Ten tap dancing Cleopatras is quite a sight
A review of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, now showing for Soulstice Theatre
Aug 4th, 2009
Boulevard Theatre’s “Stations of the Cross”
Written by local writer, actor and storyteller Beth Monhollen, Boulevard Theatre's Stations of the Cross follows the traditional 'stations' of Jesus suffering as told through monologues and short scenes about the restaurant service industry. Often witty and occasionally dark, Cross provides many, many laughs and insights into human behavior.
May 6th, 2009
Hair wants to shine, but falls flat
Even though Hair defined the "rock musical" genre and illustrated drug use, its message was actually quite serious and intellectual. But the players at UWM seem to have trouble paying homage to these great American social issues. On stage, actors seem more intent on portraying various stages of being stoned. Illegal drug use pervades the entire show, but it here it seemed to overtake all other aspects.
Apr 24th, 2009
Brooklyn Boy at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre closes its 34th season with playwright Donald Margulies’s semi-autobiographical play. It focuses on a novelist who, after two attempts at the great American novel, gets it right on the third try to critical acclaim and popularity by penning a semi-autobiographic novel called Brooklyn Boy. With the vague notion that this achievement may endear him to his dying father and save his withering marriage, the author attempts to re-draw his life as he thinks it should be. But new found fame and a re-discovered past proceed to pull him in opposite directions. James DeVita is understated and charming as Eric Weiss, the writer suffering through a mid-life crisis. As the character is quietly devastated to learns that success cannot alter the relationships with his father and soon to be ex-wife, actor DeVita expresses frustration and anger with a unique deft without resorting to simply yelling. The supporting cast members all neatly avoid playing into stereotypes. Robert Spencer as Eric’s father Manny Weiss is able to create a rich and complicated relationship with his son. Rebecca Rose Phillips gives depth as an enamored groupie and Tom Klubertanz is lovable as Ira, Eric’s childhood friend who forces him to reminisce and ultimately deal with his grief. Rounding out the cast is Darrel Cherney, Michelle Lopez-Rios and Julie Swenson in strong and multi-faceted performances. Although much of the play is a reflection on Weiss’s life growing up in a Jewish family and community, director and MCT Producing Artistic Director C. Michael Wright makes sure the play is not just a Jewish story. Brooklyn Boy is relatable to anyone, regardless of religious or ethnic background. Brooklyn Boy runs through May 3rd at the Broadway Theatre Center. For tickets call 414.291.7800 or visit MCT’s website.
Apr 23rd, 2009
Tales from the Dugout
Pink Banana Theatre Co. opened its annual show comprised completely of original one-acts on Friday, March 27. Staying true to its mission of encouraging new artists, Pink Banana used locally grown writers, actors and directors. With few mis-steps, Pink Banana once again showed itself to be a hot bed of young Milwaukee talent. Using a video screen as a back drop served two-fold: first, as a way of introducing the writers, actors and directors of each one-act and also as a set piece to suggest location. In Along for the Ride, a video of the retreating road through a back window added scenic depth and clarity to what could have just been actors in chairs on stage. Muffin’s Man was certainly the best received by the audience. Written by Patrik Beck and directed by Michael Cotey, it’s the perfect storm of wit and absurdity. Three men wait outside a coffee shop on an ordinary morning and at least one of them is not what he seems. Rob Maass, Daniel Koester and Travis A. Knight form a perfect triad for this brief yet action packed comedy. The last scene before the intermission proved to be a bit off kilter. Written and directed by Stephanie AB Wiedenhoeft, A Squirrels Nest aimed to examine the lives of five women. While obvious that the point was to highlight the internal and external conflicts that unite women, it was generic and used too many blanket statements to be truly insightful. Subject to Change, written by Alison Niles and directed by Joe Foti, lived up to its title by showcasing the rapid adjustments women in the armed forces must make. Unrequited Hate, written by Russ Bickerstaff and directed by Fjosh Redbeard, was an intriguing look into the relationship between co-workers. Complemented by actors Nick Firer and Adrian F. Feliciano, this fast-paced spoof was another audience favorite. Rounding out the show was The Interpreters, written by Artistic Director Rose Wasielewski and directed by Patrik Beck. A couple seeking marriage counseling receives help and answers in a pair of frank and outspoken interpreters who voice the true meanings of their words. For complete schedules and ticket information for all of Milwaukee’s theaters, visit Footlights online.
Apr 7th, 2009
Fire on the Bayou
The corner of Hope and Desire is a perfect metaphor for the city of New Orleans. Battered and ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans continues to strive to not merely recover but to thrive. Written and directed by Kevin Ramsey, Fire on the Bayou at the Milwaukee Rep celebrates the history, present and the hopes for the future of New Orleans through the music that is part of the city’s rich culture. Comprised of not only live singing and music, the show is also sprinkled with spoken vignettes about living in New Orleans. These stories exemplify the unyielding spirit of those still calling New Orleans home. While many of these tales are contemporary, the music is largely several classic tunes. Audiences will most likely recognize songs like “Iko Iko,” “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya” and “Jambalaya.” Opening with “My Indian Red,” Milton Craig Nealy as Spyboy Jambalaya, immediately lets those attending know that they will be up and dancing with his enthusiasm and playful nature. Jannie Jones, playing Queen Marie, has a deeply flexible voice that resonates with time honored songs about The Big Easy and also with pop numbers like “Proud Mary.” Eric Noden, playing Dr. Johnay as well as serving as co-music director is a jazz and blues enigma. Dressed in a red pin-stripe suit and wearing shades, he plays guitar, bass and harmonica. He also lends his wonderfully rough voice to songs like, “Going to Mardi Gras” and “Basin Street.” Singing as well as playing keyboard, Jeremy Cohen as Professor Short-hair and also co-music director is most impressive while recounting the events of Hurricane Katrina. Rounding out the company is Scott Napoli on drums. Even though he spends the show mostly out of sight, his playing encourages the excitable and party-like atmosphere that the Stackner Cabaret is perfect for. Fire on the Bayou is sympathetic to New Orleans but it won’t let people forget that even in the wake of tragedy New Orleans has the ability to rebound and blossom again. Complete schedule information and tickets for this show are available at Footlights online by clicking here.
Mar 16th, 2009
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex is one of the few surviving plays from ancient Greece. Written by Sophocles as the second of a trio of plays about King Oedipus and his family, Oedipus Rex is rife with the impact of following fate and choosing to exercise free will. The University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s theatre department takes an tale of ancient Greece and moves it to 300 years in the future where humans have reverted to being subject to the will of the gods. The city of Thebes is in turmoil because a horrible plague has descended upon it. King Oedipus vows to do whatever is needed to save the citizens. Word comes down from the gods that Thebes is dying because the murderer of the former King still resides in the city. When badgered into confessing, the blind seer, Tieresias, tells Oedipus himself murdered the former King. Oedipus will not believe it and thinks it is a conspiracy of his bother-in-law’s to usurp power. A series of stories from the gods reveal that Oedipus was told that he would murder his father and marry his mother, so he left his parents. Queen Jocasta reveals that she and the former King had a baby that the gods said would murder its father, so the former King banished the baby. Jocasta realizes first that everything the gods foretold has come to pass. Oedipus requires more persuasion and proof that he is his wife’s son. Director Tony Horne’s re-imagining of Oedipus Rex into the future puts the play into an interesting light. Disaster after disaster has moved people to revere Greek gods and visit the Oracle for guidance, instead of becoming more rational. Horne does not let this artistic choice impact the language of the play. It’s an affecting choice, although if the audience doesn’t read the program before hand they probably won’t notice the fast forward in time. The chorus provides commentary and also voices the inner thoughts that characters cannot say aloud. Choreographed by Shell M. Benjamin and orchestrated by Raeleen McMillion, the chorus is gorgeous and terrifying. Their movement and dance seem spontaneous and effortless. Andrew Edwin Voss shoulders an incredible responsibility as the title character. While adept and suitably heroic, one wishes he would express a few more emotions than just anger and impatience. Oedipus Rex is a classic play that UWM has made timeless. Its themes of fate versus free will present questions that may never be answered, which may be one of the reasons this particular play has become such an enduring dramatic work. UWM’s production certainly showcases the department’s talent and work ethic. Complete schedule and tickets for events in the Peck School of Arts can be found online at Footlights.
Mar 10th, 2009
Secrets of a Soccer Mom
Soccer Mom. It’s a term that crept into the American vernacular near the end of the twentieth century. It’s a woman who drives a mini-van or an SUV, visits Starbucks everyday and has an expensive cell phone that constantly ringing with calls about the PTA. She ‘runs errands’ every day of the week and manages her ‘schedule’ around her children’s athletic and extra-curricular activities. Right? Outwardly, that’s a generic description of Soccer Moms. The Boulevard Theatre’s Secrets of a Soccer Mom shows both the typical Soccer Mommian attributes as well as the deeper mysteries and enigmas of all those blond-highlighted women driving luxury mini-vans. Written by Kathleen Clark, Secrets of a Soccer Mom begins with three women meeting to play in a Mom vs Son soccer match. They agree to play poorly in order to let their third grade sons win. While waiting on the sidelines for their turn to rotate into the game they at first talk over classic Soccer Mom topics; the PTA, pizza day at school and field trips. As the day goes on, the three veer off from the pre-approved small talk subjects and delve into their innermost beings. As a result of exploring their pasts and presents, the three decide not to hand over a victory to their sons. Even though it looks like a silly suburban soccer game it turns into a personal battle for Nancy, Lynn and Alison. Alison, played by Marion Araujo, is at first not completely on board with playing badly. It comes out that she was an athlete before she got married. Her husband didn’t like her competing or playing on any kind of team. She sees the afternoon as a chance to leave the confines of her marriage behind; figuratively and maybe even literally. Araujo’s early enthusiasm seemed a bit contrived. However, she portrays Alison’s sincere yet naïve plans to run away in a simple and frank manner. As Nancy, Kathleen Williams outwardly seems incredibly archetypal. In a fleece and capris she chats with her fellow Soccer Moms while keeping an eye on her own children as well as others. It’s discovered that she ran in college and used to be a model. While Nancy loves her children with her entire heart, it’s obvious that she gave up much of who she was before she had them. Williams especially shines while flipping through a children’s picture book, pointing out her favorite characters and scenes as though it’s the latest Zadie Smith novel. While all three women hold their own in the Boulevard’s studio theatre, it’s really Brooke Wegner playing Lynn that steals the show. Lynn is a former social worker turned PTA-school volunteer-Soccer Mom. She organizes absolutely everything and still manages to keep up on her gossip and refrain from throttling her mother-in-law during Sunday dinner. Wegner seems to live two roles on stage; Public Lynn and Inner Lynn. Public Lynn chats, jests and conspires with her fellow Soccer Moms. While Inner Lynn rarely utters a word, Wegner’s expressions […]
Mar 10th, 2009
Witness
Small town Vermont in the 1920s conjures images of a simple, idealistic way of life. America had won the Great War and patriotism was at a high. However, First Stage Children’s Theater’s production of Witness, by John Urquhart, adapted from the book by Karen Hesse, showcases a different side of America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The play begins with Sara Chickering, an unmarried woman, welcoming Ira Hirsch and his daughter Esther to town. Ira plans to open a shoe store, however, several residents do not welcome Ira and Esther simply because they are Jewish. Several important townspeople, including the general store owner and the church pastor decide to join the Klu Klux Klan and carry out the Klan’s priorities within their town. This also includes harassing an African American girl, Leonora. While the town’s children taunt Leonora and Esther, the adults step it up by sending threatening letters, attempting to poison a well and even shooting a gun through the keyhole of Sara’s house, where Ira and Esther live. All this violence brings out the worst in some people, but also brings out the good in others. The title of the play is in fact the message of the play. The events that happen cannot be attributed to individuals of even a small group of people, as Sara Chickering points out. The town itself can be considered a living organism that must take responsibility for its actions as a whole. Every citizen is a witness and has the ability to step forward and offer testimony. Even though this thought is spoken aloud it is also visually explained by the set and the decision to keep several characters on stage ‘witnessing’ events. Designed by Nathan Stuber, the set is simple, offering a full view of the town including the general store, Sara’s kitchen and the church. Seeing these cornerstones of small town life reinforces the idea that all are interconnected. While focusing on several acts of hate and violence, there are some light moments in the play. Jacque Troy offers several buoyant bits as Viola Pettibone, the wife of a Klan enthusiast. Troy is strong but with a sense of humor in her dislike for the Klan. There are also several sweet moments between Olivia Hammernik, playing Leonora, and Robert Spencer, playing Mr. Field. As Leonora helps out around the old man’s home, he tells her stories about serving in the Civil War and why he felt fighting against slavery was important. Spencer is quietly inspirational in his portrayal. The young characters in Witness are made up of two separate casts that alternate performances. The Hope Cast includes Hammernik who is believable as Leonora and Alex Salter who is endearing as Esther. Even though the heyday of the Klan is long past, the idea of hate without basis is still an important lesson to explore because it still happens today. Witness is a profound experience for children as well as adults. Witness runs through February 22nd. First […]
Jan 26th, 2009
The Dig
Renaissance Theaterworks is certainly known for its provoking plays that quite often challenge standards set by society. Their first show of 2009 certainly falls into these categories. Written by Resident Playwright Marie Kohler, The Dig explores the relationship between a brother and sister from childhood to their adult lives. It also sifts through the interconnection between past and present through the veil of mental illness. Mattie idolizes her older brother, Jamie. When Jamie marries and begins work on an archaeological dig in Lebanon that prompts his struggle with Schizophrenia, their relationship is forever changed. Over time, Mattie becomes responsible for Jamie and his well being. The ownership of an artifact that Jamie discovered becomes contested and the government wants to question Jamie on the validity of his find. Mattie tries her best to keep the questions from Jamie by traveling the country trying to find answers about the vase and also about her brother’s slide into mental illness. She learns not only about her brother’s past but also re-discovers her own from a new perspective. Kohler’s play hits on the hot topics of repatriation of archaeological artifacts and mental illness. The perception of both is undergoing a societal shift and Kohler illustrates these changes in The Dig. Mattie’s attitude towards her adult brother who speaks only in rhymes and cannot answer a direct question moves from exasperation and near-condescension to a kinder understanding and patience. Kohler also hints at the sanctioned looting practiced by American archaeologists until recently. Catherine Lynn Davis as Mattie is passionate as the sister who watches her brother unravel until he is incapable of living a ‘regular’ life. Mattie is often frantic and Davis seemed to have trouble connecting with others as a result of the hasty pace of many scenes, but when Davis was permitted to slow down her character discovery was lovely. Brian Mani, playing the older version of Jamie, gave an incredible amount of dignity to a man participating in the world with schizophrenia. Jamie only speaks in nursery rhymes and this character could be played flippantly, but Mani makes Jamie’s world make sense even if it isn’t quite the one most people live in. VS The Dig runs through February 8 in the Broadway Theater Center’s Studio Theater. For more information call the box office at 414.291.7800 or visit www.r-t-w.com.
Jan 21st, 2009
Roses in December
Artistic Director Mark Bucher is quite proud of the fact the Boulevard Theatre consistently produces plays that are premieres in Milwaukee. The most recent premiere produced by the Boulevard is Roses in December, by Victor L. Cahn. A play composed entirely of letters with no true interaction between characters can be daunting for both the director as well as the actors. However, the Boulevard proved incredibly capable with this early work of Cahn’s. The correspondence begins with a young woman, Carolyn Meyers, inviting a writer, Joel Gordon, to a college reunion. Even though Carolyn writes in a professional capacity, she also has a few personal reasons that unravel as their letters become less perfunctory and more intimate. Although Joel sees her letters as mildly annoying he begins to enjoy them and appreciate his growing relationship with Carolyn. With only two characters that are never physically in the same location, both actors need to respond to a growing relationship with another human being via letters. In the first half of the show, Bucher allowed his actors only a single moment of eye contact. As their letters deepen and explore the past, Bucher allows more direct interaction which helps to heighten the devotion both Joel and Carolyn feel towards their long distance relationship. Anne Miller, playing Carolyn, is as charming as Carolyn’s self-description. Miller’s exuberance and refined determination drive the play forward making a series of what could just be monologues into a lively exchange. David Ferrie lends an oddly engaging allure to a character that could easily be played as a one dimensional curmudgeon. Ferrie gives his character layer after layer of history and pathology that shape Joel’s entire adult life, lifting each overlay only when appropriate. Miller and Ferrie’s work together build the complex relationship that this type of play demands. Roses in December runs through January 18 at the Boulevard Theatre in Bayview. 414.744.5757 or boulevardtheatre.com.
Dec 30th, 2008
A Tuna Christmas
Holiday-themed shows are a favorite in Milwaukee this time of year. They draw in larger then usual crowds and are often appropriate for nearly all ages. Soulstice Theatre opened A Tuna Christmas last Friday with a packed theatre full of people ready for full holiday swing. A Tuna Christmas is the second play in a series about the fictional town of Tuna, TX written by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard. It centers on the town yard decorating contest and a ‘Christmas Phantom’ that sabotages the contest. Traditionally, all the characters are played by just two actors. Soulstice opened their production up to six actors. While this does provide for more elaborate costume changes; it also ushers in a bit of the absurd. When an actor goes from playing a waitress at the Tastee Crème to an old man, is she meant to keep on her massive pink earrings or did she just forget to take them off while backstage? Much of what makes the Tuna plays so much fun is the ability of the actors to use voice and physicality to switch between characters. Soulstice relies more on costumes and things like wigs, hats and body padding. While some of the choices Soulstice made were fun and definitely in the Tuna spirit, several were superfluous and seemed to serve more to the amusement of the cast than the audience. Nonessential costuming aside, the six actors, Enid Barnes, Jeffrey Berens, Ben Dern, Ken Dillon, Michael Endter and Kelly Simon portray the town of Tuna and its eclectic citizens with the wit and irony intended by the script. Soulstice Theatre put together a fun show that can certainly be enjoyed by families this December. The satirical humor and occasional ad libs are clever and light. A Tuna Christmas runs through December 6 at the Marian Center at 3195 S. Superior St. For tickets call 414.431.3187 or visit their website at www.soulsticetheatre.org.
