Live theater fans have a smorgasbord of a week ahead with no fewer than four plays opening:

• A cliffhanger adapted from the original stage play of “Dial M for Murder”

• A clown car full of actors who keep trying to put on “Murder at Haversham” Manor while the stage set sabotages them and their “corpse” refuses to die

• “Don Pasquale” and “Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” focusing on two men who feel they’re entitled to female consortium after they’ve passed their own sell-by dates, and who have no clue about what a boiling pot they’re jumping into.

The only question: Which one shall we see first?

Opera Naples: ‘Don Pasquale’

There are only two chances to see Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera, ‘Don Pasquale,’ and they’re both this weekend. Count on physical comedy, gorgeous music and a wry sense of humor in a story as easily found in Naples, Florida, as it was in mid-18th century Italy.

The Don is tired of waiting for his nephew Ernesto to marry, despite the fact his demands are unfair — he’ll only accept a woman of Ernesto’s own class, rather than Norina, the young man’s true love. The impatient Pasquale decides to take preserving the family lineage into his own hands.

His friend, Dr. Malatesta, sees the folly of it and plots with Ernesto to pass off Norina as Malatesta’s own pure-as-driven-snow, just-departed- the-convent sister. But the only time Pasquale will get close to her is when they sign what he thinks are matrimonial papers. Then the new Mrs. Pasquale becomes Wifezilla.

There are out-loud laughs for the audience, but it’s an opera with a long list of challenges. Check off that list: communication. Maria Zouves, who is directing, is a veteran of international opera productions. She knows how to work with this cast from the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation Opera Naples Academy, with some singers for whom English is a second language.

A little tougher on the list: stamina. Because they have enough academy members, the opera is double-cast, and that wealth of talent means double the rehearsals for all the creatives in the background.

The toughest part? “I think the biggest challenge with this particular piece is that it’s a comedy,” Zouves said. “Comedy is so much harder to do. It is a style of music where there’s a lot of repetition but a lot of different voices and different comedic things going on at once.

“And unlike a comedic play, there isn’t one voice in each moment. The voices are all happening,” she added. Don Pasquale and Ernesto, then Pasquale and Malatesta — everyone is vocalizing their thoughts in rapid-patter music. (English speakers needn’t worry; there are su-pertitles.)

Donizetti works have another cast member to accommodate: the orchestra.

“The orchestra is another character. The orchestra sets the mood. Many times this ‘character’ comments on what the singers are singing,” added Opera Naples Artistic Director Ramón Tebar. “There are so many colors that are supporting, sometimes even contradicting. Donizetti has this crispiness that makes this opera especially exciting.”

The Academy’s students have been working solely on ‘Don Pasquale’ for the last two weeks, building up their stamina, focusing their concentration on staying in character.

“That’s the purpose of this academy — to give them not only the opportunity to sing it from top to bottom, but also with an orchestra,” Tebar said. It’s one thing, he explained, to sing it with a piano, which may be following their lead, and quite another to sing with an orchestra, which is setting its own tempo.

“They’ve got to be looking at the audience and looking at the conductor,” he said.

Several of these academy students have another big date this weekend: They are singing in the inaugural joint Luciano Pavarotti Foundation Opera Naples vocal competition Saturday at FGCU. Four winners will take away a guarantee of at least $10,000 in contracts.

When: 7 p.m. Jan. 17 and 2 p.m. Jan. 19 for Don Pasquale; 2 p.m. Jan. 18 for the competition

Where: Wang Opera Center, 2409 Linwood Ave., Naples, for Don Pasquale; U. Tobe Recital Hall, FGCU, 10501 FGCU Blvd., Fort Myers, for competition finals

Tickets: $39-$119 for ‘Don Pasquale’; $35 for the competition finals. operanaples.org or 239.963.9050

Naples Players: ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’

Looking artless is an art. As with their operatic counterpoints at Opera Naples, The Naples Players are working double-time to make all the pratfalls and stunts in ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ look natural.

In this case, that is building contraptions — some 23 of them, by set builder/actor Mike Santos’ count — that can fall, explode, flip and grab on command. One example: its carefully crafted grandfather clock.

“We had to make it big enough for people to fit inside but light enough that people could move it around,” Santos explained.

There are swordfights, a wrestling match between its two women and a corpse that simply can’t stay dead; even the technical director ends up playing a role after one actor is knocked unconscious. Bryce Alexander, CEO and artistic director for The Naples Players, is directing the show, and he echoed Tebar’s observation about the extension of characters beyond the humans onstage.

“The set and the props are characters themselves for this particular show. There is not a point in the two-hour performance where every motion that you have with a set or a prop isn’t carefully choreographed,” he said. “And yet, it needs to feel like it’s all fresh and never happened before.

“It’s a real technical challenge for the actors, because they can’t be living in their heads the whole time thinking about the prop. They have to be living and acting the story.”

Further, he said, the actors in this show must be ready with Plan B: What if those floorboards don’t flip up in your face? What if the chandelier doesn’t fall?

