Be warned: There most certainly will be hugging among strangers at Playhouse Square. And random acts of kindness will likely break out as well.

Mario Mendoza, a lifetime .215 hitter during his Major League Baseball career, is best known for being the source of the name of the threshold for batting ineptitude: the “Mendoza Line.”

Three things become abundantly clear while watching Mercury Theater Company’s production of “Chaplin,” the 2012 bio-musical about the creator of the Tramp and his epic rise and dramatic fall in silent film-era Hollywood.

In Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners “Private Lives,” music plays a crucial role when the brilliant dialogue cannot carry all the emotional weight of the storytelling. So much so that one of the characters casually remarks: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Shakespeare believed that all the world’s a stage, but only Edinburgh, Adelaide, Prague and a dozen or so other world cities offer international theater and fringe festivals. Add Cleveland to that list.

Earlier this year, there was an utterly charmless revival of “Man of La Mancha” in London’s West End that was set in modern day surroundings and featured in the title role an unpersuasive actor — Kelsey Grammer — who is famous for things other than musical theater.

Epic. That’s how the $10 million musical “Ragtime” was promoted and critiqued when it arrived on Broadway in 1998.

The sobbing you hear underscoring the production of “Dear Evan Hansen” – currently on tour and on stage at Playhouse Square after being recognized as the best musical on Broadway in 2017 – is coming from both sides of the proscenium. It is the sound of actors lost in their astoundingly hones…

The question to ask theatergoers these days is not “have you seen ‘Mamma Mia!,” but “how many times?”

In 1949, love was legislated in South Africa.

“Nothing will come of nothing,” says Lear, the elderly king of England, when his favorite daughter refuses to dote on him the way her opportunistic, two-faced older sisters do. And so, upon the honorable but undemonstrative Cordelia’s disinheritance and exile, Lear’s great tragedy – triggere…