The choreographer wants to see the finale one more time, so the performers launch into it with everything they’ve got, sliding across the stage on their knees, doing lifts and splits, cartwheels and backflips, kicking heels in the air and thrusting arms high. The moves are beautifully in sync, the dance flowing smoothly from one routine to the next. These dancers have got it going on, and even though this is a rehearsal still two weeks from opening, they deliver that explosion of music, motion, and exuberance that brings a crowd at a Broadway show to its feet, cheering.

Did I mention these are high school and college kids?

Well, they are, the freshman class of Summer Stock Austin, a new educational venture that gives young performers with serious aspirations for a theatre career a chance to develop their craft in the old-school environment of a stock company. That means putting together a couple of shows with every member of the company working on every aspect of the production: performance, design, construction of sets and costumes, and assisting with, well, anything that needs to be done. It’s a training ground not seen much anymore, but Ginger Morris and Michael McKelvey, the masterminds behind Summer Stock Austin, know how valuable it can be in rounding out young artists’ stage skills and heightening their appreciation of everything that goes into bringing a play to life. So they set about to make it happen here, drawing on their many connections to local cultural and educational institutions, as well as pros in the biz, for space and resources. The resulting partnership of St. Edward’s University, the Zilker Summer Musical, and the Austin Shakespeare Festival has enabled 40 performers from more than 13 area high schools and the St. Ed’s Theatre and Music departments to work on a Shakespearean comedy and a Broadway musical. For three weeks, the kids have been putting in full days at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, spending their mornings rehearsing Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, directed by ASF Education Director Marc Scipione, and their afternoons on Footloose, the 1998 Broadway version of the Kevin Bacon film, with McKelvey and Morris co-directing and Broadway veteran Robin Lewis choreographing. Now, they’re ready to show off what they’ve learned with a two-week run of those shows in rotating repertory. If you’re speculating on the future of theatre, this is stock worth investing in.

Don’t worry. There’s good music.

Summer Stock Austin casts its performers from the theatre program at St. Edward’s, other universities, and area high schools, and these student-actors create work that ranks a cut above what most performers at that level can manage. As the title character, Jacob Trussell more than holds his own as the demon barber who slits the throats of his customers and allows his downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Lovett (a wildly exuberant Kathleen Fletcher), to cook and serve the evidence in the form of hot-selling meat pies.

Turns out, it’s all for justice. Years ago, the Honorable Judge Turpin (Aaron Moten) took a fancy to Sweeney Todd’s wife and sent Todd to a penal colony in Australia on trumped-up charges. In Todd’s absence, his wife disappeared, and the judge chose to raise Todd’s daughter, Johanna (Mikayla Agrella), as his ward. Now Todd has escaped back to London, where he sets up his murderous parlor. As events unfold, the few characters with any innocence left gradually join the ranks of the corrupted. Witnessing their story is like observing a dissection in a Victorian medical amphitheatre.

The hot-and-heavy atmosphere may not have been intentional. Opening night of Sweeney Toddsaw a bad mic placement on the part of the leading man. For almost the entire 2½-hour performance, the whoosh, whoosh of Trussell’s breathing could be heard amplified into the theatre. It’s an absurdly easy problem to fix, and who knows why nobody thought to mention it to him at intermission. Hopefully, someone has addressed the issue since opening night. Meanwhile, my experience of the play must be imagined as background to the loudest nasal whistle you’ve ever heard.

It’s this lack of production support that bruises an otherwise decent show. The design, too, falls short of supporting the actors’ work. The three-story towers of scaffolding making up the set (designed by Joe Carpenter) evoke the claustrophobic, looming feel of Victorian London, but unfortunately, actors kept winding up in the dark. Typically that’s the fault of the actor who can’t find his or her light, but in this case, there isn’t much light for them to find. When Anthony Hope (Ben Mayne) and Johanna sing their love for each other across three stories of a house, one can’t help wondering what the attraction is when they can’t even see each other’s faces.