Dec 1st, 2008
One Thousand and One
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Theatre Department opened its 2008-2009 season with a Mainstage production of 1001 by Jason Grote. Straying from the standard university fare of well-known and over-produced plays, UWM bravely chose a newer work by a contemporary playwright. This bold move gave voice to some wonderful moments and connections, but ultimately was too imposing for the UWM Theatre Department to grapple with. Jason Grote wrote this play as a reaction to September 11, 2001. However, he is adamant that it is not a 9/11 play. The backbone of the play is the first English translation of The Arabian Nights. Other works and artists are woven in, such as Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges and even Monty Python. Some of the literary references will float over the heads of many audience members, however, the comedy of these references is playable at two levels; the audience shouldn’t ever feel as though they missed something. Grote uses the scenes of 9/11 to explore modern racial relationships, but also to tie them back to a common history. 1001 shifts back and forth between several different stories, between space and time and between sparse realistic moments and pure magic. In a brief talk back following opening night, Grote spoke about incorporating magic into his work. His feeling that magic and mysticism can and should be utilized in live theatre is a welcome break from the super-realistic and angst-ridden relationship plays that are currently popular. Grote’s play is by no means straight forward, which proved to be cumbersome for most of the actors. All the actors in 1001 play more than one character. When actors are multi-cast, it can either be delightful and magnificent or confusing and dispirited. Director Rebecca Holderness obviously tried to encourage each actor to discover distinct physical mannerisms for each character, which is key when a single actor portrays several personas. Adrian F. Feliciano did this wonderfully as he played One Eyed Arab, Mostafa and Sinbad. Each character was distinct and crisp. It was also clear that Porsha G. Knapp had a clear understanding of her three characters, Princess Maridah, Juml and Lubna. She was endearing and completely engaged with her work. However, several cast members were not able to keep their characters separate from one another. They seemed to rely on costume changes and alterations to announce that they were now a new person with a new set of beliefs and reactions. While costumes did play an important role, the actors cannot trust in fabric alone to do the work for them-it’s lazy. Holderness may not have gotten the best out of all her actors, but she was able to address Grote’s epic storytelling with humor and ease. Most notable was a scene where Princess Maridah is to be pushed off a great height as punishment from her father. Death is imminent. Instead of trying to stage a realistic death scene, Holderness kept it straight laced until the big push, when Knapp daintily stepped down off the dooming perch, […]
Oct 15th, 2008
State of the Union
The Milwaukee Rep responds to a long, exhausting presidential campaign with Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s State of the Union. Despite having been written half a century ago, State of the Union delivers a surprisingly topical look at presidential politics in an entertaining show that only feels a bit long at times. The Rep draws on the talents of almost every actor in its Resident Acting Company to populate this ensemble piece, making it one of the most impressive productions of the season by virtue of its casting alone. Taking center stage is Lee Ernst as fictitious businessman Grant Matthews, who has the Republican nomination for the president thrust upon him. Ernst is thoroughly believable as a maverick everyman who is drawn into the kinds of compromises everyone expects of a presidential candidate from a major political party, but much like a less than successful politician, he fails to make much of an impression. Ernst is an overwhelmingly talented actor, but he fails to register as much more than a figurehead here. Matthews’ major challenge as a candidate for office comes in the form of an estranged wife who may as well be divorced from him for all the effect she has on his life. Laura Gordon cuts a fascinating figure as Matthews’ wife, Mary. Gordon takes an interesting turn as someone fascinated by her unsought role in the machinations and ambitions of an entire political party. She is a very sympathetic figure in the maelstrom of activity that defines a major political campaign. There are so many other impressive performances in this production that it’s difficult to decide what to mention in a brief review . . . Deborah Staples is a great deal of fun as Matthews’ adviser with questionable morals. The ambiguity of her relationship with the candidate makes her performance all the more interesting. Dan Mooney makes an appearance as politico Sam Parrish in a few select scenes. All of the Pickerings’ put in impressive performances, most notably Rose as Southern Belle Lulabelle Alexander, wife of Peter Silbert’s southern judge Jefferson. Featuring nearly two dozen performances, State of the Union sags in places, but it’s well worth seeing a production this sophisticated. The Milwaukee Rep’s production of State of the Union runs September 16 through October 12 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater. 414-225-5490 or www.milwaukeerep.com
Sep 24th, 2008
The Constant Wife
It’s the classic tale of a man who loves a woman, a woman who loves a man and the world that gets in their way. Somerset Maugham’s tale of potential infidelity comes to the Boulevard Theatre as it presents The Constant Wife. Maureen Dornemann stars as title character Constance Middleton whose fidelity to her husband Dr. John Middleton, played by Michael Chobanoff, is called into question when former flame Bernard, played by Jaime Jastrab, re-enters her life. In a clever move to keep production costs low, the Boulevard stages this classic 1925 drama as a rehearsal of understudies for a much bigger, more opulent production of Maugham’s drama. The set and costuming are minimal, and the cast itself was assembled with many new faces and amateur actors. In such a stark environment, individuals have the opportunity to set themselves apart. Maureen Dornemann does a remarkably good job of portraying the title character, but she has previously proved herself to be a thoroughly interesting actress. Here Dornemann’s intelligent stage presence is put to good work portraying a woman who would seem less than three-dimensional if she were portrayed by an actress of less talent. Though she is clearly more defined in the play by her husband than anything else, the title character possesses a kind of strength that goes beyond her occupation as wife. It’s a delicate distinction that Dornemann nails perfectly. Her husband, played here by Michael Chobanoff, balances out the picture quite well. Chobanoff portrays the role of a less than faithful husband with all of the depth that a character like his needs in order to really makes the performance work. The Boulevard Theater’s production of The Constant Wife runs through October 5th. 414-744-5757 or www.boulevardtheatre.com for more info.
Sep 24th, 2008
Ripper!
In the autumn of 1888, a series of murders shook London’s Whitechapel district. The victims were all women, all murdered in similar ways, leading police to suspect they were all perpetrated by one person — now known to the world as Jack The Ripper. Possibly the most infamous serial killer of modern times, dozens of dramatic fictionalized presentations about the murders have appeared over the course of the century. Locally, a recent staging of the story featured Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper starring playwright Dale Gutzman as the detective. This month, the legendary serial killer finds a local stage again as Jackie Benka’s Ripper! debuts at the Alchemist Theater. While it is thoroughly entertaining, Benka’s script is not terribly intricate. The ending and a few plot details may, no doubt, seem novel to people with a passing interest in the killings, but those who are familiar with Ripper lore should not expect anything new. Indeed, some anachronisms in the script would irritate fans and scholars. But the production is fantastic for anyone looking for an affordable, entertaining evening of pop theatre in an intimate venue. Enter the bar/lobby area at the Alchemist to find it decked out in the nineteenth-century manner, with the actresses destined to be the Ripper’s victims offering escort into the theatre next door through the stylishly eerie alleyway behind the building. Alchemist has put a great deal of work into locking in the atmosphere of the play, and it really pays off. Inside the theatre, every open area not taken up by seating is made to look like a Whitechapel alley. Costuming may not be precise, but there is more than enough here to deliver an immersive mood. Seamless pacing starts the play as Alice Wilson escorts Aaron Kopec to center stage. Wilson plays streetwalker to Kopec’s London doctor — a gentleman named Sydney Pearcey. And so begins the story. Kopec’s Pearcey is a tragic figure that the audience is neither allowed to entirely empathize with or entirely hate; Kopec expertly plays the part somewhere between hero and villain. Briana Ziebell cuts an admirably strong figure as his wife, who suspects his infidelities. On the whole, the women in this play have exceptional emotional strength, which is a refreshing change of pace from many Ripper stories. The most notable female portrayal amongst the prostitutes is Liz Shipe in the role of Mary Kelly. Currently studying theatre at UWM, Schipe shows considerable promise. Also making a notable appearance is Mark Lonteen in the role of police Detective Abberline, a character written somewhere between actual policeman and dramatic hero. His performance is the heart of this production — moody and entertaining without being particularly dark or heavy-handed. VS Alchemist Theater’s production of Ripper! runs now through September 27. 414-426-4169 or visit Alchemist online for more info.
Sep 16th, 2008
The Only Thing
Making its way to Milwaukee after its debut in Madison last year, Eric Simonson’s Lombardi: The Only Thing arrives at the intimate Off-Broadway Theatre with an updated script and a stellar cast. Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cecsarini stars as legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi in a story that mixes fact with fiction and drama with comedy. Next Act balances extremes in a thoroughly satisfying production to open to a promising season. As the story opens, professional football is in a crisis of leadership. It’s 1965 and the league is changing. New money is flowing into game as popularity skyrockets and players pair up with high-powered agents who are pitting themselves against team coaches. The Packers have just lost another playoff game and the team is in disarray. Enter Cecsarini as Lombardi — a man wracked with stress who never seems to have enough Pepto Bismol on hand. Cecsarini may not have Lombardi’s physical bulk, but he carries himself with an extensively studied gait that feels remarkably true to the towering sports legend. The opening scene also features John Kishline as assistant coach and yes-man Phil Bengston, Mark Ulrich as sports reporter Bud Lea, an open critic of the team who needs them to succeed to advance his own career, John Taylor Philips as star player Jim Taylor, whose position with the team is on edge, and Reese Madigan as Paul Hornung, largely considered to be the heart of the team. Though some liberties are taken here, this opening is powerful in its gritty realism. Things grow markedly more surreal after intermission as we see Lombardi at Mitchell Field preparing for a flight to New York. Ailing health finds him drifting off into hallucinatory conversations with his late father (John Taylor Phillips), military football coach Red Blaik (John Kishline), the late John F. Kennedy (Reese Madigan) and Saint Ignatius (Mark Ulrich). The five men have a discussion about leadership and the nature of winning over a game of sheepshead. It’s an inherently comic moment with layers of serious philosophical meaning. On the whole, this part of the play is charming and cleverly-written, but while there are some savvy performances from Cecsarini and the actors portraying the dream figures, there are moments when the lofty philosophy drags the action of the play. Had the sequence been cut just a bit shorter, it would’ve been flawless. But the play in its entirety is an immense joy. Ulrich’s performance as Ignatius sparkles with wit. Kishline’s confidence as Blaik is every bit as effective as his passivity as Bengston. Phillips’ performance as Lombardi’s father carries a warmth that balances well with his cool portrayal as Taylor in the play’s beginning. Madigan renders a very deep performance as JFK. All of this is more than enough to keep the play together. With an inherent appeal to a far wider Next Act audience than average, this one is sure to sell out, and with a production this good, there’s a fair chance that many of […]
Sep 16th, 2008
Doubt
Taking on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a massive endeavor. With well-published expectations to aspire to, many companies and directors go over the top with set, lighting and costume descisions and play to stereotypes instead of bringing out true human beings with flawed judgment and emotional responses. But with John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner in drama, Spiral Theatre shoulders the responsibility as though it’s just a silently hovering moth, showcasing emotions shaped by perception, experience – and most of all, doubt. The play opens with a domineering and self-sure Sister Aloysius, the school’s principal, lecturing a new and less confidant teacher, Sister James. Taken aback and in awe of her veteran sister, Sister James tries to abandon her enthusiasm for teaching at the insistence of her superior. While doubting her own capabilities, Sister James becomes subject to suggestibility by Sister Aloysius about the integrity of Father Flynn. Sister Aloysius first hints and then adamantly proclaims that Father Flynn is guilty of sexual molestation of a male student – the school’s first black student. The last few moments illuminate that no matter how surely one presents themselves, doubt always exists and indeed is an important part of our beliefs. In foregoing a traditional theatre space for the sanctuary of Plymouth Church on Milwaukee’s east side, Director Mark Hooker found the ideal location for Shanley’s play – set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964. Hooker uses the church setting for Father Flynn’s sermons, while Sister Aloysius’ office comprised of a plain desk and chairs at the front of the church. In this simple and unostentatious setting, Hooker and the actors can focus on Shanley’s characters. Sandra Stark as Sister Aloysius is rigorously strict and renders comic moments with perfect timing by playing them absolutely straight. She also captured the particular vulnerability essential to the character. Terry Gavin is intriguing as Father Flynn, the understanding priest with a sense of humor and call to reach out to the surrounding community – or, as the case may be, the scheming pedophile taking advantage of a student isolated by race. The truth about Father Flynn is never revealed, and Gavin plays the priest with innocence while still letting doubt creep in about his true intentions Playing the inexperienced Sister James, Jenna Wetzel is credible as a dedicated teacher and servant of the church, whose blind faith in her mentor is shaded with encroaching doubt, forcing Sister James to explore her own faith and belief. The shift Sister James experiences is subtle, and Wetzel’s portrayal is nuanced and skillful. As Mrs. Muller, the mother of the student possibly being sexually molested, Ericka Wade is compelling and controversial. One minute she insists that Father Flynn has done nothing but ease her son’s transition, the next she demands his removal and the next she rationalizes that if it’s true, it’s only until June, and her son needs to stay at the school in order to get into a good high school. Wade is […]
Sep 16th, 2008
Isn’t it Romantic?
The Milwakee Rep opens its 2008-2009 season at the Stackner Cabaret with a classy, romantic evening of music. The first of three openings in as many weeks for the Rep, Isn’t It Romantic? features the powerfully rich voice of singer Jimi Ray Malary leading William Knowles on piano, Don Linke on bass and Scott Napoli on Drums. The jazzy quartet swims through a selection of songs assembled by playwright and director David Hunter Koch, whose work last graced the Stackner stage in last year’s Hula Hoop Sha-Boop. Koch also put together Ellington: The Life and Music of the Duke for the Rep Cabaret’s 2005-2006 season — a show which also featured Malary, Knowles and Napoli. Isn’t it Romantic? carries a series of songs through a typical cycle of romance: Solitude “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” among others) gives way to new love (“S’Wonderful,” a particularly swinging version of “My Funny Valentine” and more), which follows through into the deepening of the relationship (“Lady is a Tramp”) and moving in together (“Love is Here to Stay’) before exploring the difficulties that come with a long-term relationship (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”). After intermission, the cycle swings in the other direction, peppered with clever, poetic observations about love and relationships from David Hunter Koch – marriage, he says, is life’s way of keeping you from arguing with strangers. Scenic designer Susannah M. Barnes has put together a beautiful art deco set for the show that is stylish and rich in detail. Four paintings show the backs of four women dancing with four men. Light spills onto the stage through stained glass. The atmosphere may lack the smoky clinking of glasses and ambient chatter one might expect from a traditional romantic cabaret atmosphere, but Barnes’ set gives the impression of a jazzy little slice of virtuoso perfection. You’re not hearing the scratches or pops and imperfections that make this style of music so appealing to modern ears, but the clarity and purity of the experience here makes for some really great cabaret theatre. VS Isn’t it Romantic? runs through November 2nd at the Stackner Cabaret. 414-224-9490 or visit the Rep online.
Sep 8th, 2008
Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner
The Sunset Playhouse opens its 49th season with Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner by Pat Cook. The comedy revolves around three aging sisters who’ve created an insular world for themselves in their family home. The three are proud of their independence and of their reputation. When the town doctor tricks them into taking in a boarder who happens to be a nurse, they discover more about their own capabilities and their family history. The sisters, Maggie, Dora and Lydia – played by Dolores Ivanchich, Inge Adams and Frances Klumb respectively – impress and delight from the first moments on stage. In a demonstration that proves why the town thinks they are, indeed, crazy and cranky, all three simultaneously talk, listen and respond to one another. Adams’ impeccable timing makes Dora’s sarcasm crisp and smarting, while Ivanchich radiates sweetness as the slightly memory-challenged sister; she’s especially lovely in the last scene after ‘tasting’ a bit too much egg nog. Klumb is no-nonsense as a former teacher still able to rule over her son and the town doctor. The three connect on stage with such ease that it’s almost impossible to imagine that they haven’t lived with or near each other their entire lives. As Dr. Arnold “Doc” Lomax, Pat Perkins is fresh and able to match the three feisty leads. His physical comedy is authentic – he makes getting wrapped up in a telephone cord while drunk look natural and not a choreographed venture. Less successful is Nasreen Ameri as nurse and boarder Jean Mitchell. Each line is delivered with the same faux enthusiasm no matter what is happening on stage, and she struggled to connect her character with anyone else on stage. Occasionally she even looked uncomfortable, breaking character. An entrance-and -exit comedy can sometimes look cramped if adequate space and doors are not provided, but Scenic Designer Paul Meeusen, interning under technical Director, J. Michael Desper, designed a marvelously open set that provides the room needed for a play that takes place in just one room with a nine-person cast. Meeusen and Despar utilized three levels to make answering the doorbell and going upstairs a more dynamic aspect of each scene. Artistic Director Mark Salentine should be commended for choosing a play that shows elderly women not as just grouchy or doddering, but as individuals with vigor, defiance and love. Though the writing and plot itself in Pat Cook’s play often falters, the problem of children trying to decide when their elderly parents can no longer live on their own is or will be shared by almost everyone. Salentine’s rendition will appeal to multiple generations of families. VS The Sunset Playhouse’s production of Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner runs through September 17th. 262-782-4430, or visit Sunset online.
Sep 8th, 2008
The Wonder Bread Years
John McGivern returns to the Marcus Center this month for another run of Pat Hazell’s comedic monologue The Wonder Bread Years. One of the most recognizable actors in town, McGivern’s memories of growing up in a quirky Milwaukee has natural appeal for his fellow boomers and beyond. While Hazell wrote The Wonder Bread Years as something of a cross between a motivational speech and a standup comedy routine, John McGivern’s distinctive performance style turns it into a theatrical monologue that maximizes an audience’s empathy. McGivern’s enthusiastic delivery infuses these stories with the commonality of American youth – even for those of us not a part of the generation in question. McGivern mixes his own memories of childhood with those written for the stage by Pat Hazell, which localizes the monologue in Milwaukee – just enough. The show hopes to remind everyone of the wonder of their childhood regardless of age, but for someone born in the mid-1970’s, it’s interesting to see people from another generation audibly reacting in unison to pop cultural references from nearly half-century ago and commenting on them during intermission and idle moments. From those tiny boxes of cereal to tough skin jeans, bag lunches and a number of other icons of a generation, much of the show is pretty specific. As pop culture continues to fragment into an endless miasma of pop subcultures under the engine of emerging user-driven media, it’s fun to hang out with one of the last generations to share the same narrowly slices of pop Americana as they are brought to the stage and rediscovered one by one. There is no question that McGivern is the primary reason why so many people see this show, and the reason why continues to be sparklingly clear. He has incredible stage presence that is alarmingly natural, even when he’s delivering the same story he did dozens of times at the Marcus Center last year. When he interacts with the audience, he seems to have a genuine appreciation for the people who have come to see him perform. Clearly he’s enjoying what he’s doing here and it’s an enjoyment that is conveyed to the audience in a way that seems almost effortless. VS John McGivern stars in Pat Hazell’s The Wonder Bread Years now through September 21 at the Marcus Center’s Vogel Hall. 414-273-7206 or marcuscenter.org.
