BRUCE VILANCH

If you’re a fan of Lily Tomlin, Tracey Ullman, Anna Deavere Smith or any of those genius performers who can stroll onto an empty stage and magically fill it up with 20 or 30 fully realized characters, you will be too hyped up to operate heavy machinery after seeing Sarah Jones in “Bridge and Tunnel.” She’s pretty dazzling. Even Meryl Streep evidently threw up her hands after seeing her and said, “I can’t do this, I might as well produce it,” and she did, bringing it to Broadway for a Tony-winning run. Now Miss Jones is coming to the perfect Brentwood Theatre, where you can catch every nuance. When I was doing “Hairspray” on Broadway, everybody under a certain age was running to audition for the workshop of “Cry-Baby,” the next musical to spring full-blown from an item of John Waters’ fevered oeuvre. The premiere is coming to the La Jolla Playhouse, and the accent is on rockabilly, with a score by one of “The Daily Show’s” funniest writers, David Javerbaum, and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, plus a book by the “Hairspray” team of Tom Meehan and Mark O’Donnell.

One of the saddest things I ever heard was Joni Mitchell’s admission in that Rosanna Arquette documentary about the music business that she felt her participation in the music business had come to an end. There was just no place for her, she had concluded. Starbucks to the rescue. As they have perked up many of my mornings, they will be perking up my CD player this month with the first new release of Mitchell music in forever. The album, “Shine,” is available in grande, venti and gargantuoso.