After a curated show of music, dance and film called “Murder Ballads” at Oberon in Harvard Square, no one expected its Sept. 30 follow-up of sunlit meadows and fluffy bunnies.

“There Is No Good News: A Comedy” was pitched to ImprovBoston comedy club as being about the U.S. financial crisis. Then writer and monologist David Mogolov found out his wife was pregnant. The show and the baby had “the same gestation period,” and both changed quite a bit from their conception.

Amanda Palmer, who was most recently in Cambridge for her Evelyn Evelyn project with Jason Webley (portraying musical conjoined twins), has another project on the way with the American Repertory Theater: starring in a production of “Cabaret.”

Granted “The Pillowman” is showing in Harvard’s experimental theater, but the experimentation has gotten out of hand. This is a production that could benefit from a director having fewer ideas, and possibly fewer resources.

A production of Joe Orton’s wicked “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” closing this weekend seems to have found the perfect young schemer of the title role — Jack Cutmore-Scott, an unflappable and funny Brit in his senior year at Harvard.

You could have bought tickets early for tonight’s Naked Girls Reading (or another event at Oberon) if you feared the show would sell out. If it was about saving money, though, you needn’t have bothered. With service fees, advance tickets that seem to save 25 percent off the full price in reality save only 7.5 percent.

There are at least seven opportunities coming along to help recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Cambridge, including a Cambridge Symphony Orchestra performance, choral selections, talks and a theatrical presentation.

Stephanie Skier holds a pipe end that will drop if something goes wrong during a July 23, 2009, waterboarding administered by co-actor Nadeem Mazen at the YMCA Theater in Cambridge's Central Square. (Photo: Zahra Syed) There are such powerful ideas …