Sep 5th, 2008
The Misanthrope
Boulevard Theatre opens its season with a modern twist on an old comedy as it presents its production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope – moved from 17th-century France to contemporary Quebec, set in an art gallery and spiced up with a liberal dose of gender-bending. The new floor of the renovated Boulevard is a rich, deep wood that suits the setting well. A single bench sits center stage, in tune with the clean, modern set dressing and costuming — a nearly flawless visual presentation from beginning to end. The rhythm of Moliere’s story may not be perfectly rendered, but the production more than redeems itself elsewhere, in jovial performances and impeccable presentation. David Flores stars as Alceste – in this production, a visual/performing arts critic falling for Cesarmene (Cesar Gamino), a flirtatious gallery owner. “Cesarmene” is the Boulevard’s male adaptation of Célimène – a coquettish young lady in the original script. As the play opens, Alceste is having a philosophical discussion with his friend Philinte – another gender-swapped role, played with charisma by Beth Monhollen. Philinte and Alceste discuss the difference between tact and honesty in modern society. Dramatic presentation usually offers a more casual introduction to characters before barreling into abstract philosophical debate, and with less sophisticated treatment, this conversation might be an immediate turn-off for a contemporary audience. But Flores and Monhollen deliver Moliere’s rhythmic rhyming couplets with understated drama and intellectual passion, making the first scene bearable and even exciting. The Misanthrope was selected as a vehicle for Flores, and he justifies the choice marvelously. Joe Frasee delivers a fun performance as Oronte, a poet in the original play framed here as a “spoken word/performance artist,” a flamboyant gentleman every bit as enamored with Cesarmane as Alceste. Oronte demands Alceste’s frank impression of a sonnet he’s written, and Alceste, despite his better judgment, agrees to hear the piece – which Oronte performs wearing nothing more than a pair of shiny red underpants. Cesar Gamino as Cesarmene plays Alceste’s decisive opposite. There is balance between opposing forces in the ensemble, but the balance between Gamino and Flores as Alceste and Cesarmene is most striking. Alceste’ longing for truth and honesty is matched by Cesarmene’s innate desire for pleasantly flattering dishonesty. Their dynamic is captivating and carries the tension of the play. We’re no longer at the point in art history where gender-bending is a shock, but even more conservative theater-lovers should be pleased by this production – besides the gender and name changes and cheeky choices, this is Moliere’s original Misanthrope – performed with total respect and deference. VS The Boulevard Theatre’s production of The Misanthrope runs through August 24. For more information, call 414-744-5757 or visit the Boulevard online.
Aug 20th, 2008
Well
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens its season with the Milwaukee premiere of Lisa Kron’s Well — a pseudo-meta-theatrical drama. Angela Iannone stars as Kron, who is trying to develop a theatrical exploration into the nature of health and illness in modern society. Ruth Schudson plays Lisa’s mother, who has unsuspectingly been framed onstage as Lisa’s case study in human health. In spite of Lisa’s persistent affirmations that she is not doing a play about her mother, her mother slowly takes over the production, leaving Lisa to wonder what she was trying to say in the first place. The set, designed by Lisa Schlenker, splits the stage down the middle. On the right, the set is furnished and domestic, with bookcases, knickknacks, furniture and – at the outset of the play – Lisa’s mother, asleep. Stage left is bare, with a video screen high above the floor. Angela Iannone’s stage presence is fascinating – she deftly portrays Lisa Kron ass a magnetic, witty playwright. Ruth Schudson, who has taken on a great many roles over the years, looks absolutely at home onstage, rendering Mrs. Kron’s wizened confidence with comely clarity. The supporting ensemble includes local stage veterans Bo Johnson and Tami Workentin, rising talent Travis A. Knight and relative newcomer Marti Gobel. All performances here are well-executed, but there seems to be something missing, and it isn’t due to any lack of skill on the part of talented director Laura Gordon. There’s a level of cohesion that the script never quite manages to attain. Through its post-modern construction, it directly addresses Well’s lack of cohesion, which grows to become the central conflict of the play. But simply making note of the disconnectedness of scenes doesn’t make them any easier to bear. A lack of cohesion is a lack of cohesion, even if you choose to make it the play’s driving conflict. Kron’s script is clever, but it fails as a piece of meta-theatre on a fundamental level. Throughout the play, each character in the production is revealed to be the actor or actress playing them except Lisa herself, who is never completely revealed to be Angela Iannone. Iannone excels in the role of an artist who is losing track of her statement, but the production is never allowed to acknowledge that a talented actress is playing the role of the playwright. In this respect, every production of Well that doesn’t star the real Lisa Kron in the female lead is limited. Make no mistake – this is a satisfying production, but in a play so narrowly focused on striking the ore of human emotion, the play’s central figure is merely speaking the same lines all the rest of the actors are. It’s a flaw that cuts to the heart of what Kron is trying to say. VS Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Well runs now through August 24 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre. Tickets can be purchased by calling 414-291-7800 or visit the Chamber Theatre online.
Aug 20th, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen’s romantic drama Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813, is one of the most beloved and revisited classics of the English literary canon. Its adaptations have been numerous, from standard-issue stage and screen presentations to Broadway musicals, cheeky modern-day retellings like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bollywood flicks. Audiences will inevitably bring all of their love, excitement and expectations to this month’s production of the Jon Jory adaptation at Concordia University’s Acacia Theatre. The charismatic Anne Miller stars as Elizabeth Bennet, a sharp-witted young woman living in England in the early 19th century. Elizabeth is a strong-willed woman who isn’t nearly as enchanted with the idea of romance as her two sisters. Things change for her as she meets the alarmingly conservative, even-tempered Mr. Darcy (Neil Vanides). The two begin a reluctant romance destined to shake both of their conceptions of social reality. Jon Jory’s script cuts the lengthy novel into a very expedient three hour drama, reminiscent of Deborah Moggach’s much-nominated 2005 screen adaptation. The Acacia adaptation, directed by Bradley Winkler, lacks the finesse of that film adaptation, but manages more than enough humanity to recommend it. While the drastic differences in wealth present in that film aren’t seen onstage here, a profound sense of social stratification permeates the production. Of particular note is Mr. Darcy’s first appearance – Darcy (Neil Vanides) is a deftly carved statuette, silent and motionless in a mass of conservative dancers in a huge ballroom. Bradley Winkler orchestrates large groups of actors with excellence in the few scenes that require them. Notable performances on the edges of the production include Glenna Gustin as Elizabeth’s mother, who seems overwhelmingly focused on the wellbeing of her daughters, and Richard Gustin’s shrewd interpretation of the Elizabeth’s father, the patriarch of the Bennet household who refuses to be completely reverent to those of higher social strata. Miller and Vanides make for an attractive romantic center, but they seem to lack some sort of chemistry as a pair. Though Miller musters emotional strength as Elizabeth, Vanides’ deftly aloof social awkwardness keeps him at a distance that precludes any notion of intimacy. This is disappointing, as the two of them look exceptional together. Had there been more of an effort to bring the two together emotionally, this could have been a compelling production overall. As it is, this is a reasonably satisfying stage adaptation of Austen’s story that should serve as an appetizer for fans of the novel until the Milwaukee Rep stages its own adaptation in March. It should be noted that, although the Rep’s Quadracci Powerhouse production will doubtlessly be more extravagant than Acacia’s, the money spent here is visually impressive. The set may not look like much, but when paired with Denise Elfe and Marie Wilke’s sumptuous costume design, there’s a potent visual reality to the production that leaves little to be desired. VS Acacia Theatre’s production of Pride and Prejudice runs through July 20 at Concordia University’s Todd Wehr Auditorium. (414) 744-5995 or acaciatheatre.com
Jul 18th, 2008
Ah, Wilderness!
Largely considered to be one of Eugene O’Neil’s lesser works, Ah, Wilderness! is nonetheless fascinating. From its outdoor theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, the American Players Theatre offers an idyllic production of O’Neil’s pseudo-biographical comedy. The story follows a day in the life of a wealthy family in Connecticut on the Fourth of July, 1906. It’s strange to see O’Neil’s only comedy for a host of reasons: considering O’Neil’s intense dramas like Strange Interlude and The Iceman Cometh, it’s unusual to hear him go about the business of setting up punch lines. Also, since it’s pseudo-autobiographical, Ah, Wilderness! is oddly similar to his pseudo-autobiographical drama A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Whereas Ah, Wilderness! presents a sanitized, overly romanticized vision of O’Neil’s family life, Long Day’s Journey is arguably one of O’Neil’s darkest dramas. And there’s an unshakeable tension in the comedy that feels a lot like hanging out with a passive-aggressive family during a holiday. O’Neil seems obsessed with showing the world a vision of his childhood in a happy, presentable format. There’s a pervasive sense that O’Neil (and by extension the whole cast) is afraid that something less than pleasant may surface to mar the cheerful cosmetic happiness of it all. But bizarre tensions aside, APT’s production of Wilderness is remarkably well put together. Stage veteran Henry Woronicz plays family patriarch Nat Miller, owner of the Evening Globe newspaper, who has raised several children with his wife Essie (the ever-appealing Tracy Michelle Arnold). At the center of the play is a precocious Miller by the name of Richard. Presumably the Eugene O’Neil analogue in this play, Richard (Steve Haggard) is a strong-willed intellectual who is taken with Muriel McComber (Kelsey Brennan). Their strong but young love is tested when Richard’s notes to Muriel are discovered by her parents, who have forbid her to see him. Distraught, Richard goes to a disreputable bar with his friend Wint (Kevin Pitman), and as anyone could probably guess, shenanigans ensue. This is O’Neil, though, and not a more established comic playwright like Neil Simon, so the shenanigans in question have a dark edge that never really manages to be that funny. If anything, it’s all quite uncomfortable. Thankfully, it is all entertainingly uncomfortable. Stellar performances by the entire cast ensure that the play is at its best, despite a less-than-impressive script. Tiffany Scott is particularly memorable as Richard’s little sister Mildred, and Sara Day puts in a captivating performance as Nat’s unmarried sister Lily. The biggest standout performance in a supporting role here has got to be Ken Albers as Essie’s perpetually drunk brother Sid. Albers has a charisma that only comes from a long life on the stage. It’s a pleasure to see him in a role where he is able to capitalize on that charisma. While the sappy, wistuful ending leaves all kinds of things to be desired, it is nonetheless a satisfying evening of theater, all things considered. The American Players Theatre’s production of Ah, Wilderness! runs through October […]
Jul 7th, 2008
The Making of a King
Taking place in two separate feature-length parts, William Shakespeare’s Henry IV rarely appears in its entirety. This is a lamentable situation, as Shakespeare’s style of storytelling benefits a great deal from a longer, more involved plot structure than a single feature-length play will allow for. In its entirety Henry IV forms the middle half of a four-part series that begins with Richard II and ends with Henry V. Milwaukee Shakespeare closes out its four-year production of the series this coming February with its staging of Henry IV, while this summer, the American Players Theatre in Spring Green launches its abbreviated production of Henry IV. The play is largely focused on Part One, with a heavily edited version of Part Two to round out a single two-hour presentation. While it’s a pretty fair substitute for anyone who might not have caught Shakespeare’s classic in its entirety with Milwaukee Shakespeare these past two years, the APT’s truncated Henry IV isn’t the breathtaking tale of power and intrigue that it could have been. James Ridge puts in an admirable performance in the title role, carrying a weary restlessness with him. Ridge musters a commanding stage presence, but the rest of the events of this particular adaptation fail to harness his energy to power a coherent stage dynamic. Fusing the two scripts together seems to have killed some of the intensity of Shakespeare’s pacing, and Ridge’s performance, which would’ve been brilliant in a more balanced production, can’t help but flounder a bit here. APT Core Acting Company member Matt Schwader plays the king’s son Prince Hal. Though Schwader has more than ample charisma in the role of the young prince who carouses with thieves and bandits, the finer ends of his performance lack the finesse needed to show the full intensity of Hal’s transformation into Henry V at the end of the play, and Without the full benefit of all the events leading to that end, Schwader isn’t given enough room to develop. Brian Mani puts in the single most memorable performance of the production as Hal’s ally Sir John Falstaff. Though he’s largely comic relief, Falstaff is one of the most enduring characters in the series, and the opportunity to play Falstaff gives Mani an perfect spotlight in the production. He takes full advantage. Mani, who performed the title role in APT’s Timon of Athens last year, is a gifted actor and here we see him elevating the ends of an otherwise largely uninspired production of Henry IV. Mani, Schwader, Ridge and many others hold things together, but the underlying problem here is the script, which fails to bring coherence or power to let the drama stand alone. One of the major consumer-level criticisms of Shakespeare’s histories is that they are long and boring. APT had the opportunity to fuse two of the histories into a package that would be much more attractive to unfamiliar audiences, but their adaptation fails to do this, settling for an adaptation of the two-part script that is […]
Jul 7th, 2008
Now in 3D!
You might not think Hillary Clinton and Alanis Morissette have much in common, but somehow, Broadminded’s rendition of Hillary’s concession speech as the spoken lyrics of “You Oughta Know” sheds new light on the current presidential campaign season as well as the media coverage consuming it: exactly what the four women of Broadminded are aiming for in their newest multi-media sketch show, Broadminded: Now in 3-D. Each sketch targets an aspect of modern media and exposes the skewed, the superficial and the downright ridiculous. The four women of Broadminded – Stacy Babl, Anne Graff LaDisa, Melissa Kingston and Megan McGee – got together two years ago after taking classes and performing at ComedySportz. All four collaborate in the writing, direction and production of each sketch. They are ego-less in their synergy, producing light comedy with a serious underlying point, like the ultra-conservative news pundit who insists the answer to controlling illegal drugs is right there in the second amendment, or the sober BBC anchor interviewing girls she believes to be Chinese exchange students, but are really just Americans who want a few bucks on a promised prepaid Master Card. The show incorporates video sketches with the live performance, spoofing a Dateline exploration of “Prodigious Progeny.” The most notable chronicles the nurturing that goes into raising a daughter believed to be the anti-Christ. After all, the number six can look an awful lot like the letter “G” if not practiced over and over with strict parental guidance. LaDisa is eerily charming as the hoped-for anti-Christ. Broadminded: Now in 3-D is the group’s first attempt at a completely thematic show. Each sketch spins satirical on aspects of the media and entertainment, including television, radio, news and advertising. It’s smugly satisfying to see a version of those yogurt commercials in which live-culture lovers admit they’re still hungry. And who knew there’s now a prescription drug called Urbanadrene, a cure to the disease Suburbanitis? Side effects include but are not limited to eating organic produce and using public transportation. The four women don’t just throw together a few funny ideas and hope for the best: research is an integral part of their creative process. Most will recognize syndicated radio host Delilah as an effortlessly bland surgeon of the heart, patching up relationships with generic pop songs of the past two decades. But Kingston’s phenomenal interpretation of an alcohol abuser lining up shot glasses on the sound board while producers try to break into her studio is based in truth, which makes it even better. Performers in comedy sketches have just a few seconds to establish personas for the audience. Broadminded uses body language, voice and very few props to convey character immediately. All four women completely invade their roles, and each sketch is crisp and distinctive. The video sketches provide time for make-up, hair and costume changes. Some of the physical comedy occasionally slides into stereotypes that Broadminded could have avoided, but despite this, the women never rely on an article of clothing or […]
Jun 23rd, 2008
The Boys Next Door
Staging Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door can be a tricky endeavor. The comedy about a group of developmentally disabled men and the social worker who looks after them uses a brand of humor that doesn’t always make people feel comfortable. The audience is encouraged to laugh at the cognitively impaired not because they are strange and freakish, but because their offbeat idiosyncrasies are honest reflections of neuroses common to even the most functional among us. The key to a successful staging of the play is the delicate balance between the comedy of the individual and the comedy of disability in a way that maintains a universal level of human dignity. The Sunset Playhouse production, which opened last weekend, comes perilously close to presenting its subjects as stereotypes of mental retardation, but only in brief, fleeting moments. For the most part, this is an exquisite production of a well-written contemporary comedy. Mark Neufang plays Jack Palmer, the social worker keeping track of four men who live in a group home for the developmentally disabled. The play charts Palmer’s uneasy desire to find better, less stressful work elsewhere. Neufang has an impressive amount of nice-guy charm, but the subtleties of his character’s mounting job dissatisfaction are largely missing. However, Neufang brings more than enough compassion to the stage to make up for any other shortcomings in his performance. Scott Kopischke plays group home resident Arnold Wiggins. Wiggins is a reasonably functional individual who works at a movie theatre. Wiggins has a mildly obsessive compulsive personality that is warped by an aversion to internally consistent logic. Kopischke recently played Elwood P. Dowd in a Sunset production of Harvey. His performance here is far more accomplished. Here he shows a profound amount of humanity and a clear aptitude for performance in a larger ensemble piece peppered with a few clever stretches of monologue. Lawrence J. Lukasavage plays group home resident Norman Bulansky. Norman’s cognitive development seems to be stuck at grade school level, but he’s functional enough to hold a job at a local donut shop. This is Lukasavage’s first performance with Sunset and probably one of the few he’s had outside Off The Wall Theatre. Lukasavage takes to the new stage quite well in a brilliantly subdued performance. It’d be all too easy to simply pretend to be a child in the role of Norman, and Lukasavage gracefully avoids this in a very sympathetic performance. Kurtis Witzlsteiner plays mild schizophrenic Barry Klemper. Klemper believes himself to be a professional golfer. Probably the most functional of the four men, Klemper may be one of the trickiest roles to play. The character has to seem completely functional until a key moment when everything turns around for him. Witzlsteiner is capable at conveying the character’s emotional dynamic, but seem to lack the kind of stage experience necessary to make the role as powerful as it could be. Mario Alberts rounds out the central cast in the role of Lucien P. Smith, a profoundly impaired man […]
May 29th, 2008
To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday
In 1983, Michael Brady’s touching drama To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday generated a landslide of critical praise, marking Brady as a promising new playwright. Over a dozen years later, the play was adapted for a film, which bombed critically and financially. The play is still produced, but probably not as much as it deserves. The story itself may not be all that impressive, but the script impressively compensates for the plot: the dialogue is crisp, clever and inventive, and the characters carry a strikingly vivid depth. One of the quietest companies in town, Soulstice Theatre, has opened a thoroughly entertaining production of the drama that runs through the end of the month. Randall T. Anderson plays a semi-retired teacher named David who leads a reclusive life on his island home. He is having difficulty moving on from the death of his wife Gillian, a situation which is complicated by his nightly conversations with the memory of her (played with a great deal of emotional magnetism by Ana DeLorme). Anderson delivers David’s intellectual charm in a deeply articulate performance. Brady populates the rest of the play with interesting characters memorably represented by Soulstice’s cast. Hannah Richtman, a high school junior, plays David’s daughter Rachel. Rachel, concerned about her father’s inability to move on after her mother’s death while still coping with her own sense of loss, has a remarkable amount of intellectual and emotional maturity, which Richtman gracefully and admirably brings to the stage. Ellen Sommers plays her friend Cindy, who stargazes with David and Rachel at the beginning of the play. Richtman and Sommers work well together, which goes a long way toward grounding the play’s social center. They are soon joined by Rachel’s aunt Esther (Jillian Smith) and uncle Paul (Jeffrey S. Berens) who bring an old student of David’s (Amber Page) to his island home in an effort to motivate him to be less solitary. Soulstice performs the play in the Marian Center’s Academy Studio Theatre, which will be familiar to anyone who saw Dramatists Theatre show last season. It’s an intimate theatre to begin with, but Soulstice’s use of the space for this production amplifies its intimacy considerably. A stairway bisects the seating area that directly faces the stage. Those in the seats flanking the stairway are extremely close to the action. The Boulevard Theatre is known for bringing its actors close enough to touch, but Soulstice’s blocking for this production is closer to the audience than anything that I’ve seen in half a decade of covering theatre in Milwaukee. Director Char Manny places some of the most emotionally intense scenes right next to the staircase. Sit in one of those first two seats flanking the staircase and you’re only barely further away from the actors than they are from each other, imparting the feeling of almost being directly involved in some of the most intense conversations in the play. If you were any closer, you’d be in the production. The acting might not perfectly live […]
May 20th, 2008
Armadale
Brian Vaughan and Emily Trask in Armadale Jeffrey Hatcher is one of the most talented American playwrights alive. His deftly-written monologue program Three Viewings recently found a local stage at Kopper Bear productions — a tiny studio staging which became one of the best productions in the county this season, of any size. Even the best writers, however, don’t always write the best stuff. For Hatcher, Armadale is a perfect example. Hatcher’s adaptation of the 1862 penny dreadful by Wilkie Collins makes its world premiere this month at The Milwaukee Rep. While it has its moments, Hatcher’s adaptation of Armadale is an amateurish work that nearly succeeds in spite of itself thanks to the heroic efforts of a top-notch Milwaukee Rep cast. Armadale is the story of two men, both named Allan Armadale, caught in the scheming web of Lydia Gwilt. Collins forged Armadale’s voluminous plot in tiny episodes as a very long-running serial, with the complete novel weighing in at well over 700 pages. In theory there could be countless ways to capture Collins’ unique blend of turgid romantic soap opera and social commentary into a stage play. Only the least imaginative would involve a script that stretches nearly three hours onstage, which is exactly what Hatcher has done here. Rather than carefully choose the most dramatic scenes in the novel to construct a graceful, deftly-paced plot, Hatcher has slapped together a script that lurches, heaves and gasps across the stage, occasionally running when it should walk, jumping when it should crouch, leaving stranded the few truly captivating moments of drama, comedy and beauty. For all its pedigree, The Rep’s world premier production of Armadale fits one of the most common profiles in local theater: a remarkably talented cast thrown at a less-than-inspired script. While the cast manages to salvage some of the script’s less entertaining moments, more often than not, decent talent goes underutilized. Brian Vaughn and Michael Gotch play the Allans, with Vaughn in peak form here as a wealthy man caught up in forces beyond his control. But Gotch, though up to his usual standards, seems to be thrown at a far from interesting character. In stand-out performances, Gerard Neugent brilliantly plays an investigator with a few fleeting but hilarious moments, and Emily Trask is excellent in her twin roles (the last before she leaves town to begin an MFA program at the Yale School of Drama). Living up to her high visibility in the Rep’s promotional material for the play, Milwaukee Rep Resident Actress Deborah Staples gives one of her best performances in years as the story’s incomparable femme fatale: Ms. Lydia Gwilt. VS The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Armadale runs through May 25 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the Rep box office at 414-224-9490 or visit the Rep online. Wilkie Collins’ original novel Armadale is in pubic domain and can be found free of charge online.
