The New Group, celebrating its 30th anniversary this spring, may not be so new anymore, but that doesn’t mean they have forgotten how to rock. Indeed, their latest production, a pop musical called The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, is nothing if not a Gen Z shout-out to teenage angst. With his music and lyrics, Michael Breslin delivers a handful of clever, hard-driving songs into the hands of a capable company of young performers. Unfortunately, Breslin’s book, co-written with Patrick Foley, has all the charm of an undisciplined child.

Just ahead of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Ireland’s Once Off Productions has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with The United States vs Ulysses, the frisky entertainment now playing at the Irish Arts Center. Written by journalist/dramatist Colin Murphy, the play is intricately researched yet undidactic. Featuring a six-member cast from Ireland directed by Conall Morrison, it’s an imaginative, fresh-mouthed account of one of literary modernism’s most significant legal confrontations.

In Robert Leverett’s We Do the Same Thing Every Week, Dick (Leverett himself) and Jane (Jessica Nesi), the famous elementary schoolbook characters, are visited on a rainy Sunday afternoon by a strange, humanoid Cat (Casey Worthington) that is going to help them have fun—whether they want it or not.

The October 1981 issue of Vogue magazine features Nastassia Kinski on the cover and includes the infamous Richard Avedon two-page photo spread of the actress wearing nothing but a huge, writhing boa constrictor. But in the alternate reality of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s vitriolic new comedy, Five Models in Ruins, 1981, that October issue very nearly comes to feature a much lesser-known cover girl, and the accompanying story would showcase not a serpent, but five decidedly catty women in flowing white gowns.

Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water, like the dramatist himself, is charming and effervescent. Also like Haddad, it’s slender (though that word has different connotations when applied to the human form and to an Off-Broadway play).

The Mistake is a gripping and powerful examination of the decisions that went into the development of the atomic bomb and its initial deployment on Hiroshima. Written by cast member Michael Mears and directed by Rosamunde Hutt, the play is an unflinching look at the emotional and physical destruction of scientific breakthroughs when they are used to stop a war, as told by the inventor of the nuclear chain reaction, Leo Szilard.