Mini Reviews

-- P.M.

* EDWARD II

(At Shakespeare Theatre -- Sidney Harman Hall through Jan. 6)

Among the sad stories of the death of kings, few come to a more gruesome finish than Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II," the tale of a monarch who falls savagely from grace after falling desperately for a man. The play is an Elizabethan curiosity, a work unfolding around an overt homosexual relationship in the English court. And though director Gale Edwards cannot resist indulging at times in a bit of campiness, her seductive treatment persuasively pumps up the love story, turning the dramatist's contribution to the newborn genre of English history play into an elegant document of gay martyrdom. Her decision to shift the setting to the 1920s -- Edward II ruled in the early 1300s -- not only gives the costume designer, Murell Horton, an excuse to deck the dandies out in Jazz Age finery, it also links up niftily to the undoing of another love-struck Edward, who abdicated the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry an American, Wallis Simpson, as the Duke of Windsor.

-- P.M.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

(At Olney Theatre Center through Jan. 6)

John Vreeke's robust, deeply serious production is boldly sung and athletically danced, and although there are flaws enough to keep it from being really thrilling, this "Fiddler" is one of the Olney's best recent forays into musical theater. The sheer vitality of the piece is indomitable, even if Vreeke's staging has a darker dramatic lining than "Fiddler" often gets. A certain amount of darkness, of course, comes with "Fiddler," the beloved 1964 musical based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. The setting is 1905 Russia, and while the tale deals with evolving traditions as the beleaguered dairyman Tevye's daughters get married without his help, larger issues lurk as a pogrom is threatened.

-- N.P.