Actors and theatre companies from across Northeast Florida are preparing for the Fourth Annual First Coast Unified Auditions, set for Saturday, July 19 at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine.

If you think you know Willy Wonka, think again. At Alhambra Theatre & Dining, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a wild, whimsical ride that delivers the spectacle and charm you’d expect from Roald Dahl’s classic, but with its own fresh spin. Director Shain Stroff’s artistry shines in his leadership, guiding a team of creative minds that transforms Roald Dahl’s classic into a full-blown theatrical treat that is heartfelt, hilarious and delightfully off-kilter.

The 5 & Dime’s, The Baltimore Waltz opens with Kristen Walsh as Anna, an elementary school teacher blindsided by a devastating diagnosis that she is terminally ill. Instead of resignation, Anna decides she will seize every pleasure Europe has to offer. Her plan is to embrace life in the most hedonistic way possible, abandoning her old rules and letting desire set the itinerary. What unfolds is not a straightforward journey but a wild, hallucinatory romp: whimsical, raunchy and bursting with the kind of logic found only in dreams.

In the dim, cluttered recesses of a Chicago junk shop, three men circle a scheme like wolves around a carcass. There’s the shop’s owner, Donny Dubrow, trying to stay one step ahead of poverty and moral compromise. His young protégé, Bobby, skittish and uncertain, wants to prove his worth. And then there’s Teach, a walking powder keg with a leather jacket and a mean streak, who sees every slight as an excuse to seize power.

ABET - All Beaches Experimental Theatre’s The Fantasticks takes on one of musical theater’s most curious relics — a minimalist fable of young love and life lessons that has charmed audiences for decades. Whether its particular blend of whimsy and earnestness holds up for modern viewers is debatable, but ABET’s production finds genuine moments of charm amid the show’s quirks.

Desperate Measures is a sly and spirited musical adaptation of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s morally knotty comedy about justice, mercy and the abuse of power. Rather than Elizabethan Vienna, the action here unfolds in the Arizona Territory during the late 1800s, where saloons and six-shooters replace dukes and friars.