Barring the slip-ups and concepts that didn’t connect, this Sweeney Todd is a good live production to see on the tails of the 2007 film. It’s gross, it’s violent, and it’s as delicious as one of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies.

“Heil myself!” crows the ersatz Adolf, and under the little black postage-stamp ‘stache glued to his upper lip is the show-biz smirk of an actor reveling in his star turn in the spotlight.

As he giddily throws his arm up in self-salute, down the staircase behind this faux Führer stride showgirls crowned with outsized pretzels and bratwurst, and one who sports on each breast a swastika.

Need it be said? You don’t turn to The Producers for subtlety. No, Mel Brooks pretty much annihilated anything resembling nuance in this send-up of the Broadway stage. In their place he packed every broad stereotype, cheap gag, and over-the-top, beyond-the-pale satirical jab he could to comically savage everyone from the egotistical directors of the Great White Way to a certain tin-pot tyrant of the Teutons. What you turn to The Producers for is laughs – big, loud, bottom-of-the-belly laughs drawn from the flamboyance, vanity, desperation for attention, and histrionics of those who live by the boards and die by the boards.

And when you see Summer Stock Austin’s staging of “Springtime for Hitler,” the outrageous signature number from the 1968 film made more outrageous in the 2001 stage musical, that’s what you get. The chorus line of tap-dancing goose-steppers, the showgirls fresh from a Berchtesgaden beer hall, the Busby Berkeley-style twirling human swastika – they provoke guffaws because director-choreographer Ginger Morris (with an assist by guest tap choreographer Scott Thompson) and her young performers serve every inanity with enthusiasm and a flair for the ridiculous. That’s especially true of Tyler Mount, anchoring the number as the beaming, self-satisfied Hitler – or rather, as the character Roger DeBris playing Hitler, for it’s that fabulously swishy director’s drama-queenliness that informs the portrayal of this song ‘n’ dance dictator. Taking his cue from Garland at Carnegie, Mount oozes enough show-bizzy brass and “I love me in this!” narcissism to make his “German Ethel Merman” at once deliriously entertaining and the theatrical catastrophe that it’s intended to be.

Yes this Third Reich romp was conceived to be a total disaster so its producers could shutter it after one show and pocket the millions they’d raised for a run – a scheme that fails as spectacularly as they wanted their Nazi musical to. As those titular producers – Broadway flopmeister Max Bialystock and timorous accountant Leo Bloom – Trevor McGinnis and Zach Green exude a disarming desperation. McGinnis’ Max is in a state of perpetual scramble, flop sweat pasting his hair to the brow that covers his brain, which is feverishly cooking up a new scam every minute. By contrast, Green’s Leo is all but frozen in fear much of the time, his mouth in the wide wail of one who knows he’s about to be caught. As losers, they’re very winning, and they play off the play’s other zanies – Addison Billingsley’s cheerfully bonkers Franz, Aline Mayagoitia’s showstopping Swedish bombshell Ulla, Mount’s DeBris, and Coy Branscum’s even swishier Carmen Ghia – with a comic facility that belies their young years.

Paul Davis’ set may be rickety enough to be a bit distracting, and Benjamin Taylor Ridgeway may not have been able to stretch his costume budget all the way across the cast, but those elements also underscore Summer Stock Austin’s status as a training program, and the proof of its success is in the performances. Where The Producers is concerned, they show a knack for laughs that a comedy old-timer would kill for.

Whenever the topic of time is broached in front of Toad, which happens repeatedly in the year we observe this peevish amphibian and his more mellow friend Frog, he may be counted on to say testily that his clock is broken. You can set your watch by it.

That Frog suffers these persistent complaints with the patience of a saint, never mentioning that the clock was broken by Toad himself in a fit of temper, is a measure of his devotion to his irascible friend. And for all his flashes of ill humor, Toad has a deep and abiding affection for Frog, for whom he will make sacrifices of his own. And that, dear reader, is the tender heart and generous soul of A Year With Frog and Toad, the musical adapted from the books by Arnold Lobel. It is about a friendship that endures, weathering all seasons.