Apr 29th, 2008
Two one-act dramas
Underground art institutions Insurgent Theatre and Alchemist Theatre have teamed up for a double feature that explores the darker side of human emotion. The two shorts, split by an intermission, run no longer than an average feature-length drama. The presentation runs through May 4. Insurgent opens the program with Cracks in the Floor, a compelling naturalistic drama starring Tim Chrapko and Tracy Doyle as siblings who live above a man running a Christian cult (Jason Hames). Doyle’s performance is inexplicably captivating given the passivity of her character while Chrapko’s best work lies in unspoken movements – in the title moment, for instance, when he peels back the carpeting to reveal light shining through a crack in the apartment floor. In a brilliant and subtle statement about the nature of observation, Cracks in the Floor turns mirrors upon mirrors as the audience watches Chrapko watch those who are watching Hames. The play was developed in Insurgent’s workshop and through intensive one-on-one character development with director Wes Tank. The resulting short is by no means a ground-breaking work, but the process contributed to producing a profoundly moody piece that drifts across the stage with a casually dazzling darkness. In Alchemist’s psychological thriller 31 – set along US Highway 31 – Kirk Thomsen plays a reluctant forensic pathologist investigating a string of murders with Aaron Kopec as the womanizing police investigator working alongside him. Kopec also designed the set, which is impressively detailed for such a small space. Liz Shipe picks up dual roles as the forensic pathologist’s wife and a waitress at the diner where the two investigators meet. The plot is derivative of Hollywood crime dramas and draws quite close to Christopher Nolan’s indie classic Memento, but the ensemble manages to deliver interesting, clever performances. Shipe and Kopec’s moments together as Investigator and Waitress are some of the most novel in the play. Thomsen’s believable performance tempers the pathologist’s uneasiness with an understated professional detachment. The story of 31 ends with a video segment which fails to tie together an otherwise satisfying first outing for Alchemist Theatre Productions. VS Cracks In The Floor and 31 run through May 4 at the Alchemist Theatre. For more information, visit Insurgent and/or Alchemist online.
Apr 25th, 2008
Talley’s Folly
Originally staged in 1979, Talley’s Folly is a romantic theatrical waltz for two written by Lanford Wilson. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre closes its season with a production of the play starring Laura Gray and Jonathan West. In 90 minutes without intermission we see an unlikely romance develop between an older man and a younger woman on July 4th, 1944. Jonathan West plays Matt Friedman, a sharp Jewish gentleman who is smitten with Sally Talley, a strong-willed, highly articulate southern woman. Matt meets Sally at a decaying gazebo-like boathouse in twilight. In no uncertain terms, Sally tries to tell Matt that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, but Matt is persistent. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the plot will ultimately end up, but it does get there in a refreshing way. Cast in the glow of Jason Fassl’s lighting design, R.H. Graham’s well-designed set establishes a pleasant mood. Still, the play starts off on the wrong foot; when it begins, there is Jonathan West, bearded, speaking in an accent that is difficult to place. That’s intentional, but West’s voice doesn’t sound natural, even if the emotions behind it seem to be. West tries his best to be charming at the outset, but he falls considerably short for at least the first quarter hour, coming off as that guy you meet at the bus stop whose conversation you tolerate for the sole purpose of being polite. Laura Gray as Sally makes it apparent that she wants to get rid of Matt as quickly as possible, but, though it is easy to identify with her need to get away from this guy, sympathy doesn’t go far enough to make her seem all that pleasant either. But the awkward first third of the play is worth sitting through, particularly for those who pay attention. Somewhere after the first half hour, the dynamic between Sally, Matt and the audience becomes a lot more comfortable. There’s an emotional gravity between Sally and Matt that keeps them orbiting each other in conversation, careful to keep their distance for fear of crashing into each other too soon. Gray and West portray the intricacies of human emotional traction with admirable subtlety. As the story of Matt and Sally becomes increasingly interesting, the production builds momentum, and somewhere around the last quarter hour of the play, Matt Friedman becomes irresistibly charming, and Sally’s strength becomes unspeakably beautiful. The audience had to sit though 75 minutes worth of less-than-satisfying theatre, but everything ends almost perfectly. Right on time. And without the relative discomfort of much of the rest of the play, those last 15 minutes wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as they end up being. As it is, this is one of the most satisfying productions of the season, even though so much of it is rather unpleasant. VS Talley’s Folly runs through May 4 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre. Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at […]
Apr 21st, 2008
Hula Hoop Sha-Boop
When I was in grade school, some of the biggest hits on pop radio spoke of paternity suits, what it was like to be a virgin “touched for the very first time” and the sound of doves crying. By the time I got to high school, pop radio was openly dealing with sex, anatomy and human aggression. It’s difficult for someone who grew-up in the 1980s and early 1990s to understand that there was a time when the pop music hit parade was overwhelmingly innocent. Aside from a few dark songs like “Mack The Knife” (a song about murder), most of the music on the pop charts back then were the kind of innocent teen love songs that make it so easy to forget that the 1950s were anything but innocent. While intolerable amounts of racism and sexism were socially acceptable, pop radio asked, “Do you love me?” While the CIA was ramping up to do extremely malicious deeds overseas, pop radio asked, ”Do you want to dance?” As the cold war was building-up the military industrial complex, pop radio asked, “Why do fools fall in love?” The Milwaukee Rep returns to an age of pop-cultural innocence as it stages these songs and more in the Stackner Cabaret’s production of Hula Hoop Sha-Boop. They may not have been the most poignant songs to come through the airwaves, but there was a real passion behind the hits of the 1950s, driven as they were by the emotional energy of jazz and blues. Much of that passion had been bleached and sanitized from the music by the time it made it to the recording studio and out over the airwaves, but it was still there. The music comes to the Stakcner cabaret with nearly all of its remaining soul drained from it. This is not to say that Hula Hoop Sha-Boop isn’t a great deal of fun. It is. Really. Hula Hoop Sha-Boop is a deftly-weighted package of nostalgia balanced by a contemporary understanding of mid-century culture. The show opens with an audio mix that swiftly takes the audience from the present back to mid-century with brief, iconic sound bytes from every decade. Occasional glances are taken at the adult word beyond pop culture, the most savvy of which takes the audience through a performance of the “Duck and Cover” PR jingle – the U.S. government’s attempt to calm public fears of the threat of nuclear weapons. It’s easily the cleverest moment in the production. With no real plot to weigh it down, the show quickly barrels through medleys of over sixty songs from ‘50’s and ‘60’s pop radio. The quick pace of the show moves swiftly through a tightly packaged collection of songs presented without intermission on a set packed with more nostalgic visuals than a Rock’n’Roll McDonald’s. The cast keeps up with the pace of the show and keeps things together. (Scott Rott’s costuming carries a great deal of weight as well.) Mo Brady looks perfect as the mid-20th century […]
Mar 31st, 2008
Endgame
Before the play begins, the audience faces an image that resembles a René Magritte painting. A formless background of white clouds against blue sky is projected into the drawn curtain. When the curtain is pulled back, we see the familiar, iconic set of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. A sheeted object rests center stage. Two more sheeted objects rest off to the side. Sand rests in piles on the floor. A large, cylindrical steel wall stands with two high porthole windows stands above the set. Todd Rosenthal’s set is well-crafted and everything is almost eerily, perfectly in place besides the painted-on stains and filth on the set walls. In the role of Clov, a servant who cannot sit down, Milwaukee Rep Resident Actor Lee E. Ernst exhibits considerable talent for bringing subtlety to his somewhat pathetic character. He walks with an awful trudge. Everything from the precise peculiarity of Clov’s laugh to his unique way of climbing a ladder is breathtakingly idiosyncratic. The physical aspect of Ernst’s performance is especially indispensable at the beginning of the play when the character speaks no dialogue, busily drawing the sheets off two ashbins and his elderly charge Hamm, played by Mark Corkins. He resonates deeply in this role. The character’s pompous egocentrism, breathing through Corkins, echoes over an infinite abyss of monotony at the end of the world. Corkins and Ernst craft a brilliantly dark comedy, tempered with just the right amount of drama. Endgame is easily the single most powerful production The Rep has staged this season. Adding contrast to Corkins and Ernst are Torrey Hanson and Laura Gordon in the roles of Nagg and Nell. Gordon’s performance is the nadir of human emotion — a minimalist symphony. Hanson is hauntingly stark, rumbling along in the semi-death of Hamm’s father until it comes time to tell the joke. Hanson’s delivery of the joke provides a perfect counterpoint to the rest of the production. Endgame has been described as a staged dramatic poem for four actors. There’s a gentle rhythm and percussion moving through the characters that can be played with endless subtle variations. These four very talented and seasoned Rep actors create an impressive spoken word quartet, aided by Ernst’s talent for physical performance. For those in the right state of mind for the comedy of misery, this production is sheer pleasure from beginning to end. The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Endgame runs now through April 20 at the Stiemke Theater. For more information call the Rep box office at 414-224-9490 or visit the Rep online.
Mar 27th, 2008
Blessed Assurance
As messed up as things seem in the United States right now, it is reassuring to realize that certain things were much worse 100 years ago. A lot happened in the 20th century. In theory, every adult citizen of the United States can vote now. This was not the case on the other side of the 20th century. And while the actual power of that vote is subject to speculation, many people exerted a great deal of courageous effort to make universal suffrage a reality. This month Acacia Theater Company stages Laddy Sartin’s Blessed Assurance, the story of one African-American woman who demanded her right to vote in Mississippi in 1964. Ericka Wade stars as Olivia, a cook at a diner in Sunflower County. As the play opens, that familiar face at the diner has become a controversial one. Olivia had climbed the courthouse steps to register to vote and been turned back. Wade has a kind of quiet strength that ties together the rest of the cast quite nicely. Wade has given some stand-out performances at the Boulevard Theatre recently and makes an equally impressive Acacia debut in a role she inhabits quite memorably. Evan Weisfeldt plays Harlan, the owner of the café. While Harlan seems to respect Olivia, he is a victim of prejudice, and when pressed, he is caught between his apparent respect for Olivia and his place in society in a volatile period of American history. Weisfeldt captures the uncertainty of the time, but his performance fails to shed much light on that side of the human psyche that is unable to accept change towards greater equality. Finding the source of deep-rooted intolerance would be a tremendous challenge for any actor, and Weisfeldt plays the character with enough balance to keep him interesting. But without a deeper understanding of his motivations, he comes off as something of an enigma. Olivia’s friend Lewis, played by Mario Andre Alberts, is concerned for her safety and joins her in her second trip to the courthouse to demand to be registered to vote. It’s a move that makes things that much worse at the café, which by this time has closed for business and become a refuge for the two of them. Alberts’ performance is compassionate, and he coaxes Lewis and Olivia closer together over the course of the play. There’s a strength between the two of them, but things are going to get much worse before they get better as the two are accosted by a man named Slick. Jason Will plays the face of blatant racism as Slick. He’s apparently a regular at the café, but his relationship to the other characters is complicated. Perhaps he knows Olivia and Lewis as people, but doesn’t recognize them as equals. This dynamic comes into subtle prominence in a scene between him and Lewis. Slick sits on the counter and asks Lewis to shine his shoes – something Lewis stopped doing a long time ago. The scene is uncomfortable to watch, […]
Mar 4th, 2008
Butterflies are Free
Love and romance are classical theatrical themes, but few productions in the greater Milwaukee area this season have trained their focus on a single, simple love story. Now through March 9, Spiral Theatre welcomes romance back to center stage with Leonard Gershe’s Butterflies are Free. The story of a young musician falling for an aspiring actress debuted on Broadway in 1969 and three years later was adapted for a film starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert. Clues in the dialogue pin the story squarely in New York at the end of the ‘60s, but Director Mark Hooker’s choices ensure that the period doesn’t overpower the story. Don Baker (Ryan Dance) is a blind man who has just moved out of his mother’s house and into a tiny New York apartment, much against his mother’s wishes. Mrs. Baker (Sandra Stark) is determined to get him to move back in with her, but Don longs for independence – and he’s just met Jill Tanner (Ruth Arnell), the beautiful girl next door whom he seems to be falling in love with. Don and Jill’s fragile new relationship is put to the test as Mrs. Baker stops by for a surprise visit, questioning Jill’s stability and Don’s ability to remain independent. The first half of the play lets us see Don and Jill begin to make a connection over the course of a conversation. The outside stresses come along after intermission, where things become much more complicated as more is revealed about Don and Jill. The second half doesn’t come off nearly as flawlessly, but Dance and Arnell are so good together that it hardly matters. Ryan Dance is excellent as he plays the subtleties of blindness without exaggerating them. Don’s dialogue has a cleverly sarcastic bite that Dance’s soft-spoken delivery pleasantly offsets. Arnell, recently featured in relatively flimsy roles (“The Girl” in Sunset Playhouse’s The Seven Year Itch and similar roles in a couple of different bedroom farces), is overwhelmingly magnetic and captures her role with depth. She conveys Jill’s idiosyncrasies with a casual, lived-in charm that never feels forced. Her performance is so believable that it’s actually kind of exhilarating to watch her character fall in love. There’s a familiar sense of excitement about that particular conversation that brings two strangers together, and this pair brings that excitement to the stage with vivid precision. The idiosyncrasies of Spiral Theatre’s space on West National Avenue contribute to the atmosphere of a New York City studio apartment. The characters frequently refer to the sounds bouncing through the paper-thin walls of the apartment, while in real-time, the sound of traffic from outside the theatre reverberates into the space. Not long into any evening performance of the show, the sound of mariachi music can be heard from a nearby restaurant. Spiral moves to Bucketworks for its next show, and it will mark the third venue of Spiral’s season — quite a hat trick for such a small theatre company. VS Spiral Theatre’s Production of Butterflies Are […]
Feb 25th, 2008
The Lion King
Inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, Disney’s 1994 animated feature The Lion King was a huge success at box offices nationwide. In 1997, it debuted with ridiculous success as a Broadway musical thanks to the songwriting talents of Elton John and Tim Rice, who also scored the film. The show prowls through the Milwaukee Theatre this month in a nearly sold-out series of performances. The Lion King is engineered for families, but the musical, though based on a 90-minute animated feature, is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, an expansion so drastic that the kids who would get the most out of the show couldn’t possibly sit through the whole thing. Take a cue from our own First Stage Children’s Theatre, one of the biggest professional children’s theatre companies in the country: you can do amazing thing with a 90-minute stage musical for families. But people would probably be less inclined to pay for an extravagantly priced show if it was only as long as a feature film, and regardless, stretching out the story gives it some artistic clout. The extra 75 minutes make for the best parts of the show. The exotic traditional African folk music and dance added to the stage musical may feel out of place next to highly-produced, glossy Eton John/Tim Rice music, but they impart a new life to the story. Gugwana Dlamini, in the role of the monkey Rafiki, gives this show’s single most impressive performance. She sings around the borders of the musical’s glossiness, giving the production a beautifully jagged edge. Dlamini’s African vocals call to something very primal that is rarely heard by an audience this big. The South African vocalist’s hypnotic song elevates the musical beyond its heavily commercial identity. The production design is predictable given the size and expense of the production – a fairly crude distillation of traditional African folk art. An impressive collection of animal puppets and costumes captures some of the feel of the wild, but completing the illusion requires a great deal of imagination on the part of the audience. The perfect seats for this visual feast are somewhere in the middle of the ground floor. Get too close to the stage and it’ll look kind of ridiculous. Get too far away and it just looks like a bunch of people in a well-choreographed musical wearing strange apparatuses. But wherever you sit, and no matter how many fidgety kids are surrounding you, somewhere in the distance you can hear Dlamini’s voice resonate the same sort of primal sound that might have inspired Osamu Tezuka to sketch his first lion. VS Broadway Across America’s production of The Lion King runs through March 2 at the Milwaukee Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-273-7206 or online.
