FILL IN THE BLANK: Dallas theatergoers know Scott Warrender for his Das Barbecu, which the Dallas Theater Center staged, and his version of Cinderella performed by Lyric Stage. And now he’s back in town, this time with Blankity-Blank at Theatre Three. This show functions sort of like Mad-Libs, in which audience members provide nouns and verbs that the actors must work into the story. “The hardest part for the actors is keeping a straight face,” the show’s director, K. Doug Miller, tells dallasnews.com. The concept sounds like a hoot. But does it work? “This inspired bit of silliness will have you in enough stitches to close up major surgery,” writes Lawson Taitte in his review.

LOVING ‘LOVE’: Sometimes you’ll read two critics’ reviews and wonder, “Were they at the same show?” In the case of Gregory Sullivan Isaacs and Wayne Lee Gay, the answer is definitely yes, though for a second each thought he was some place besides Fort Worth Opera’s The Elixir of Love. “The Fort Worth Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love is funny. Really funny,” Sullivan Isaacs writes in his theaterjones.com review. “Not to mention clever and witty, like Mel Brooks-meets-Woody Allen, by way of The Music Man.” “I thought I had accidentally wandered into a revival of The Music Man,” Gay says in his review on D magazine’s Front Row blog. It should be pointed out that both guys liked the touch of Americana. As did Chris Shull. “Though the stage was overcrowded and movements of cast and chorus compacted and contained, the impression was always one of sunny delight,” he writes in his dfw.com review. Meanwhile, Scott Cantrell was mostly OK with the idea of time shifting, but feels something got lost in the transition. “Director Jennifer Nicoll replaces the opera’s charming humor with way too much cheap and hyperactive shtick,” he writes in his dallasnews.com review.

SO YOU’VE STOLEN A PAINTING. NOW WHAT?: I’ve been reading with curiosity the coverage of last week’s big heist at Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, in which a thief walked out with art estimated to be worth a cool $120 million. And the question I always return to is: What exactly is the market for a one-of-a-kind piece of art? The answer, apparently, is: If you know the market, you also probably know the thief. Time magazine asked around to find out who might buy these works and found that the most likely scenario involves crime organizations stealing the art in order to trade it for contraband. “Because of the involvement of organized crime groups, art theft fuels other crime types, from the drug and arms trades to terrorism,” Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, tells the magazine.