Milwaukee Rep Tries Adding Nonsense To The Nutcracker

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents Nuncrackers in the Stackner Cabaret November 3, 2023 – January 7, 2024. Pictured R-L Katie Kallaus, Ashley Oviedo, Seth K. Hale, Meka King, Isabel Quintero. Photo by Jenn Udoni.

Every performing arts company engages in a search for a holiday perennial to carry into the new year. Time and again they try – often lasting for one of two seasons but not having the legs for longer.

Except now and then a winner is found. The Milwaukee Repertory Theater found a good one in “A Christmas Carol.” The Milwaukee Ballet has the “Nutcracker,” which the current offering at the Rep’s Stackner Cabaret spoofs so fiercely that you suspect the Rep hoped they might have another perennial in “Nuncrackers,” running through January 7. What a sad wish.

It is an unabashed continuum of Dan Goggin’s minor “Nunsense” enterprise, which in more than 30 years has spawned several variations on the Little Sisters of Hoboken and their wimples. Put performers in those habits and each frozen face and arched eyebrows become as artificial as a Kabuki doll.

This variation, originated five years ago, sends the comic nuns and dutiful priest past the edge of slapstick, pratfalls and slightly risqué jokes into creating a Christmas TV telethon with their own Catholic home shopping network.

In the cabaret, where people sit at tables and order snacks and drinks, The Rep surrounds such productions with high professionalism in waitering, casting, lighting effects, mix of taped and lived singing, costume accessories, even hand puppets in this case – as if such professionalism excuses the tripe it is all wasted on. While some other cabaret productions have sparkles of musical and dramatic life, this one feels like a tired old joke from the start, relying on a brand of sitcom humor that is as dead as the habits all nuns once wore.

While most of the puns and ideas seem lame from the start, late in the show comes a surprise. It may be derivative, but it cuts through. Milwaukee trained actress Ashley Oviedo playing Brooklyn loudmouth Sister Robert Anne actually stops the show with her ribald belting of one of Goggin’s many rip-offs of known holiday melodies, “All I Want for Christmas Is a One Night Stand (at Carnegie Hall).”

She proves she can sing but think of the nature of the joke! It gives you a taste of the pun-heavy humor being employed. Any guffaws were out of proportion to the humor or the appeal of the music. It made an audience member worry if too many patrons on opening night had been plied through friendship and plenty of liquor. Or maybe here was a case of an audience eager to laugh at schoolboy ideas dead for decades.

Certainly, the main joke is to make the nuns look ridiculous in cowboy hats, tiaras and Village People garb. Goggin is nimble enough with show music to make all the tunes sound like Christmas carols — and sometimes they are.

Director Kelley Faulkner, a veteran performer in many Rep productions, keeps the acting volume at full blast and unloads every trick of choreography that has inhabited the recent stage or TV comedy shows. Katie Kallaus uses squeaky sound effects and a big voice to sell her goods. Isabel Quintero is the cardboard mother superior, also with a big voice. Meka King provides the gospel oomph and Seth K. Hale at least doesn’t seem as embarrassed as he should be by the frock he wears and the drunken excess he is asked to play. The performers are giving their all for material that is barely worth their efforts.

Nuncrackers Gallery

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blogs here and here.