Certainly Henley’s three sisters have their idiosyncrasies. Lenny has turned herself into an old maid because of what she calls a shrunken ovary. Meg has gone off seeking fame and fortune in  Hollywood and wound up clerking in a dog-food factory. Babe has just shot her fancy-lawyer husband in the stomach, and the only reason she’ll give is she “just didn’t like his looks.”

Still, Henley’s play is more than southern gothic because her MaGrath sisters are real people, with real foibles and real fears. And it’s when producer Beth Marshall’s revival gets to the heart of those characters that it comes off the best.

The play gets a handsome setting at the Garden Theatre in Winter Garden, where Tom Mangieri’s kitchen set is just homely enough and John Valines’ country music has just the right touch of brass. That brass may have seeped into Marshall’s performance as the MaGraths’ shameless cousin Chick, a woman who talks about her high-toned upbringing while she’s adjusting her underwear.

But Chick is the only larger-than-life character in a household where sadness rules — in Jennifer Bonner’s frank, sexy, disappointed Meg; in Britni Leslie’s dim, pretty Babe, a woman who’s all at sea; and most of all in Meggin Weaver’s anxious, endearing Lenny, a tender woman whose every emotion flickers across her face.

Leslie can be shrill, and not as quirky or otherworldly as others who have played that part. But the sorrow that has shaped the MaGraths shows itself in the minor characters, too — in Jason Horne’s sweetly serious Barnette Lloyd, Babe’s adoring lawyer, and in William Hagaman’s down-home Doc Porter, a onetime suitor of Meg’s with quiet mischief in his eye.

The show’s accents are all over the place, and the two intermissions are one too many. But Tawari and her cast members show a lovely sensitivity to a story that would be heartbreaking if it weren’t very, very funny. You don’t have to be having a real bad day to see the MaGrath women as sisters under the skin.

Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426. Read her Arts & Letters blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/artsandletters.

Theater review
‘Crimes of the Heart’
What: Beth Marshall Presents production of Beth Henley comedy.
Where: Garden Theatre, 160 W. Plant St., Winter Garden.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 29.
Cost: $$18 and $22 general, $18 seniors and students.
Call: 407-877-4736.
Online: Gardentheatre.org.

That’s a lot to fit into a little play, and at Mad Cow Theatre Love Song sometimes shows the strain. But its gentle nature draws you to its side.

In Love Song, a disturbed young man named Beane lives alone in a nearly empty room, where he imagines, all too clearly, the walls closing in. His sister Joan, a brittle executive, has problems of her own — employee woes, an edgy relationship with her sardonic husband Harry.

Then an intruder bursts into Beane’s life, and everything turns upside down. She’s a burglar, it seems, but also a gorgeous young woman, and suddenly Beane is giddy, beside himself, as wound up in ecstasy as he was a day earlier in hurt.

Not all is as it seems, but the set-up grabs you. Joshua Geoghagan’s Beane is a head case but an engaging one: His mind is always racing, but there’s a sweetness about him that makes you take him to your heart. He shares his wired nature with Joan (Lauren Maleski), and Maleski beautifully plays the transition from thick-skinned exec to concerned big sis.

In turn, she has a terrific rapport with Christian Kelty’s Harry, a laid-back guy with a big heart and a crafty humor: His lovemaking scene with Maleski is a stitch. And Alexis Jackson is nicely fierce as Molly, the intruder, although she becomes less provocative after she falls for her victim.

Director Michael Marinaccio allows the play to falter a bit when things get precious midway through. But there’s real pain here, and real gladness, and the kind of familial love that theater often ignores. Some may think that Love Song could use a reality check. In fact, there’s more reality here than meets the eye.

‘Love Song’
What: Mad Cow Theatre production of John Kolvenbach drama.
Where: Mad Cow Theatre, 105 S. Magnolia Ave., Orlando.
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 25 (also, 8 p.m. Oct. 21).
Cost: $22 general, $20 seniors and students, $15 (or pay what you will – call box office for details) Oct. 21.
Call: 407-297-8788 Ext. 1.
Online: madcowtheatre.com.

