s closet unbraced — doing ungentlemanly behavior." In Aquila’s Hamlet, which arrives at the Cutler Majestic Theatre next Thursday, Hamlet wears a University of Wittenberg T-shirt. "The idea was to make him a university student who’s going someplace outside his home town, but we didn’t want to make it so modern it becomes a domestic play."

According to Richmond, who directs the production, there’s pomp and circumstance in the form of "crowns and armor and the things you expect with the opening of the House of Parliament and the queen’s birthday." But there’s a balance among that, the domestic aspects, and "the relationship between mother and son and son and stepfather."

When she was a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, director Susan H. Schulman (The Secret Garden) loved Little Women. "The library had a great children’s section and I would go on Saturday morning and just read," she explains over the phone from New York. She especially identified with Louisa May Alcott’s stand-in, Jo March. But not with Jo the writer — rather, with Jo the director of "penny dreadful" melodramas. "Little Women appealed to me immensely because my friends and I also used to put on plays — on the fire escapes."

Years later, plenty of adaptations of the 1868 classic about New England sisterhood had come across her desk, but something was always missing. Then came a musical, of all things. And it worked. "This version had the emotional highlights of the books — the things you can sing about."

Little Women opened on Broadway a year ago; This Tuesday it comes to the Opera House with original star Maureen McGovern as Marmee. McGovern has been attached to the

Squeeze Box, the performance piece by Ann Randolph that Lowell’s Merrimack Repertory Company has imported from New York (through January 22), is a rambling, sentimental memoir in which Ann, a young woman who works with alcoholics and schizophrenics at a shelter and feels her life is at a standstill, comes to accept that the work she’s doing is worthwhile and defines her. At least, that’s the stated message of the play. But Randolph’s program note, which addresses the way in which the play came out of "a crisis of faith in myself and in my work," focuses mostly on her dream of "sharing my story that waited to so long to be told" with midtown Manhattan audiences, and on the role Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft played in helping her to achieve that goal. So the real story of Squeeze Box is not Randolph’s epiphany at the shelter (she quits her low-paid, unglamorous job and then is stirred by a conversation with one of the women there to return to it — and own up to her musician boyfriend that she is