Falcon...Comedy...gulp?

The just announced 2008-09 Falcon Season will include -- better be sitting down -- FIVE COMEDIES! Yes, positively shocking that the theater run by Garry Marshall should tab its season "Bringin' the Funny," but there you have it.

I don't mean to wax sarcastic, really I don't. It's just that comedy is what the Falcon always does. I've dogged some of the company's fluffier works, and bemoaned the lack of a "Cobb" or "Groovaloo" which were part of the Toluca Lake theater's early subscription season. Maybe drama doesn't sell. Truth be told, though, I suppose the Falcon programs what it thinks it does best. So who's to quibble.

No Falcon season is complete without a Troubadour Theater Co. visit. Or, in this case, two. The aforeblog-predicted "As U2 Like it" Plays Aug. 14 to Sept. 13, presumably slipping into rep with the Troubies' summer show, "Alice in One Hit Wonderland II: Through the Looking Glass." I might get tiffed over the fact that their holiday show is a bring-back were it not for the fact that "It's a Stevie Wonder-Ful Life" (Dec. 12-Jan. 4, 09) was one of their funniest.

"An Act of Love" playwright David Lanberg is back with a world premiere called "Surviving Sex" (sounds funny, doesn't it?). That's Feb. 6-March 1, 09. And Marshall himself has a new play, "Everybody Say 'Cheese!'" synopsized thusly: "Harriet Keenan decides it's time to join the women's movement before it stops moving. But her liberation requires the help of her husband, Leo, whose greatest ambition in life is to die before something happens to him." That's March 20-April 11.

I didn't expect "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" to come back to a major Southland house. Not after it came to the Geffen Playhouse some seven years ago with David Hyde Pierce and Uta Hagen in one of her last roles as an old lady who takes dance lessons from a prickly hoofer, but here it is, back for another, er spin, at the Falcon: Oct. 31 to Nov. 23. (Jeez do they really open on Halloween?).

(818) 955-8101, www.FalconTheatre.com for more info.