Photos: Top, Alexis Jackson and Joshua Geoghagan. Bottom, Lauren Maleski and Christian Kelty. Photos by Tom Hurst/Mad Cow Theatre.

There was Mary Martin, indelible in South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

Then there was Shirley Jones. The 19-year-old recent arrival to New York was in the chorus of South Pacific when she was chosen by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for the movie adaptation of Oklahoma!

Jones and her son, Patrick Cassidy, along with Broadway stars (and real-life couple) Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley, will perform My Favorite Things: A Tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein this weekend at the Colorado Festival of World Theatre in Colorado Springs.

Most actors of the time were signed to a movie studio; Jones was put under contract to two men.

“I was the one and only, first and last person under personal contract to Rod gers and Hammerstein,” she said recently by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

“I was never under contract to a studio, ever. This all happened within a year, less than a year of my very first audition for them. I guess from that time, they were just preparing for the film ofOklahoma!”

Her memories make a snapshot of theater and Hollywood history, particularly of Rodgers, known for coming on to his actresses.

“Richard Rodgers was very sort of anti-Hollywood. He didn’t like films. He was afraid of what they would do with their (work).

“Dick was kind of a ladies’ man, a well-known one. I’m not telling tales out of school. His daughter, Mary Rodgers, she says the same thing. But he was a super-talented man. His music was the most important thing in his life.

“Every week that man would come in backstage, play the piano and call the entire cast in to go through his show, once a week. And any time a show went out on the road, he would rehearse the orchestra at least for a week.

“What he didn’t want a singer to do, he didn’t want their own phrasing. He wanted it phrased the way he had written it.”

Over seven years, Jones starred in three classic movie musicals: Oklahoma! in 1955, Carousel in 1956 and The Music Man in 1962. The roles were so indelible that for a time no one would hire her.

“They stopped making musical motion pictures, and as far as Hollywood was concerned, my career was over,” she said. “They always thought if you were a singer, you couldn’t act, which I never understood. Naturally, you’re acting in a musical as well.

“So my career was finished, and after I did Carousel, I decided I was going to have to do something if I was going to have a career.”

She went into television, doing such theater-based shows as Playhouse 90. Her agent was against it.

“The agent said, ‘You’re a movie star.’ Well, I wasn’t working, let’s face it.”

What saved her career (shortly before The Music Man) was her Oscar-winning role as a prostitute in 1960′sElmer Gantry.

“I did 20 motion pictures after the Oscar. I had a whole new career.”

For one generation, that career consisted of The Partridge Family, on which she starred for four years with her stepson, David Cassidy.

Now, Jones, 74, is coming to Colorado Springs with her younger son, Patrick, for the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute. They first performed together four years ago on Broadway in 42nd Street.

“I do a lot of the introductions of the things that we’re going to sing,” she said of the tribute. “But this dialogue with the four of us, it’s hysterical. It’s a husband and a wife arguing with each other and a mother and a son arguing with each other.”

And more than 50 years after her Oklahoma! debut, Shirley Jones can still hit the high notes.

“I was just vocalizing when you called,” she said.

“The only problem I ever have now is the middle range. I can sing low great, I can sing high still great, but the middle range is weaker because I am a soprano and apparently this is what happens with a soprano.”

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

My Favorite Things A Tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein

* When and where: 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday, Pikes Peak Center, 190 S. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs

* Cost: $20 to $67

* Conversation with the cast of My Favorite Things: 10 a.m. brunch, 11:30 a.m. presentation Sunday, Pikes Peak Center, $20 (no brunch) to $50 (brunch).

* Information: 866-464-2626

* Above, from top, Shirley Jones in Oklahoma, The Music Man, Carousel and The Partridge Family.