Feb 20th, 2008
Enchanted April
There’s something transcendental about Getting Away From It All. Given the right opportunity, people shed their accepted identities, move toward something less constructed and take a closer walk with their ideals. At the turn-of-the-century, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s novel Enchanted April explored the transformative nature of a vacation, a theme which becomes the single most enduring element in the stage adaptation by first-time playwright Matthew Barber. With a well-poised cast that captures a diversity of personalities, the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April has endearingly vivid charm. In the years following World War One, Lotty Wilton (Linsey Page Morton), the housewife of a British solicitor, runs across an advertisement for a vacation at an expansive, romantic estate in Italy. Lotty, a timid dreamer longing for something more than a life of servitude to her husband, seizes the opportunity to break out of her daily life. Since the vacation would be too expensive for Lotty to afford by herself, she approaches someone she’s never formally met – Rose Arnott (Laura Gornott) – and asks if she might like to go with her and split the costs. Rose, stuck in a distant marriage to novelist Frederick Arnott (Torrey Hanson), accepts. Making her Rep debut, Chicago-based actress Linsey Page Morton brings a charming, exuberant radiance to the stage. In the role of her husband, Brian Vaughn serves as a vaguely comic counterpoint to Lotty’s cheerfulness. Vaughn strikes a clever balance, playing his character somewhere between youth and middle age, halfway between conservative businessman and excitable schoolboy. The subtlety of Laura Gordon’s comic talent really shines in her role, but once the story moves to Italy in the second act, Gordon renders delicate, genuine emotion. This is Gordon in top form in a role that isn’t really written to break out beyond the ensemble. Deborah Staples and Rose Pickering nestle perfectly into their characters as the two other women approached by Rose and Lotty to join them and further diffuse costs. Staples is perfectly poised as wealthy young socialite Caroline Bramble, who goes to Italy to get away from the stress of English high society. Rose Pickering plays Mrs. Graves, a conservative British matron with hilarious steeliness. At the beginning of the second act, Gordon and Morton draw back the curtains to transform the darkness of London to the radiance of Italy. Amidst a beautiful, empty set (by Bill Clarke) Deborah Staples gracefully lounges, reading a book. There’s real comedy in the reveal – she seems so perfectly at home in the beauty of Italy that it’s as if the entire estate was built around the image of her there, reclining and reading, at home with her purer self. VS The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April runs through March 9th at the Stiemke Theater. Please note that Vaughn’s performance features something rarely seen onstage: brief, full-frontal nudity. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-224-9490 or online.
Feb 18th, 2008
Crime and Punishment
It’s dry. The forced perspective is harsh. Dust and plaster are piled around a dark, drab space. And there’s a man lying there in dreary, heavily worn garments. Look closely and you’ll see he’s breathing. Most people don’t seem to notice until they sit down. The lights fall into complete darkness. They rise. There are two men there. One of them faces the audience. The way he’s sitting looks very uncomfortable, but not in any earthly way. He should be uncomfortable — he’s Raskolnikov, tragic protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s shadowy, voluminous novel, played by Mic Matarrese. He’s just killed two people. Everyone in the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre seems to know this but him. This is no mystery. He’s aware of what he’s done – he just doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s a voice. It asks Raskolnikov if he believes in the story of Lazarus: resurrection. The voice is that of Drew Brhel playing Profiry — a man investigating a pair of murders. His back is to the audience, but we get to see a great deal of him in this play: he makes up a third of the cast. The third cast member plays multiple roles. Her name is Leah Dutchin. She plays both of Raskolnikov’s victims and one of the main reasons for the murders. Dutchin brings a memorable female strength to the play. The drama runs its course as we see the layers of the murderer’s psyche gradually pulled back to reveal the complexity of his actions. Invariably, some of the complexity of the novel has been eliminated in the adaptation, but with only three central characters in the play, we get an interesting dissection of the act of murder. In a brief conversation, Director Patrick Holland compares TV’s Law & Order and the Christopher Nolan film Memento to Crime and Punishment, and while there are definite echoes of modern popular crime drama in this Milwaukee Chamber production, something infinitely classier is going on here. The knowing questioning of Drew Brhel, paired with expert lighting and the sound design, evokes Alfred Hitchcock. The concept of murder infuses every single line of the play, but it’s rarely spoken about directly. When it is – especially in Brhel’s galvanizing voice – we see more shades of Hitchcockian drama. The wicked forced perspective of Pitts’ clever set is pushed and stretched in so many places. Leah Dutchin appears in doors that once were walls. The doors are everywhere, constantly opening to remind Raskolnikov of something he desperately wants to forget. There’s an ebb and flow to the action. Moments of fragile peace are shattered every time the wall opens to reveal another door. Things don’t truly settle down until the end. The last door opens and a piercing light cuts through it all. Maybe it never seemed important until that final moment, but this is a physically dark play as well. We see things moving around in dust and shadow for the entire 90 minutes without intermission. […]
Feb 18th, 2008
Faith Healer
A scene from Friel’s play Faith Healer, as perfomed by Next Act Theatre. Irish playwright Brian Friel casts a piercing glance into the heart of truth and belief in his three-part drama Faith Healer. Three characters played by three remarkably talented actors speak four conflicting monologues in a thoroughly satisfying script. Next Act Theatre stages this fascinating drama on the intimate stage of the Off-Broadway Theatre through the end of the month. Jonathan Smoots opens the play speaking arcane names of ancient villages buried in the antiquity of the British Isles, creating an air of fantasy. Smoots plays Frank, the title character — a man somewhat uneasily saddled with his profession. Smoots, until now largely relegated to supporting roles, here has presence and a great deal of flair at center stage. The charismatic actor embraces the stage lights with a deep, friendly Irish accent. He tells of his shaky journey from village to village — speaking of his mistress and his agent with sunny tones shaded by a clever uncertainty of his own capabilities. He’s right there in front of us, but even as he speaks simple words as clear as day, there’s an air of mystery about him. Smoots’ deft performance includes a spot-on Irish brogue that shifts to perfect Cockney when the character does an impression of his agent. Smoots shows a casually impressive flair for moving between accents without slowing down, dropping a line or fading out of character. The fact that any classically trained actor with two decades of local stage experience should be able to do this doesn’t make it any less impressive. The second character to take the stage is the faith healer’s mistress Grace. Mary MacDonald Kerr strikes a sharp figure in the role of the educated solicitor who somehow fell in with a man who took her away from a respectable middle-class life. Kerr shows a shrewd strength that is a lot of fun to watch. More than simply contradicting some of the details of Grace’s life with Frank, Kerr renders a completely new dimension to the character that builds on what the first monologue explored. She draws attention to Grace with an understated integrity, working out her story with every word she speaks. The final character to take the stage is Frank’s agent Teddy. Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cecsarini plays the witty Cockney gentleman who handles Frank’s business affairs as a friend and promoter. He speaks about his experiences with Frank peppered with tales of other acts he’s managed. It’s the more heavily comic end of the play and Cecsarini handles it expertly. His third perspective adds respectable depth to the rest of what’s been said onstage, setting it for one last encounter with Frank. Smoots’ final moments on stage end in a beautiful silhouette brilliantly painted by Lighting Designer Jason Fassl. The lights fade. The applause sounds out. Faith Healer‘s themes reverberate through the evening. VS Next Act’s production of Faith Healer runs now through March 2 at […]
Feb 7th, 2008
Twelfth Night
Alexis McGuinness and Molly Rhode in Milwaukee Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Milwaukee Shakespeare’s impressively staged production of Twelfth Night only played for seven performances, a briefly realized event manifesting just long enough to register a reaction before its disappearance. Shakespeare’s quintessential gender-bending comedy came to the stage of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center with a distinctly 20th century feel. Noele Stollmack’s set vaguely suggested a financial institution designed by Ikea, with minimalist stairs, platforms and bars. It provided a remarkable background for the production, and with some exquisite lighting, also by Stollmack, this production of Twelfth Night was a real pleasure to watch. The costuming by Mara Blumenfeld paired perfectly with the set, and with simple sports coats, secret service outfits, loud pinstripes and lace trim, the costuming promoted a greater period ambiguity. Brian J. Gill played a solidly charismatic Orsino, Duke of Illyria, who employs the services of a young man named Cesario – actually a disguised woman named Viola, played here by Alexis McGuinness. Viola loves Orsino, but is unable to show her love through the disguise, and unwittingly, Orsino dispatches Viola to woo Olivia — a countess played with subtlety by Molly Rhode. The plan backfires when Olivia falls for Cesario, who is of course only following the directions of the man she loves. The production fails to capture the full intricacies of the complex dynamic between Olivia, Viola and Orsino, but other aspects of the play more than made up the difference. It was a bit unexpected, for instance, to see the central action of the play upstaged by Mark H. Dold in the role of Olivia’s servant Malvolio. Dold, who has worked extensively in television, made Malvolio’s every detail sparkle with wit early on in the play. He carries himself with remarkable poise — a servant with exceptional aspirations who secretly pines for the woman he serves. His performance exemplified this production’s fascinating unevenness: the meat of the play seemed lost in exquisitely captured details from the periphery of the story. A considerably distracting subplot featured Viola’s brother Sebastian (Kevin Rich) and his good friend Antonio (Todd Denning). Rich was brilliant in the relatively marginal role, and Denning’s interaction with him carried a great deal of weight. There’s a bond between the two men that gets lost in the action of the play – perhaps because Shakespeare never found direct resolution between the characters. Under the direction of Paula Suozzi, that relationship received a well-executed resolution here that brilliantly shows a happy ending for some isn’t a happy ending for everyone. VS Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of Twelfth Night closed February 3. Its production of Cymbeline opens March 22 for a considerably longer run at the Broadway Theatre Center Studio Theatre. For tickets or more info call 414-2917800 or visit Milwaukee Shakes online.
Feb 4th, 2008
True West
Sam Shepard’s True West is a cleverly dark comedy that would be all too easy to overdo in all the wrong places. A less than shrewd production could miss the finesse of the original script, but the Spiral Theatre, in a tiny space on National Avenue, brings the right immediacy and intimacy to capture Shepard’s somewhat sinister humor with strikingly vivid form. In a testament to its growing prominence in local theatre, Spiral Theatre nearly sold out its 30+ capacity studio theatre on one of the coldest nights of the year. Spiral’s show is impressive, and while not all of the finer points of Shepard’s script are perfectly intact, the company manages to deliver an exceedingly enjoyable trip to the theatre. Len Macki stars as Austin, a struggling screenwriter who is looking after his mother’s place while she is away in Alaska. He’s managed to secure a meeting at her place with an important Hollywood producer (Josh Wetzel) to pitch an idea for a love story. The only problem: his brash older brother (Terry Gavin) is staying with him and threatens to blow Austin’s one chance at getting the producer’s green light. Things begin to unravel when Austin’s brother convinces the producer that it would be a good idea for Austin to write a Western instead. (Okay: Shepard’s plot is a lot better than it sounds in a few sentences. And if it’s not staged correctly, it’s every bit as cheesy as it sounds.) Len Macki, comfortably at the center of the production, holds much of the production together. (He’s not prominent locally, but he’s been active elsewhere, most notably Madison.) He dynamically renders Austin’s emotional development over the course of the play, moving from one intricately realized moment to the next. When Austin loses composure and takes to drinking, his emotional collapse is palpable. When he’s clearly dropping pieces of toast into toasters that aren’t plugged in, it makes sense even, though the illusion isn’t complete. Everything that happens around Austin makes sense, even when the production doesn’t make anything clear, and for that, Macki is truly remarkable. Gavin and Wetzel competently hold up their ends of the play. Gavin plays the seedy older brother with a subtle hint of a greater depth. Wetzel plays a Hollywood producer with a nice-guy charisma you wouldn’t expect from a man in his position. This contrast makes for an interesting performance; Wetzel seems almost guileless in a job one would expect to be played like a politician. Rounding out the cast is Sandra Stark in the role of the mother – again (during the holidays she appeared in Boulevard Theatre‘s production of Indian Blood). Seeing Stark play mother twice in three months would be strange if she weren’t so good at it. She speaks the lines. She doesn’t really need to do much more than that. She’s a natural for this kind of role, and here she’s a clever bookend to the production. Spiral Theatre’s production of True West runs through February […]
Jan 24th, 2008
Berzerk!!!
In the hours I spent watching the snow fall in Green Bay, I’d forgotten that the relatively quiet streets of Milwaukee’s East Side weren’t filled with snow. In something very much resembling a good mood, I caught the #15 bus to Bay View for my second evening of high-pressure theatre. I was headed to The Alchemist Theatre for Berzerk!!! — an evening of ten-minute plays presented by Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theatre. Last year’s event at the Turner Hall Ballroom had been an exceedingly good time, and I had no reason to think this year’s show would be any different. There were only a few people at the theatre’s bar when I got there, but a couple of beers into the evening, the place began to fill. Alamo Basement co-founder Mike Q. Hanlon introduced the sold-out show by way of explanation: for Berzerk!!!, Hanlon took lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and sent them to local playwrights, who were then given 10 self-enforced minutes to write a short script. Eleven shorts were performed by Insurgent and Alamo Basement cast members, mostly dressed in simple black. Two of the shows had been pre-selected for longer re-writes to be performed at the end of the show, and to complicate things further, during Hanlon’s introduction, a pair of playwrights worked alone on a pair of 10-minute shorts that would receive staged readings during the evening. The 15 shorts performed here were an interesting contrast to the show I’d seen the previous evening – Bunny Gumbo’s Combat Theatre. Combat Theatre is a different kind of theatre under pressure: playwrights pull a topic and a location out of hats. Twenty-four hours later, a series of shorts hit the stage. Everything involved in each of the eight productions must be completed in the same 24-hour period of time. The Bunny Gumbo shows tended to be light comedy sketches with a minimum of innovation. Berzerk!!! ranged from intense drama to absurdist comedy, in settings vague and abstract, clearly defined and realistic. Berzerk!!!’s diversity probably came form the process: playwrights worked alone on their own time before handing scripts over to Hanlon and company, who had a substantial amount of time to construct a dozen or so mini-productions. Perhaps working in a combative environment tends to produce sketch comedy the way a writer working alone tends to produce less predictable work. Maybe it’s just the writers that were available for each project. It’s all speculation from the outside, but Berzerk!!! seemed a lot edgier than the first night of Bunny Gumbo’s pleasantly commercial Combat Theatre. The show opened with one of the plays written during the opening monologue, a reasonably clever piece by Rex Winsome. Winsome’s near-comic over-emphasis on philosophy and politics was the basis for a unique tone. Taken too far, this could have come across like an empty gimmick, but Winsome’s voice was sharp enough to keep this from happening. Chelsea Bernard’s Marty and Maryann was a fun little domestic conversation rendered in respectably heavy […]
Jan 22nd, 2008
Arthur, The Boy Who Would Be King
The legend of King Arthur goes so far back that historians aren’t in perfect agreement as to exactly when or where it may have originated. In the modern age, stories of the Arthurian legend have been adapted to film, television, comic books, ballets and even a couple of rock operas. The latest incarnation of the legend to hit local theatres is actor/playwright James DeVita’s Arthur, The Boy Who Would Be King, now playing at the Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove. It’s a family show, written to be equally appealing to both children and parents. The resident playwright of First Stage Children’s Theatre, DeVita’s work here is an admirable adaptation of the old legends. Camelot is on the verge of collapse. Arthur is wracked with feelings of futility as everything he has worked for is falling apart. Merlin acts as a sort of Dickensian Christmas spirit, taking Arthur through his childhood into the dawn of Camelot and beyond. What unfolds isn’t exactly an inspired or insightful look into a story that’s been explored countless times, but it isn’t a tedious re-tread either. The cleverest moments in the script surround Merlin, a shadowy figure who has been a lot of fun for writers over the decades. DeVita realizes his wisdom with a kind of playfulness that keeps the play from becoming lost in its own drama. Some of this playfulness is competently captured here by Ed Carroll in the role of the wizard with the aid of lighting and other modest stage effects. The rest of the cast is big — really, really big. The Main Stage of the Sunset Playhouse is used to its fullest capacity here as thirty or more actors filter through the play, many of them children. Arthur and the other main characters are played by no less than thee actors each. Adult Arthur (Rick Richter) sees himself as a child (Stefano Romero) and an adolescent (Jon Van Gilder). Richter has all the presence of a King, with Romero and Van Gilder of appropriately less regal bearing as someone who was not at all noble until he drew a certain sword out of a certain stone. The play cycles through three distinct casts to represent different eras. As dramatic as this may seem, it feels quite natural, though it makes the full size of the cast feel less impressive than it would if everyone were playing a different character. The set by talented Sunset scenic artist J. Michael Desper is not as showy as might be expected, but the many bricks of the caste wall form a multi-tiered performance surface. It also serves as a nice space for the fight scenes choreographed by the Gene Schuldt. Shuldt’s great talent is normally evident, but here he’s working with a huge group of relatively inexperienced people, so it isn’t quite as show-stopping here. Like much of the rest of the production, the general immensity of things drowns out the power of the individual in a less than balanced production that […]
Jan 22nd, 2008
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
The spelling bee dates back to the early nineteenth century, and what may have started as a celebration of literacy in a largely agrarian nation has become a common feature of childhood culture familiar to people all over the country. One slice of Americana meets another in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee — a musical about the fictitious bee of an insular county that could be anywhere in the country. The musical, which opened at the Marcus Center this past Tuesday and runs throughout the week, is patterned after an actual spelling bee. There are grade school-style standing displays in the lobby and a desk for anyone in the audience who wants to sign up for the bee. At the beginning of the show, half a dozen audience members are called to the stage to compete. The show is performed without intermission and, strangely enough for a musical, with relatively little singing. Songs are short, inconsequential and as memorable as a fifteen-second television commercial. The result is a passably enjoyable comedy full of spelling-bee jokes and deft language-play that would be great if it weren’t for all those songs breaking the pace of the laughs. While music drags the production in numerous places, Spelling Bee is entertaining as a character comedy. The spellers are diverse: Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre (Dana Steingold), the precocious ultra-liberal daughter of two gay dads; William Barfee (Eric Roediger) an awkward kid with a unique spelling technique; Olive Ostrovsky (Vanessa Ray ), the child of distant parents; eccentric Leaf Coneybear (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), whose spelling abilities seem to come from nowhere; multi-talented ultra-perfectionist Marcy Park (Katie Boren) and sexually frustrated Boy Scout Chip Tolentino (Justin Keyes). James Kall has a brilliant sense of comic delivery as Vice Principal Douglas Panch, who officiates the bee with former champion Rona Lisa Peretti (Roberta Duchak). The touring production uses the old trick of dropping local references like Brett Favre and Brady Street. Still, nothing can top the craziness of inviting actual audience members to compete in the bee. It’s staged – the audience members are gone by the time the first couple of characters are eliminated – although on opening night, one woman didn’t get cut as expected, even managing to spell a word that had been entirely fabricated for the musical. Her turn came up again immediately, and she politely misspelled a much longer word. A show that so clearly welcomes this kind of controlled audience participation has a clever charm to it. VS The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee runs through November 11th at the Marcus Center. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-273-7206 or online at www.marcuscenter.org. December 11 – 16, the touring company makes its way to the Fox Cities PAC in Appleton. For more info, visit www.foxcitiespac.com
Nov 8th, 2007
How do you measure ten years?