Even further, all those actors are playing double roles: They’re a theater troupe, with its own quirky personalities and shortcomings, trying to put on a play. Each actor has to be a character in the theater troupe, as well as a character in the troupe’s disaster-prone production.

Tina Moroni, who plays the drama queen Florence Colleymoore within the play and the diva Sandra Wilkinson as its troupe member, is a former ballerina. It’s an asset in her role: “You must be in the exact spot in the exact second,” she emphasized.

By at least one account, they’re succeeding. When two of the women in the cast, on cue, started slugging it out and shouting at each other, Theo, the Naples Players’ informal therapy dog, ran out on stage to see if he could console anyone.

When: Various times Wednesdays- Saturdays through Feb. 16

Where: Kizzie Theatre at the Sugden, 701 Fifth Ave. S., Naples

Tickets: $50-$55 at naplesplayers. org or 239.263.7990

Arts Center Theatre: ‘Last of the Red Hot Lovers’

Cheryl Duggan woke up in the middle of the night thinking about copper Jell-O molds. A good play can do that to you.

Duggan is the director of Arts Center Theatre’s production of the Neil Simon comedy ‘Last of the Red Hot Lovers,’ which opened last weekend on Marco Island. It’s a play she’s wanted to direct for some 20 years, and she wasn’t going to leave one detail unattended.

When a pass-through window on the set looked bare, Duggan puzzled over it for days until the Jell-O mold inspiration came. Then she reached out to relatives in her native Minnesota, who were able to find a set and ship them to her two-day express, all on her dime.

“I spent a fortune having them sent to me. I don’t care how much it cost. I wanted it right,” she said.

While Duggan professes to love all Neil Simon plays, Red Hot Lovers is a personal favorite.

“This one is a little more sophisticated. Everyone needs a happy ending, but in this one it’s about the moral compass going true north,” she said. “And it has humor, but says things that make you think.”

The short-form plot sums up as a mid-life crisis that detonates on its owner. Barney Cashman, played by veteran Mitch Frank (“Bus Stop” and “Slow Food” with The Studio Players), who determines to inject some zest into his colorless life by joining the sexual revolution of the ’70s.

“The whole point of this thing from very beginning is not make the audience hate him,” Duggan said of Barney. Barney is a vulnerable nebbish who hasn’t learned how to manufacture his own excitement, and it’s clear to his conquests.

“It’s demanding of a cast that has the right kookiness, repressiveness and audaciousness in the three women he tries to cavort with,” Duggan added. And she feels she has the trifecta in hers:

• Elaine (Christi Sadiq), a Mafia babe with hair like a funeral spray and leopard couture

• Bobbi Michele (Dixie Huey), a now-generation chick in wavy patterns and mismatched colors who carries weed in her purse for occasions like this

• Jeanette Fisher (Betsy Greenblatt), the perpetually depressed wife of Barney’s best friend who looks as if she needs some excitement, too “I costumed it for the ’70s. A lot of this is my personal stock,” said Duggan. And the Jell-O molds?

“Every time the arts center has something they need a dish for, I’ll be bringing Jell-O,” she warned.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Jan. 26

Where: Arts Center Theatre, Marco Town Center, 1089 N. Collier Blvd., Marco Island

Tickets: $40. marcoislandart.org or 239.784.1186

Gulfshore Playhouse: ‘Dial M for Murder’

Most contemporary dramas have a time-stamp set by their use of phones. Those that require one reposing on the living room end table can’t be staged as newer than 1990. ‘Dial M for Murder,’ a thriller touched off by a late-night phone call, is onwe of those.

Plays can also be boxed in by their Hollywood treatments, and this one doubtlessly has readers who think of Grace Kelly, Ray Milland and Robert Cummings the moment they hear the title. Add to that Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the popular film version.

What most theatergoers don’t know is that ‘Dial M’ was born as a 1952 British stage play, and Jeffrey Hatcher has taken it back to its roots, with some surprises stirred in. Among them is a change of career: The larcenous Tony Wendice is now a writer and his wife Margot’s lover is also a writer — a more successful one.

“So there’s a major professional jealousy,” explained Jackson Gay, who is directing her second Gulfshore Playhouse production, after last season’s Into the Breeches.

But in the end, it’s the money. Tony plans to help himself to Margot’s family fortune by killing her before she decides to leave him. When that backfires, he improvises an even icier plot.

This version is also done in a single set, which she likes: “This makes the tension really great because you are trapped in this house. You can’t really get out.”

It’s the kind of play Gay seeks out to direct, and not just for the production challenge.

“I love watching the audience try to figure it out. I love knowing that in two seconds they’re all going to all jump.

“This style is very popular right now with audiences,” she observed. “I think it’s because our country is so torn, so divided, and with the struggles of living and all that, that people just want to come into the theater and have fun, and laugh and jump in their seats, be literally thrilled.”

When: Various times, Tuesdays- Sundays through Feb. 6

Where: Gulfshore Playhouse, 100 Goodlette-Frank Road S., Naples

Tickets: $39-$119 at gulfshoreplayhouse.org

Information: 239.261.7529