To say that A Midsummer Night’s Dream kicked off the festival marvelously is an understatement along the lines of saying that the NSA has a vague idea of your calling and Internet browsing habits.

After a winter spent rearranging house, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is ready to defend its position as cultural and educational touchstone. The 2013 edition has sprinted ahead of expectations and appears on tap for a successful start to the season. It may not be a make-or-break year, but plenty of eyes will be on the CSF as it unfurls its latest repertoire.

Claire Patton and Lucia Rich, both wearing all-black clothes for the evening’s rehearsal, are sitting in a studio space in a structure outside a North Boulder home, trying to explain what “physical theater” means.

In fact, it amuses me to no end that some of the material on their website (particularly the description of Penumbra in the Garden of Twilight’s Cucumbers, the fictional play they’d intended to produce before settling on Delirium Tremens) and in the program so far exceeds in cleverness and craft the dialogue in Delirium Tremens itself.

After the rather lackluster The Other Place, the usually metronomically reliable Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) comes back strong with Bach at Leipzig. If you enjoyed the movie Amadeus — and if you haven’t seen that film I can’t recommend it enough — you’ll revel in this jaunty, cheeky, fictionalized look at the cutthroat competition to assume one of the highest posts in the rarified world of music in Germany circa 1722.

For troupes like Playback Theatre West, audience participation isn’t about who can shout their ridiculous word loudest. Audience members are instead invited to share personal stories for actors to interpret on stage.

Even if you are a Dawkins-lovin’, God-mockin’, card-carryin’ atheist, the odds are that during your youth you spent some time in and around a church or synagogue.

A date takes a wrong turn and ends up in an orgy; someone spontaneously kisses a cab driver with irresistible eyes; McDonald’s serves as the backdrop for a break up; a guy decides he’d rather stay single than fall in love with a girl named Aphrodite.

To quote Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype.” To paraphrase the Dead Milkmen, I’m not saying that The Other Place isn’t a good play. It’s a fine play, an all-American play full of good, upstanding people.

A few days before her African dance class presentation, University of Colorado Boulder student Jessie DePasquale’s dance partner said she wouldn’t be there.