It was almost an overnight success — an iconic piece of Broadway that infected the hearts and minds of thousands. Personally, I don’t see the appeal. I tend to agree with Cintra Wilson who once described it as “Cats with AIDS.” Think of it what you will, there is no denying the fact that Rent is now over a decade old. The fact that people are still performing it means that people are still seeing it. It came to the Milwaukee Theatre this past weekend on its way to Illinois, Louisiana and a host of other engagements. In spite of little advance publicity and almost no advertising, opening night was well attended. I was there. I was in college when Rent debuted Off-Broadway, and I am only a few years younger than Rent’s writer/composer Jonathan Larson. The costuming, set design, and overall visual aesthetics of the original musical, which are maintained in the touring production, came from the mid-nineties. It’s a look which will live on for decades to come in subsequent productions long after contemporary fashion has rendered them silly and antiquated. With its continued success and barely wavering popularity, Rent is my generation’s Hair. Seeing an audience filled with high schoolers feels strange. These kids were in grade school when Rent debuted. They’re watching Rent the same way my generation watched mid-80s John Hughes movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. They’re seeing a freshly-minted retro-pop-culture beginning its slow, steady march into nostalgia, then old age. They don’t know people like the characters in Rent. They will have to wait at least another ten years to see bizarrely romanticized musical theatre versions of people they knew ten years ago singing and dancing onstage. Rent still has that distinctive feel of genuinely good core music that’s been shellacked to a disturbingly glossy sheen. If you happen to be into that sort of thing, the show still holds up remarkably well. Jed Resnick and Heinz Winckler open the show as Mark Cohen and Roger Davis — a filmmaker and a musician living in a questionable apartment in New York. Anwar F. Robinson (evidently of American Idol fame) stars as their friend Tom Collins. The plot, a series of isolated events hazily woven into a central story, is about as coherent as it was a decade ago. There are singular moments that feel reasonably timeless – there’s still quite a bit of power in “Seasons of Love,” for instance –but some of it feels dated. It’s surreal to hear the audience “moo” at the appropriate moment in “Over the Moon,” as though they were all programmed to do so, and when the characters sing of dreams of opening a restaurant in “Santa Fe,” the production enters a time warp. A number of people from my generation went to New Mexico to pursue their dreams and ended up lost somewhere between the mesa and Burning Man, never to return. For the right people, this is a pleasant trip to big Broadway […]
Oct 30th, 2007
The Woman in Black
Renaissance Theaterworks revives the classic art of scary storytelling with Stephen Mallatratt’s wildly successful The Woman In Black. Based on the novel by Susan Hill, The Woman In Black tells the story of a man trying to escape ghostly events his past that have haunted him for years. The play, one of the longest-running productions in the history of London theatre, comes to the stage of the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre in a remarkably well-balanced Renaissance production. Milwaukee Rep resident actor Jonathan Gillard Daly plays a London solicitor who seeks to deal with traumatic events from his past by performing a staged reading of his recollections. Unskilled in the art of public performance, the solicitor enlists the help of a charismatic young stage actor named Arthur Kipps (Bran J. Gill.) As Kipps consults with the solicitor in an empty theatre, the story takes on a life of its own. As an actress, Mary MacDonald Kerr has proven her ability to bring drama (Burn This) and comedy (String of Pearls) to the stage vividly and with grace. In directing The Woman In Black she has put together a spook story with enough startling moments to keep an audience interested from beginning to end. Kerr makes clever staging decisions in the reasonable intimacy of the studio theatre. With the aid of ubiquitous lighting guy Jonathan Fassl, Kerr draws a moody atmosphere of light, shadow and darkness around a classic ghost story featuring two talented actors and a pair of equally talented shadows. Daly’s real challenge here seems to be the art of pretending he knows nothing about theatre as his character. It’s strange to see a man with Daly’s extensive stage experience pretending to be theatrically challenged. Daly presents his character as a man taking a liking to telling the story in a full theatrical production complete with recorded sound effects. The darkness of his tragic memories is barely on the edge of his consciousness as he delves deeper and deeper into the past. Gill’s stage charisma sells the role of actor quite well. The character becomes more complex as the story starts to develop its own momentum, but Gill manages a reserved sense of fright as he is immersed in the solicitor’s memories. Rebecca Phillips and Emily Trask round out the cast as shadowy figures. The most impressive part of their performances here is what isn’t seen onstage. Thanks to stage tricks, they’re maneuvering around in what must be something very close to total darkness to strike the perfect pose as the lights suddenly flash to reveal them. As often as this happens, it never ceases to be a shock. Renaissance Theaterworks’ production of The Woman In Black runs through November 4 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-291-7800 or online at www.r-t-w.com.
Oct 19th, 2007
The Wonder Bread Years
Stand-up comedian/writer/commercial spokesman Pat Hazell is touring the country with The Wonder Bread Years, a series of recollections about growing-up as a baby boomer. Local comedian and theatre icon John McGivern takes Hazell’s role in Milwaukee’s production of the one-man show. The set is a stylized suburban front porch, personalized with a few McGivern touches to ground us in 1960s Milwaukee. From tiny kid’s cereal boxes to Kool-Aid and Toughskin jeans, the monologue about childhood in America covers a lot of common pop cultural ground, and anyone who grew up in the US in the 60s, 70s or 80s can make a connection with Wonder Bread Years. Pat Hazell’s performance of the same material was aired some time ago as a one-hour PBS special. Even though Hazell performed his own material, McGivern’s performance far outshines Hazell’s. Hazell’s delivery is heavily rooted in stand-up comedy, while McGivern, whose experience is richer in the theatrical stage, performs with a much more engaging stage presence. When McGivern is onstage, he’s there for far more than telling jokes. He genuinely loves being there. The delivery may feel a little over-enthusiastic in places, but McGivern’s trademark exuberant earnestness makes the material feel much more organic. This is particularly effective when the comedy settles down in poignant observations about the nature of childhood. Hazell’s delivery is detached — like he’s delivering a sales pitch. When Hazell gets serious and sentimental with his own material, it comes across like a speech at a $300 per ticket motivational seminar. When McGivern delivers the same material, is performance caries the kind of authentic ebullience that makes it work. McGivern may be better with The Wonder Bead Years than its original author was, but in places it is clear that McGivern isn’t entirely comfortable with Hazell’s material. When McGivern is performing his own material, there’s a kind of magic onstage – especially in his interactions with the audience. It’s a distinct theatrical experience when a stage presence as strong and dynamic as McGivern talks about his childhood to a packed audience of people who could’ve been in the area when he was growing up. Everyone’s in a theatre, but there’s that distinct feeling that you’re hanging out with a nice guy from the neighborhood on his porch on the east side. VS Pat Hazelton’s The Wonder Bread Years with John McGivern runs through October 28th at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the Marcus Center at 414-273-7206 or online at www.marcuscenter.org
Oct 12th, 2007
Life Could Be a Dream
Californian cabaret guru Roger Bean opens the next in a growing number of original musicals at the Rep’s Stackner Cabaret. The same man who brought Milwaukee The Marvelous Wonderettes, The Andrews Brothers and Lana Mae’s Honky Tonk Laundrydebuts his latest, Life Could Be A Dream. Though it’s not quite as accomplished as previous revues, Life is a fun look back at the 1960s doo-wop experience. When a local radio station announces a contest to find the next big musical sensation, Denny (New Yorker Ben Cherry, who last appeared with The Rep in The Andrews Brothers) decides to put together an act in hopes of winning the hot rod of his dreams. With his awkward choir-boy friend Eugene (Richard Israel in his Rep debut), he forms a doo-wop group – complete with choreography – and the opening song is a shaky rendition of the title song by the pair. The group grows to include Piggly Wiggly clerk Wally (Justin Robertson) and auto mechanic Skip (Carlos Martin), and together the friends polish, mature, and struggle as they all become infatuated with the same girl. The show closes with a medley featuring the entire group in a much more sophisticated version of the title song. It can be tricky to do show such progress convincingly, but under the direction of Bean and chorographer Pam Kriger, the cast gives an excellent performance. The only woman in the cast – Julia Graham as Lois – provides much of the conflict within the fledgling doo-wop group. In a particularly smart bit of musical arrangement , each of the guys expresses his feelings for her in a medley featuring “Devil or Angel,” “Earth Angel” and “Only You.” Ben Cherry is inherently likeable as Denny, but he hasn’t been given much more to do than be nice and try to organize things. Some of the best lines are Justin Robertson’s as Wally in an entertaining comic role. But there aren’t as many laughs as there have been in previous Bean shows – and Bean has done the “nice, quirky people thrust into a spotlight” thing before in a number of his revues, so the story feels a little dull. Everything holds together pretty well in Life Could Be A Dream, but without the novel spark of comic wit so characteristic of Bean, it simply isn’t a clever as his previous work. VS The Milwaukee Rep’s Production of Life Could Be A Dream runs through November 4 at the Stackner Cabaret. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling 414-224-9490 or online at www.milwaukeerep.com
Sep 21st, 2007
2 Henry IV
Milwaukee Shakespeare continues its multi-season presentation of the Henriad with part two of Henry the Fourth. The production, which cleverly fills the space of the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, continues the saga of yet another doomed king on his way out of office. The doomed king in question is the title character as played by Angela Iannone. Thin, sinewy Iannone is a clever casting choice on the part of Milwaukee Shakespeare. Iannone, who has a long history in local theatre, casts the role in a faintly otherworldly light as she makes contact with the character of Henry IV through an almost saturnine stage presence. The king is frail and will die soon — this much is clear in a profoundly visual way before any lines are spoken. The stage is set up much the same way as it was for the 1 Henry IV last year. The audience flanks the stage with half of them facing the other half through the flurry of drama onstage. This season’s set elevates two of the four entrances at a diagonal to each other, providing a dramatic edge to the flow of action onstage. Everything feels pleasantly out of balance as the events of the play tumble across the stage. Even the cast feels a bit uneven, albeit affably. This year’s Prince Henry is played by last year’s Hotspur. This year’s Earl of Westmoreland is played by last year’s Gadshill. This year’s Bardolph is played by … last year’s Bardolph. And Michel Pocaro returns for another year in the role of Henry Percy. Jake Russo is every bit as comic in the role as he was last year. Pocaro’s continued exploration of Percy’s personality has been interesting to watch since he first walked onstage in the role as part of Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of Richard II at the end of the 2005 – 2006 season. Standout performances by those new to Milwaukee Shakes’ Henriad include a deft Bo Johnson in the role of Lord Mowbray, a fiery DeRante Parker as the Earl of Mowbray and a weighty performance by Bob Adrian as the Archbishop of York. Kevin C. Loomis plays this year’s Falstaff admirably, with all the requisite depth and darkness the character acquires from the first to second part of the series, but he’s playing that role in the shadow of Ricard Ziman’s magnetic performance in the role last year. Loomis stands out in a number of scenes, but his performance here lacks some of the clever nuance Ziman had managed in the same role last year. Brian J. Gill brings Prince Henry to the stage with precisely the kind of charisma that is so important to the role. With everything as intriguingly off-balance as it is, the ending feels remarkably out of synch with everything that has happened in the series so far. The crown peacefully passes from the withered king as all others look on gravely. And there at the center of it all is Gill — the nice guy […]
Sep 11th, 2007
The Night of the Iguana
American Players Theatre The American Players Theatre delves into a mid-twentieth century script with its production of Tennessee Williams’ Night Of The Iguana. It’s an interesting choice in material for one of the APT’s few dips into the recent past. While it is true that Williams is widely recognized as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, The Night Of The Iguana is scarcely as acclaimed as other Williams classics like The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. (When the play debuted on Broadway in 1961, it received mixed reviews.) That said, The Night of The Iguana is far more entertaining than Williams’ more turgidly acclaimed works. It mixes particularly effective humor with a sense of drama that manages an abstract allegorical nature while still feeling quite natural. The APT production stars the multi-talented Jim DeVita as Reverend Shannon—a defrocked minister who, in his new occupation as tour guide, is leading a church group on a vacation tour through Mexico during World War II. DeVita does an excellent job here, but the character is nowhere near as interesting as the plot he’s a part of. Shannon guides his group to a hotel run by an old friend of his by the name of Maxine. Maxine (Tracy Michelle Arnold) takes the tour group in, certain that Shannon is still the wild party animal he always was—even as he claims to have reformed, cleaned up, and curbed the alcohol consumption. Arnold is very seductive here, possessing a smart, tough kind of allure that serves the character well. The rapport between DeVita and Arnold makes for some of the best moments in the play. The seduction of Shannon is complicated when a virginal young artist named Hannah (Colleen Madden) arrives at the hotel with her aging father (Robert Spencer.) It quickly becomes apparent that father and daughter have no money to pay for their accommodations and must attempt to sell his poetry and her paintings to keep their rooms. Madden is interesting here, but the character doesn’t provide her the kind of challenge she would need to turn out a really great performance. And it’s always great to see Spencer playing the lovable older guy (like he did most recently in the Rep’s production of Tuesdays With Morrie last year). It’s still a bit difficult to see him play such a simple character after his much more recent turn as a sophisticated Russian politico in Milwaukee Chamber’s production of A Walk In The Woods. In absence of any really amazing individual performances, the play comes across as a solid, entertaining ensemble piece. Talented actors squeeze themselves into roles that aren’t quite as good as they are, making for a stage dynamic that never quite manages to get boring. The script is bizarrely uneven in places, making for fascinating friction that seems to have no direct link to the central theme of temptation in a paradise that may be imprisonment. (Showing inexplicable storytelling instincts, Williams throws in a group of vacationing […]
Sep 7th, 2007
Timon of Athens
Regarded by many scholars as an unfinished, perhaps experimental piece that may not have been entirely written by Shakespeare, Timon of Athens has great potential to be staged in an offbeat style. American Players Theatre in Spring Green has brilliantly realized this potential in what is by far its most accomplished production this season. This year, the APT has fallen a bit short of its usual standards. Timon of Athens goes a long way towards making up for any shortcomings it may have presented in its 2007 season. Aside from a decidedly modern-looking set, the audience’s first indication of the setting shows up in the usual “turn off your cell phones” announcement, cleverly delivered here as a polite notice from one of the title character’s servants. As the audience, we are all greeted as guests of Timon and encouraged to enjoy ourselves. When characters begin to filter onstage, the overall feeling is that of a posh, contemporary dinner party. All the guests are dressed in white except the Painter and the Poet, who reflexively dress in a classy, reflexively nonconformist black. The Painter (Matt Schwader) carries a tiny black leather portfolio. The Poet (Michael Gotch) carries around a black portfolio of his own that holds a disheveled stack of papers. Gotch and Schwader are brilliantly subtle here, delicately playing the part of pretentiously successful contemporary art-world hipsters – the kind you see nervously shuffling about the Third Ward on gallery night. Eventually, of course, the title character shows up in the form of a jovial Brian Mani. Mani has a very robust presence in the role, lending an earthy believability to the overwhelming generosity that is Timon’s tragic flaw. Just as Timon’s guests sit to eat at the banquet of his wealth, in walks Jonathan Soots in the role of true individualist Apemantus — a philosopher. There’s not a whole lot of money in philosophy, so Apemantus has little regard for it; he snacks idly on a carrot, acting as an upstage critic to the pretentious proceedings at center stage. With a presence and comportment vaguely reminiscent of a contemporary Mark Twain, Smoots puts in a pleasantly detached performance as he warns of the treachery of bought friendship. Of course, this being Shakespearian tragedy, Apemantus’s concerns turn out to be valid, and before long, Timon loses all the wealth he ever had. We catch up with him after the intermission on a set that is a dark aberration of the finely appointed atmosphere that started the play. A rusted-over wheelchair tilts in one corer of the stage. Empty cans litter the stage with other detritus. Mani plays the generous Timon now as a surly, soiled misanthrope with a fabulously twisted sense of humor. Inevitably, Timon happens upon a stash of bills – more accursed money, which brings on all those people he never wanted to have to deal with again. The Poet and the Painter show up right away, appearing first offstage, rustling through the foliage around the outdoor theatre. […]
Sep 7th, 2007
Raise the Curtain!
The performing arts season bursts open with a half-dozen theatre groups launching productions this month. The Milwaukee Rep opens no less than three shows, including its centerpiece – Lee Ernst as Cyrano De Bergerac. The Rep’s cabaret opens its season with this year’s Roger Beane show Life Could Be A Dream. In more edgy local theatre, Wisconsin Lutheran College presents a couple of compelling one-acts, including Tickless Time, about the nature of time, and The Illuminati In Drama Liber, an experimental piece that explores the nature of linearity. Further out, Madison’s Mercury Players Theatre presents a comic musical production of Reefer Madness. Also in Madison, The Madison Rep opens its season with Death of A Salesman. Death sings a bit closer to home with The Skylight Opera Theatre’s production of The Midnight Angel. Local stages animate with intense drama as Dramatists Theatre and Milwaukee Shakespeare launch Orpheus Descending and 2 Henry IV respectively, both productions of some pretty heavy work by two of the greatest playwrights in history.
Sep 1st, 2007
“Keep guard over your EYES AND EARS as the inlets of your heart …” — Anne Bronte
The percussion of two eyelids meeting during a blink is not audible to the human ear, which consists of fibro-elastic cartilage covered with skin and fine hairs. In contrast to the eyes, the ears are always working. Visual reality is limited to a single, blinking field of vision and sight requires the tireless work of the ears to give it direction. Thus sight is aided by the ears, but rarely are the two given equal attention onstage. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra will address the disparity between sight and hearing this season by presenting two concerts featuring music written specifically for the eyes. In April, the MSO performs the score to Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights as the film is projected overhead at The Marcus Center. Earlier on, the MSO will perform a special Halloween concert featuring scores written for Alfred Hitchcock films. Hitchcock worked with such influential film composers as Bernard Hermann, Dimitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman, so this could be profoundly good. The work of another composer who wrote largely for the eye will be included on a concert at the Wilson Center in September as visually appealing Grammy-nominated vocalist Monica Mancini performs on the 15th. Included will be songs written by her father Henry, who wrote scores for over a hundred films in his lifetime (The Glenn Miller Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther ). Monica will perform some of her father’s songs (such as “Moon River” and “Dear Heart” ) to clips of the films in which they appeared. In the realm of more contemporary film music, The Waukesha Symphony Orchestra will present Corigliano’s Suite for Violin and Orchestra from his Academy Award-winning score to The Red Violin. The WSO will be joined by American virtuoso Maria Bachman – one of Corigliano’s favorite violinists. In a similar hybrid of film and music, The Skylight Opera closes its season with Nine: The Musical. Written by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, this Broadway hit is an oddly skewed adaptation of film legend Frederico Fellini’s autobiographical masterpiece 8½. The musical adaptation of Fellini’s highly surrealistic and self-referential film may seem like something of a curiosity, but the show was a big hit on Broadway. The Skylight has a flair for putting together visually appealing presentations, so it will be interesting to see how they render what should prove to be a very interesting evening of musical theatre.
