Mini Reviews

-- P.M.

* THE ELEPHANT MAN

(At Olney Theatre Center through Sunday)

I n many respects, this is the same effectively dark, focused production staged at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop by the Catalyst Theater Company in 2004. Director Jim Petosa is back, as are five of the six actors, with the lone new player deepening the show considerably. The historical figure referred to in the title is the famously deformed John Merrick, a Victorian Englishman who evolved from a back-alley freak-show attraction to a curio of mainstream society. Scott Fortier's turn as Merrick is as compelling as before, and Valerie Leonard, James Slaughter, James Konicek, John Dow and Barbara Pinolini are back as the strong ensemble. Christopher Lane joins the cast as Merrick's doctor, Frederick Treves. As Pomerance's indictment takes shape, it's Treves who delineates the contours. L ane brings enough inner turbulence to do the show justice, making this "Elephant Man" not just bigger, but better.

-- N.P.

* FAUST

(By Synetic Theatre at the Kennedy Center through Sunday)

It's no picnic being Dr. Faust, but in the naughtily fertile imaginations of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, at least it's an orgy. The temperature rises in the team's adaptation of the legend of the man who sells his soul to Satan. What you get is Goethe by way of the Playboy Channel, in which a gym-built Faust (Greg Marzullo) partakes steamily of the flesh served to him on a Mephistophelean platter. Director Paata Tsikurishvili has the notion that the bargain Faust strikes propels him into a punk-bar demimonde, populated by attractive young dancing demons and presided over by a leather-clad Satan (Dan Istrate). Marzullo and Irina Tsikurishvili make for supple house dancers, and Istrate reveals himself to be a fine, slithery major domo. At the Club Beelzebub they create, hellish is not a bad way to feel.

-- P.M.