We meet our heroes in the spring, when Toad, none too eager to be roused from winter hibernation, smashes that unfortunate clock and rolls over for another month’s nap. But that won’t deter Frog, who’s intent on his friend rising to savor the season of new life. Their adventures through spring, summer, and fall are mild by the standards of drama – the two overindulging in a freshly baked batch of cookies, Toad being teased by his woodland neighbors during a swim at the pond, Frog taking some alone time, each secretly raking the other’s yard as an act of kindness, the two flying a kite and sledding down a snowy hill together – but they’re animated by a gentle humor and Robert and Willie Reale’s lively and appealingly old-fashioned musical numbers, which wouldn’t sound out of place on a vaudeville stage or a 1940s radio show. Toad and Frog have the broadly sketched personalities of an old-school vaudeville team, and they’re just as predictable – but therein lies their charm. We know that Toad will always be irritated about or overreact to something and that Frog will always settle him down, and we enjoy seeing that played out again and again, especially when it’s done as appealingly as Ryan Borses and Zach Dailey do it in Summer Stock Austin’s production. Borses captures Lobel’s Toad to a T, his eyes narrowing in skepticism at the suggestion of something playful, his lips launching forth a plaintive “Blaah!” when he’s cranky. He’s neurotic and bossy and yet not abrasively so; Borses nurtures an air of vulnerability about him that leaves you feeling almost as protective of him as Frog does. And as embodied by Dailey, Frog is the picture of the constant friend, unwavering as an oak, with a serenity about him like the surface of a pond on a windless day.

During the year, we see only one serious rift between the pair, with Toad leaving Frog in a huff, but it’s quickly smoothed over as soon as Toad receives a letter mailed by Frog months earlier. (Its protracted delivery by Snail is a running gag – make that creeping gag – in the show, one sold with delightful enthusiasm by Eric Meo.) Frog has expressed again how much he values Toad’s friendship, and by the time Frog arrives at Toad’s for Christmas Eve dinner – can you guess what Frog’s gift to Toad might be? – we have the feeling of a friendship that can’t be shaken and will last these two a lifetime.

That kind of friendship – trustworthy, steadfast, forgiving – may sound as old-fashioned to some as the Reales’ songs, a virtue of times past. But Lobel’s books tell a different story, and the way that director Michael McKelvey and his engaging young cast have realized them here, with sweetness and verve and heart, make it clear: True friendship never goes out of season.

The show is directed by Michael McKelvey, who has directed every musical in Austin over the last few years. (He hasn’t, but it often seems that way, so prolific has he been.) Good thing, too, as McKelvey has become an expert at getting not just the best, but the most he can out of any individual performer. Here McKelvey takes a group of high school and college students and, with the help of choreographers Danny Herman and Rocker Verastique and accompanist and conductor Jason Connor, has them dancing and singing at such a high level that you’ll be astounded.

While McKelvey and his crew, including set designer Paul Davis and costume designer Glenda Barnes, deserve much credit for this very fully realized tale, the actors have to execute, and execute they do. They recognize and buy into the idea that they are in a self-referential, Brechtian musical comedy that strays into satire and fable and environmental philosophy, and their performances are broad, melodramatic, wonderfully comedic, and entirely supportive of the material. From Tyler King’s upright Officer Lockstock to Nick Catoire’s heroic Bobby Strong, from Mikayla Agrella’s idealistic Hope Cladwell to Sophia Franzella’s plucky Little Sally, there are more fine performances than you can count on one hand.

Before the show, McKelvey holds a live auction of items donated by local businesses, all proceeds supporting the Summer Stock company. More than once he said, “Come on, do it for the kids!” As regards your attendance at this, their latest production, you’d be wise to take his advice.