Sep 1st, 2007
“THE HEART has reasons that reason cannot know.” — Blaise Pascal
Radiance and darkness come from the same place. If the mind is the brightest place in the human body with its constant storm of electrical impulses, perhaps the human body’s darkness exists in the heart – a place of absolutely essential, tireless labor. The heart creates enough pressure in the course of its constant pumping to shoot blood out of the body up to 30 feet. It can continue pumping even after 1/3 of its muscle mass is decayed. In spite of this, what is strong and durable from within is also quite fragile from the outside. It only takes 25 to 75 watts of electricity to stop the heart from beating. Somewhere in every beat lurks the final one, pumping blood to darker veins on the other side of human consciousness. This season promises some particularly dark moments. In May, Windfall Theatre travels into a conspicuously bleak autobiographical musical with William Finn’s A New Brain. Finn chronicled his battle with brain cancer in a musical filled with more heart and true human emotion than most musicals ever aspire. The Skylight Opera launches a completely different take on the dark side of musical theatre with a production of The Midnight Angel at the end of September. It’s the story of a wealthy 18th century woman so bored with life that she throws a lavish, decadent ball, inviting Death itself as a guest of honor. A similarly dark specter descends upon the Waukesha Civic Theatre’s Concert Series this season with Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldiers Tale. It’s a brilliantly dark piece usually performed by seven instruments. Composed in 1918, it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a deserting soldier who meets and loses his soul to the Devil. In February, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents its stage adaptation of the dense, gritty work of Russian darkness that is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The heavily intricate story of the brutal axe murder of two women will be played out sparingly. It will take a particularly deft scalpel to bring the extensive complexity of the original novel to the stage with three actors in a 90-minute show, but with the unique talents of Drew Brhel, Leah Dutchin and Mic Matarrese under the direction of Patrick Holland, Milwaukee Chamber’s Crime and Punishment could be one of the better shows on local stages this season. Under an even deeper pall of surreal darkness, The Milwaukee Rep presents Samuel Beckett’s vision of The End next March. Mark Corkins stars in Endgame as Hamm, who sees the final curtain falling and a new one rising. Another classic tale of dystopia makes its way to Wisconsin Lutheran College’s Theatre Department with George Orwell’s 1984. The title may be out of date, but the concept of a world watched over by the all-seeing Big Brother is a very interesting choice for WLC. Earlier in the season, WLC also presents a pair of one-acts about the darker aspects of time, including playwright Susan Glaspell’s intriguing short drama Tickless Time. Written […]
Sep 1st, 2007
“The LEGS are the wheels of creativity” — Albert Einstein
In tribute to their strength and versatility, legs are used metaphorically in a variety of different cultures all over the world to indicate strength or mobility. Consisting of thousands of flexible muscle fibers grouped into numerous muscles, the legs are capable of impressive range of motion and are used for a wide array of different movements from walking to running to jumping to dancing. In any given performing arts season, local dance groups celebrate dances from cultures all over the world. In September, Madison’s Kanopy Dance Company hosts Riad Middle Eastern Dance Company to blend disparate movements from two sides of the world. From further south, Ko-Thi performs its annual African-styled harvest show at Alverno. The bite of December’s cold blows in the Russian heat of not one, but THREE productions of Tchaikovski’s The Nutcracker. The month opens up with The Minnesota Ballet at the Schauer Center. The next day, the Moscow Ballet comes to the Riverside Theatre while later on in the month The Milwaukee Ballet brings Michael Pink’s vision to the Marcus Center. Things continue to heat up in January as the fleet-footed and colorful Ballet Folklorico Mexico comes to the Waukesha Civic Theatre. In March, legends from Russia mix with puppets and contemporary choreography as Kanopy Dance presents Dark Nights: Baba Yaga and Other Dreams – a collaboration with mask and puppet artist Heidi Cooper. The range of motion broadens even further in February as Alverno Presents the return of David Nieman’s Advanced Beginner Group in a show featuring dance inspired by the rules and tactics of sports. In April, Alverno Presents also welcomes the work of highly accomplished choreographer Karole Armitage and her Armitage Gone! Dance Company. Also in April, Danceworks presents a fusion of dance and new musical compositions as it collaborates with fresh art music gurus Present Music in what should be an extremely refreshing evening of dance and music. Milwaukee Ballet also has a few premiers coming up, including its annual trip to the Pabst Theatre for a concert featuring new work and the season-closing La Bayadere, featuring new work by Artistic Director Michael Pink.
Sep 1st, 2007
“THE BRAIN is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.” — Elbert Hubbard
The mind is run by the brain through an extraordinarily complex series of bioelectric reactions. Much like local arts groups, the brain does remarkable things with profoundly few resources. The brain runs an individual’s body and arguably everything abstract going on in his/her mind on very little quantifiable physical energy. If, for instance, a waiter (who we’ll refer to here as Mark) decides to become the artistic director of a new theatre company, he can find a space in Bay View and start the Boulevard Theatre. The brain in its near-infinite complexity allows this individual to adjust to the new role. If, years later, this same individual and his theatre company are pushed out of a season-opening production of playwright David Mamet’s very modern and ridiculously acclaimed Glengarry Glen Ross by a larger theatre company, said individual will adapt to the situation (through a dizzying set of neurological interactions) by planning a production of David and Amy Sedaris’ irreverent comedy The Book Of Liz. Leaping from Mamet’s serious and deeply engaging glance into the heart of human motivation to a comedy that briefly involves a person in a Mr. Peanut costume by the side of the road seems a bit nonlinear, and as the process of adaptation took its course The Book of Liz was rescheduled. The new season-opening work finally rendered was Will Eno’s Thom Paine (Based on Nothing), which opened last month. While the Sedaris’ piece is no longer the Boulevard’s replacement for Mamet’s brilliant drama (it may have never, in fact, ever really been intended for this purpose), it remains on the Boulevard’s season schedule this September. The comedy tells the story of a woman living in a fictitious, secluded religious commune who makes the cheese balls for which the commune is so well known by the outside world. Featuring some pretty deft dialogue, Thom Paine is a brilliant fusion of the distinctive comedic voices of both writers. Thus, thanks to the process of adaptation, Milwaukee theatre is host to the comedy AND the drama of both Eno and Mamet. The adaptability offered through the constantly changing architecture of the human brain can produce astonishing versatility within a single individual as well. For instance: say a young man from New Jersey (we’ll call him Jim) gets a job on a fishing boat. He dreams of being a captain of his own boat, so he graduates from high school and goes to the local community college to perfect the math skills he will need for navigation. If, in the process of going to said college, he finds himself in a theatre watching someone onstage and thinks, “I want to do that,” neurological adaptation at a cellular level kicks in, allowing him to travel across the country to Wisconsin and attend UWM’s professional theater training program. Years later he’s a successful actor/playwright/author. This year, Jim DeVita has a tremendous amount going on, thanks to the basic fundamentals of neurologically-fueled human adaptation. The fall arrives as DeVita’s summer season as […]
Sep 1st, 2007
“Human salvation lies in the HANDS of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King
Some of the oldest words in human language relate to the hands, suggesting a fundamental linguistic link between the human mind, the human hand and the world in which they exist. Hands, being the fundamental organ of corporeal interface between a human being and the outside world, have much to answer for in this respect. Throughout history hands have built monuments, started wars and saved and ended lives. Many scholars have elected to pin the blame for many of the hand’s indiscretions on the opposable thumb, thus freeing the rest of the hand from any guilt. Actually, any monkey (or chimpanzee for that matter) can oppose a thumb against an index finger. It’s the fact that the human thumb can oppose ANY of the other fingers including the small and ring fingers that make the human hand unique. Clearly, all the fingers can take both blame and credit for getting humanity to where it is today. And many hands have taken great pains to place performances all over greater Milwaukee this season. Hands have put together a new space for In Tandem to perform in as it opens its first comedy at the newly opened Tenth Street Theatre this season. Meanwhile, Milwaukee Shakespeare is still more or less without a central home as it stages a season featuring a couple of rarely performed pieces. It opens with 2 Henry IV (in September) and Cymbeline (in March) at the Broadway Theatre Center and Twelfth Night at the Wilson Center. Many hands have adapted Shakespeare’s work to other stage forms. The Milwaukee Ballet, for instance, performs dance adaptations of two plays by Shakespeare at the Marcus Center: Hamlet in November and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in February. Two months later, completely different hands place an adaptation of a completely different piece by Shakespeare as The Florentine Opera presents Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet.
Sep 1st, 2007
Moonlight and Magnolias
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre Watch the closing credits of any film and you’ll see a long list of people who lived, breathed and sweated a massive creative project for days, weeks, months or more. Every name on that list has a story behind it that might be just as interesting as the story the film tells. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens its 2007-2008 season with Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight and Magnolias, a comedic tribute to the hard work and dedication of three men striving to finish the final script of what would become the single most commercially successful film of all time – Gone With The Wind. Actor, musician and high school teacher Tom Klubertanz stars as legendary film producer David O. Selznick. Selznick finds himself in the unenviable position of lacking a director on one of the most expensive films in history – a film eagerly anticipated by a legion of fans who have read the book and expect something good. Selznick pulls acclaimed director Victor Fleming (Dan Mooney) off his current project (The Wizard of Oz) to pick up where exiting director George Cukor left off. With a new director in place, Selznick decides to start over with a new script. Bringing in screenwriter Ben Hecht (Michael Herold), Selznick locks himself, Hecht and Fleming in his office to bang out a completely new script in five days. Selznick is aided by a seemingly endless flow of peanuts and bananas brought into the office by his secretary Miss Poppenghul (Marcella Kearns). Klubertanz doesn’t quite muster the emotional weight onstage to play the mighty film producer convincingly. The gravitas is hardly missed, however, as Klubertanz has a compelling nice-guy stage presence that makes the role work. Michael Herold gives a shrewd, intelligent turn as the last screenwriter to work on Gone With The Wind, performing with a deft comedic perspicacity that unleashes itself from some of the best lines in the script. Dan Mooney summons a great amount of arrogance for his initial appearance onstage as big-name film director Victor Fleming, which gradually erodes throughout play in a hugely entertaining performance. Kearns is perfectly conservative in the role of Selznick’s secretary until just the right moment at the end of the play. More than merely a comedy about the golden age of Hollywood, this is a play about three men working themselves to the brink of death. When everything else fades away, we’re watching three men nearly destroy themselves to build the foundations of what is destined to be an unparalleled success. As the characters’ sense of sanity and decorum start to deteriorate, we see the deeply affecting comedy of three men losing their minds, learning something about the nature of their business in the process. It’s a brilliant opening to what looks like a very promising season with Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. VS Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Moonlight and Magnolias runs now through August 26th at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box […]
Aug 13th, 2007
Bunny Rabbit In A Box Of Chocolates
As 8 p.m. neared on the night of July 21st, people milled about the Broadway Theatre Center. Casual conversation drifted through the lazy summer evening as show time approached. Alamo Basement had been at it for nearly 24 hours – writing and rehearsing the show that was about to make its debut that night. The Play In A Day concept is deliciously simple – get a group of people together (playwrights, actors, etc… ) and give them 24 hours to develop an entire feature-length play that they will then perform. Alamo Basement did something much like this last year. It was successful enough that they decided to do it again. Not long after the scheduled start time, Alamo Basement co-founder Michael Q. Hanlon and the play’s director Chris Scholke introduced the show. Taking suggestions from the audience, the title Bunny Rabbit In A Box Of Chocolates was chosen. Then the script was auctioned off to the highest bidder. A gentleman in the front row ended up winning the script, paying some $30 for something about which he, like the rest of us, probably knew almost nothing. After these small bits of business, the play began for the 50 or so people in attendance. A comedy set in a hotel in Transylvania, Bunny Rabbit In A Box of Chocolates was exceedingly entertaining. The script had been passed through a series of local DIY playwrights over the course of the 24 hours leading up to the performance. Pink Banana Theatre guru John Manno (Golden Apollo) got the script first. He worked with the actors to get a general feel for what the actors were interested in and went to work. The ensemble played characters they had a hand in developing, which made for an interesting stage dynamic during the actual performance. Alamo Basement co-founder Mike Q. Hanlon (who also served as one of the playwrights) played the hotel concierge, a classic comic straight man with a bit of a feral twist toward the end. The cast of characters parading through the hotel included a pair of honeymooning Wisconsinites with a sexual fetish for the history of warfare, a socialist hotel worker and his wife (a sexy maid with an inexplicable New York accent), a pair of dim-witted traveling thieves, a world-famous scientist and her eager assistant, a deposed Eastern European princess and others. In addition to Hanlon and Manno, playwrights included Peter J. Woods (Made In The Mouth) and Rex Winsome (co-founder of Insurgent Theatre). The script was remarkably coherent for something that four people took turns writing with very little sleep. Light comedies and farces try to capture a certain kind of mindless guilty fun, but something invariably gets lost in endless rehearsals. Impov comedy emulates freshness by giving the illusion of spontaneity, but all too often it’s simply actors forming pre-existing, pre-formulated characters and skits around audience suggestions. With Play In A Day, Alamo Basement seems to have hit on a sense of vitality that’s so glaringly missing in contemporary […]
Aug 1st, 2007
Misalliance
The first non-Shakespeare show in this year’s American Players Theatre season, George Bernard Shaw’s early 20th century dramatic debate, Misalliance, works much better on paper than it does on the stage. In principal, the idea of a play consisting almost exclusively of characters having lengthy discussions about love, marriage, justice and so on without much real action is a very clever one. In practice, it can be very difficult to sit through. Chicago actress Carrie A. Coon (who starred in Anna Christie with the Madison Rep last year) stars as Hypatia Tarleton, the restless daughter of the wealthy underwear magnate John Tarleton (Jonathan Smoots). Things seem perfectly dull in the house as things begin. All the characters seem nearly content to play out Shaw’s debate with only the slightest hint of any real action. True, there is a great deal of wit in what’s being sad, but it merely feels. Characters lounge around inside talented actors dressed in conspicuously tidy Rachel Healy costumes as everything rests in a tasteful early 20th-century Takeshi Kata set. Then a plane crashes into a building offstage and everything gets considerably more interesting. The play is an intellectually lively ensemble piece and the APT manages its usual magic of arranging a highly talented and cohesive cast. Chris Klopatek is pleasantly intolerable as the nuisance Bentley Summerhays. Bentley is that annoying brat with deafening smugness who always seems to know exactly what he can get away with. As the play opens he’s engaged in some sort of general frustration with Hypatia’s conservative brother Johnny (Marcus Truschinski). Truschinski is sharp in the role, which limits him to smooth, controlled bursts of passion accompanied by occasional bits of wit. Truschinski gives the character precisely as much range of emotional movement as he needs to get through the play without over-exaggerating any of his finer personality details. At some point early into the play’s first stretches, Bentley goes offstage to be intolerable elsewhere and in comes Lord Summerhays (Brian Mani) – a friend of the family. Mani is fun here. His character has a tendency for the type of humor Mani is so good at delivering . . . sparkling, little unassuming bits of semantic cleverness that creep up in response to things other characters say. Lord Summerhays has some entertaining bits of dialogue with Hypatia. He’s an older man taken with the younger woman who seems a bit taken with him as well and marriage is proposed between the two of them. Actually, marriage is proposed quite often in Misalliance – it’s a refreshing little parade of diversions the playwright has concocted to pass the time between the play’s beginning and end, which ends up being a central part of the play. Shaw seems intent on exploring the nature of love and marriage between many different pairings within the ensemble. There’s also this whole theme of women beginning to become individuals that Shaw wanted to explore. Apparently, he felt as though men at the turn of the last […]
Aug 1st, 2007
The Merchant of Venice
The American Player Theatre delves into sticky realms of ambiguity with its production of what is arguably one of Shakespeare’s most questionable plays. The Merchant of Venice concerns money lent to a man by a Jewish moneylender named Shylock. If the money is not paid back in a timely fashion, Shylock has the legal right to one pound of the debtor’s flesh. It’s not an overriding problem unless one happens to be exquisitely sensitive, but there are enough allusions to anti-Semitism in the script to make modern audiences cringe. The APT glides its way gracefully through what is essentially a courtroom drama with as much style as it can muster. This includes some of the best acting in the state filling a comfy outdoor theatre in the middle of a wooded area west of Madison. Sadly, however, the biggest disappointment in the acting here is James Ridge in that oh-so-central performance as the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It should be pointed out before this review goes any further that James Ridge is a phenomenal actor. In 2005, his performance as Tartuffe was exquisite and insightful – something of a revelation. This past year as the title character in Dickens In America with Next Act (which he picks up again this summer with the APT and next December with the Madison Rep), Ridge put forth a spellbinding, highly charismatic performance. In light of these recent successes, Ridge’s performance as Shylock is a colossal disappointment. Ridge affects an accent, which may serve to distinguish a sense of otherworldliness in the villain, but it never quite feels natural enough to make the character entirely believable. Ridge goes a long way toward making up for this lack of realism by playing the role sympathetically. We see depth in Ridge’s performance as Shylock. His motivations for behaving as cold as he is seem firmly defined in Ridge’s portrayal, but the larger picture of who the character is never fully resolves, leaving this production’s Shylock feeling like more of a shallow villain than Ridge’s efforts should have allowed. The rest of the performances here live up to the play quite well. James DeVita plays the title character who borrows money from Shylock to give to his friend Bassanio (Matt Schwader) so that he may have a chance at marrying his one true love, Portia (the charming Colleen Madden). As the play progresses, Bassanio gets ever closer to his dream as Portia plays reluctant host to a series of wealthy suitors played by frequent Rep actor Jonathan Smoots. Madden is in particularly good form here playing subtle comedy in perfect timing and DeVita plays the title role as a very rational man in very real peril. The best part of his performance is the intrinsic believability of his friendship with Bassanio. It would seem all too easy to play a friendship between two men in which one is willing to risk his life for the other’s well being as some kind of mysterious male code of honor for […]
Aug 1st, 2007
Much Ado About Nothing
It can be the smallest things that make any production of a popular Shakespeare classic more memorable than the last. In an American Players Theatre production, this always seems to come from the least expected places. Maybe the production design is so impressive that it nearly overshadows the play it’s presenting. Maybe there’s a subtle, brilliantly unspoken joke woven into the set design that plays on a drastic height difference between the diminutive James DeVita and a towering supporting character. In this year’s APT production of Much Ado About Nothing, it’s the villain Don John. More than simply being a marginal character, Don John almost seems to be an afterthought in an otherwise giddy comic script, which is fun enough to make Much Ado one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Precisely why Don John would leave such a strong impression is a bit of a mystery, particularly when said production features such strong performances in all of the other more central roles. Milwaukee Rep actor Ted Deasy stars as confirmed bachelor Benedick who is unsuspectingly dragged into a relationship with Beatrice – a woman with which he is quite reluctantly head over heels in love. Beatrice is played brilliantly here by Milwaukee actress Tracy Michelle Arnold. Beatrice has a stinging, level-headed wit about her – a wit that Arnold rings to the stage with a considerable amount of flair. At the center of the story rests young Claudio (Marcus Truschinski) who has fallen for Hero (Leah Dutchin), the daughter of the Governor. Brian Mani plays the governor with a characteristically charismatic stage presence. The love here is pure and played remarkably well between Truschinski and Dutchin. With a central supporting cast consisting of such considerable APT/ Milwaukee talent as Sarah Day, James Ridge and Jim DeVita (among others) this is a solidly executed production of Much Ado. While little of it seems overwhelmingly impressive, it’s all executed very well. Milwaukee Shakespeare recently did a brilliant production of this play, so APT’s production may suffer from being produced so soon afterwards, but taken on its own it is exceedingly enjoyable. Why should it be then, that the marginal villain Don John is the single aspect of the production that makes this production worth seeing? The character only serves to provide the conflict that is the central obstacle in Claudio and Hero living happily ever after. There are few characters as far from the center as Don John, yet Milwaukee Shakespeare talent Michael Gotch plays the character with such dazzling flair that the character seems almost essential to the plot in this production. It doesn’t take Gotch long to establish the ostentatious personality of his particular Don John as he begins scheming to ruin the wedding plans of Hero and Claudio. Once he’s established his presence, all eyes are on Gotch every time he makes an appearance and the audience responds openly to even his most subtly comic movements. In Milwaukee Shakespeare productions (notably Taming of the Shrew and Richard II) Gotch […]
Aug 1st, 2007
A Midsummer Night McGivern
One of the most popular people in local theatre, John McGivern has a huge following. Just to see the guy standing there onstage, the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. On the surface, McGivern seems like anyone else you might see walking around the East Side. Seeing him perform adds to the mystery of his success a bit at first. He’s a very talented storyteller, yes, but the autobiographical work he performs in his one man shows isn’t the kind of genius one would expect from a man who has reached McGivern’s level of success. It feels much more like the type of thing that might go over well at a comedy club somewhere. Why is it that he’s playing rooms as big as Vogel Hall? Somewhere in the rhythm of McGivern’s delivery, one begins to understand what makes him so popular: he’s a nice guy. His overall presence makes people feel at ease. He’s made this his profession. He’s made a career out of being professionally nice. McGivern isn’t professionally friendly in some synthetic customer service way. His amiability isn’t the kind you’d get out of a politician, a waitress or even that guy who tried to sell you insurance. McGivern has gotten to be as popular as he has because he has a genuine passion for being a nice person. And that friendliness translates extremely well to the stage in the parade of comedy and nostalgia that is his summer show: A Midsummer Night McGivern. The show features a number of stories and a couple of readings from McGivern’s childhood experiences growing up on Milwaukee’s East Side. Laid out generally in chronological order, the stories begin with McGivern’s memories of Memorial Days as a child and gradually work their way through to the end of the season. McGivern delivers these stories with a heartfelt enthusiasm that is so strong one gets the impression that he’d be telling these same stories to friends and family at some placid park somewhere if he weren’t onstage. McGivern’s stories run nostalgically through a greater Milwaukee County of several decades ago. Various bits of Americana are seen through the very specific eyes of a man who remembers his father taking him and his brothers to visit the graves of soldiers as fresh ones were being dug for those still returning from Viet Nam. There’s a bittersweet quality to some of McGivern’s stories, but the overall feeling here is one of comedy. McGivern’s specific kind of enthusiasm pairs exceedingly well with stories told from a childhood perspective. One of his more poignant bits involves him relating what it was like to be interviewed for the Weather Channel about life in Milwaukee as the seasons change. The set McGivern performs on was put together by longtime Milwaukee Rep fixture Edward Morgan. It’s a summery collection of items tastefully lounging around the stage to help set the mood. But McGivern could easily do this on a more or less empty […]
Jul 1st, 2007
Patience
For as long as there has been art, there have been those who have taken the love of aesthetics and beauty to nauseating extremes. In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan took a satirical jab at artistic pretentiousness with Patience. Today, 126 years later, The Skylight Opera Theatre revisits this classic musical in a production that carries into June. It’s a pleasant, fast-paced staging that the Skylight has polished quite nicely. The radiant Niffer Clarke stars as the simple milkmaid after which the show is named. Patience knows little of and cares little for romantic love yet is nonetheless pursued by two different men. The effeminate Reginald Bunthorne (Gary Briggle) is a poet of extreme pretentiousness who quite readily captures the attentions of all the wealthy girls in the tiny village, but he longs for the one who has no interest in him. Briggle is memorable as the ostentatious poet who cares more for the attentions of his audience than his art. Unable to feel anything but confusion for the deliberately obtuse Bunthorne, Patience talks of love with a friend. She seems to be the only single woman in town who doesn’t know what it is firsthand. In the course of the conversation, Patience remembers a time when she had feelings for a slightly older boy she used to play with as a child. As luck would have it, he shows up and she is smitten with romantic feelings for the first time in her life. His name is Archibald Grosvenor (Norman Moses) and he has loved her since he was a child. However, all who lay eyes on him have an inflated sense of his beauty. Like Bunthorne, Grosvenor is a poet of the highest imaginable aesthetics who is, of course, a cripplingly beautiful person. It is with great disappointment that Patience begins to question her love for Grosvenor. True love, she believes, must be truly selfless and one could never be selfless when loving someone of such overwhelming beauty. His beauty must belong . . . to the world. It would be an act of selfishness to demand his exclusive attentions and so Patience’s first love is a tragic one. Grosvenor is crestfallen, but the stress of the plot works in his favor, as his beauty is, of course, at odds with Bunthorne’s. The two are thus embroiled in a conflict that carries much of the rest of the story. It’s all a great deal of fun. The Chamber Theatre delivers deftly on the wit and speed of Gilbert and Sullivan in song and dialogue. Costuming by Karin Kopischke is impressive here and there is an elaborate simplicity in the design, which compliments the ornate, yet functional set by Peter Dean Beck. As entertaining as it is, the production as a whole feels a bit held back. This is really written to be a Gilbert and Sullivan with teeth and there are moments that are designed to really skewer the lofty insincerity of those who use art as a status-inducing […]
Jun 1st, 2007
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Humor can draw anyone into a theatre, but it’s the darkness that really excites the imagination. Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is one of the great classics of dark American theatre. Under the direction of Heidi Mueller Smith, Cornerstone Theatre Company presents the classic in the basement of the Brumder Mansion. As everyone settles into their seats for the evening, Ruth Williams and Sandy Stehling animate the space with a traditional Irish tune. Gradually, the play settles over the stage. There’s no mistaking that this is going to be a long, dark journey into the inner social dynamics of a particularly dark, iconic American family. Thankfully, with Cornerstone Theatre it’s a trip to the theatre featuring some of the best acting in one of the smallest performances spaces in greater Milwaukee. Cotter Smith stars as family patriarch James Tyrone – an aging actor past his prime who has made a small fortune for himself, but nonetheless tours during the theatre season. It’s August of 1912 and it would appear to have been a very long summer. Smartly dressed with sharp features and meticulously manicured facial hair, Smith cuts a darkly charismatic figure in the role. There’s a mixture of weariness and restlessness in the way Smith carries himself here. Smith’s apparent darkness as James is offset by Michelle Waide’s performance as his wife Mary. O’Neil places Mary as something of a central enigma in the script. Waide’s performance here is particularly clever. She seems to hold a great deal of casual poise, but we can tell that somewhere in the background of her apparent stability lies the hazy static of unhealthy disorder. She’s swept it all into the background of her personality, but it gradually comes to prominence as the play progresses. Waide deftly rides the emotional contours of O’Neil’s script, only letting enough emotional distress slip out to make it to the next scene. Ken T. Williams and Steven Strobel play James and Mary’s sons, Jamie and Edmund. Williams is pleasantly cynical as the older son who has returned home to help out around the house. Being fully aware and at least marginally open about all of the negativity floating around in the family’s closets, Jamie comes across as being one of the darker people in the play. Williams lends a considerable amount of depth and compassion to that darkness, which holds up his end of the play quite well. Edmund, the younger brother, is suffering from a potentially life-threatening ailment. Strobel plays Edmund with the overwhelming presence of a turn of the century slacker. His polite, unassuming presence makes it easy to sympathize with him. Rachel Williams rounds out the cast as Cathleen, the young, Irish housekeeper with a serviceable Irish accent. She plays off the rest of the family dynamic quite well as a disinterested third party. O’Neil has Cathleen surfacing from the rest of the family on brief occasions. On the whole, the ensemble plays out the emotional landscape of the play with more […]
Jun 1st, 2007
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress
Writer/Director Alan Ball has met with considerable success in film and TV. His film American Beauty won an Academy Award while his TV series Six Feet Under garnered him two Golden Globes and no less than six Emmys. Before any of that, however, Ball earned a degree in theatre. In 1993 he wrote a comedy for the stage about a group of bridesmaids in Tennessee and Sunset Playhouse presents its production of that very play as the penultimate show of its season. Bialystock and Bloom co-founder Jonathan West directs the Sunset production of Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress. It’s the story of five bridesmaids who seek refuge from a wedding reception in an upstairs bedroom. There’s very little plot here beyond the personalities of each of the women as they become better acquainted. While the character development feels a bit forced and an amateurish attempt to tie everything together with some of moral about the nature of love stains the ending, for the most part Ball lets the conversation between the five women become the play. Ball has a particularly shrewd sense of humor in language that is the real center of the comedy. Everything beyond the dialogue is just there to give it a place to be. A clever writer in his own right, West’s direction here has an interesting attention to detail and a particularly deft sense of how dialogue-centered comedy works on stage. The cast consists almost entirely of the five young bridesmaids. Actresses reflect the relative ages of their characters pretty well, but there is a bit of confusion as to how old everyone is, as they all appear to be pretty much the same age: quite young, but not in high school. Southern accents also mar things a bit, as no one here manages an authentic accent for the entire length of the play. Other than that, the performances here are all noteworthy with a few instances of real comedic inspiration. The bedroom belongs to Meredith Marlow: sister of the bride played by Victoria Hudziak. Hudziak is bitter and annoyed with the whole wedding and has escaped to her room in an effort to get at least mildly stoned so that the whole affair can be a bit more bearable. Hudziak holds the comedy of bitterness quite well, but very little can be done when Ball tries to fuse too much darkness into the character. Before Meredith enters, Frances, the innocent, religious cousin of the bride, sneaks into the room to engage in a bit of physical comedy. Ball doesn’t provide very convincing depth for what is essentially a generic religious stereotype. Actress Nikki Hoch finds a sweet humanity in the character, nonetheless. Hoch’s comedic presence is subtle but powerfully effective whenever she’s onstage. Not long after we meet Frances and Meredith, Trisha enters. Trisha is an old friend of the bride who is fiercely independent. Elizabeth M. Keefe plays Meredith in a magnetic performance. She’s had many men, but has never felt […]
Jun 1st, 2007
Rooming House
With Milwaukee being host to so many productions of plays written by people in other parts of the country, it’s always nice to see something new written by a local playwright. Early this summer, Olsen Arts Theatre Group opened Rooming House, written and directed by local playwright Christel Olsen. The play is a comedy about a group of people living in…well…a rooming house. Kim Ballou stars as Geraldine Rennelli – a woman who runs…wait for it…a rooming house. Geraldine, who is known to her psychologically diverse boarders as “Ms. Geri,” is a tough, charismatic woman who seems to be quite respected by all who meet her. There’s a lot of comic potential in the many strange personalities inhabiting a domestic space like this. Brilliant comedy can come when the weird is juxtaposed against the equally weird but, unfortunately, Olsen and company deliver on so little of it that it hardly seems worth the effort. Sadly, Rooming House isn’t that good. Ballou performs quite well as uber-mom to a strange collection of characters, many of whom have a great deal of comedic depth. Occasionally we even see the cast of actors grasp fleeting moments of this depth. For the most part, however, the cast seems all too conscious of the fact that it is on stage and not conscious enough of what’s supposed to be going on in the play. The space at Bucketworks doesn’t help, either. The acoustics in the performance space are offensively bad. This makes it particularly difficult to hear actors who lack enough stage experience to know how to properly project their voices. If Rooming House was a straight drama, the acoustic problem would probably end there. The fact that it’s a comedy makes things all the worse. In order for comedy to work there needs to be something like a coherent punch line. If the punch line isn’t delivered with the kind of strength it needs AND the space is muffling what’s being said, there may be too many obstacles for laughter to actually occur. The lack of clarity in the dialogue is an ongoing problem throughout that affects every aspect of the story. Comedic and dramatic elements that aren’t always particularly well defined in the script are further confused by self-conscious performances that fail to deliver the right emphasis at the right times. Rooming House isn’t a play so much as the dream of one. People sleep walk through performances culled from a script that isn’t quite polished enough to develop the kind of glossy pop comedy for which Olsen seems to be aiming. All this would seem like wasted effort were it not for the fact that the dream is so clearly visible. The final significant scene between Ballou and Brenda Riley (as her next door neighbor Leslie Bufano) is the one of the best. The two characters finally connect and there’s a real feeling of genuine emotion. It should be pointed out that Rooming House is not an aggressively bad play. It’s a […]
Jun 1st, 2007
A Shot in the Dark
The Boulevard Ensemble closes its 21st anniversary season with a murder-mystery comedy by Harry Kurnitz, adapted from an original French work by Marecl Archard. It’s a fun, well-balanced comedy adeptly directed by the Boulevard’s Mark Bucher. Bucher has assembled a surprisingly good cast for the final show of a memorable 21st season of theatre in Bay View. I believe it was Alistair Cooke who said that a shot in the dark doesn’t take much time. Well, the Boulevard has certainly taken its time in getting to this one, ending its latest season with a production that feels deftly aimed. The talented Joe Fransee holds together the center of the play as Magistrate Paul Sevigne, who is investigating the death of a Spaniard (Cesar Gamino). The action of the play takes place in Sevigne’s office as he interviews people who might’ve been involved in the murder and is aided in this work by Morestan – his chief clerk played by the ample Al Dobyns. Fransee’s charisma goes a long way here, but it’s the timing between Fransee and Dobyns that really pulls together the center of the play. All of the usual mucking about with exposition that goes on in a mystery is made all the more palatable by the interaction of Fransee and Dobyns. In places, they almost seem to be fencing with the dialogue, which isn’t done enough in local theatre. Fransee has a tight, crisp precision to the delivery of his lines that woks well with Dobyns overall affability. The chief suspect in the murder of the Spaniard is his lover: parlor maid Yvette Lantenay, played by Anne Miller. Lantenay was found at the scene of the crime holding the gun that killed the victim just moments after his death. The Spaniard’s last words even implicated her as the murderer. In spite of all the evidence against her, it is clear that Lantenay did not commit the crime and a good portion of the play rests on the audience’s acceptance of this. We must not think for a second that Lantenay is the murderer; otherwise all of Sevigne’s work to find the true murderer would seem remarkably tedious. Here, the casting of Anne Miller is crucial. To her credit, Miller has a sweet, innocent stage presence; it would be very difficult to imagine Miller as a killer. This is staggeringly important, as the same could not be said of every actress in town. Bucher’s choice in casting Miller does wonders for the production. Other notable performances here include Liz Mistelle as Sevigne’s beautiful wife and Jennifer LaPorte as a wealthy lady of high society. The decision to split the play’s three acts with two intermissions would seem a bit indulgent, but so much of the play relies on plot points revealed solely in the dialogue that two intermissions are welcome. Each intermission allows the audience some distance from the plot to turn it around and possibly figure out who the actual killer is. Bucher and company keep the […]
May 1st, 2007
Tartuffe
The con is on once more. Moliere’s classic tale of deception through feigned piety climbs the stage again in a glossy, big-budget Milwaukee Rep production. Just months after the Skylight Opera closed its production of the musical adaptation of Moliere’s comedy, The Rep opens a more traditional interpretation of the story. Director Joseph Hanreddy has opted for a highly kinetic slapstick approach that engages the audience without any real attempt to find any deeper insight into Moliere’s masterpiece. Longtime Rep Resident Acting Company member Lee Ernst plays the title role of a religious hypocrite who schemes his way into the household of a wealthy man in the interest of taking him for as much as he can get. Ernst is explosively over the top. He’s taken the role to the edge of physical comedy and beyond. Rarely has he been so animate on stage. It’s the type of performance that bigger audiences adore, but it leaves something to be desired from jaded theatre critics. Moliere’s script leaves an impressive amount of room for plumbing the subtle depths of human manipulation with the title character. Ernst’s performance here possesses a manic disregard for subtlety. It may be fun to watch, but it’s a guilty pleasure. The decision to do Tartuffe as somewhat highbrow slapstick doesn’t drown ALL the subtleties of the play. Marianne, daughter of Tartuffe’s victim, is played here with an insightful flourish by Emily Trask. When Orgon (played here by Peter Silbert) offers Tartufe her hand in marriage, it complicates things considerably for Marianne, whose heart belongs to another man. In so many productions this role gets played simply as the comedy of over-emotional youth being hopelessly dramatic about young love. Trask’s performance goes way beyond this. Her rendering of the character has a playful kind of sympathy for it. Trask seems to have brilliant instincts for subtle physical comedy. At one point, she’s face down on the floor center stage in emotional grief. All is silent. She raises her head ever so slightly and lets it fall. The audience laughs. The production lingers on this moment for just a bit longer. Dorine (a sharp Elizabeth Ledo) cautiously says a few more things to her. Marianne ever-so-delicately pounds her head into the floor a couple more times. It’s never overdone. Trask’s timing is perfect. We feel just a bit more for Marianne than less accomplished productions have managed in the past. Most of the rest of the people in the cast follow their usual strengths in roles that they fall into quite nicely. Rose Pickering carries her considerable stage presence to this production in the role of Orgon’s respected mother who has nothing but respect for Tartuffe. Deborah Staples is charming as Orgon’s wife Elmire, who is forced into the unenviable position of having to attempt to snare Tartuffe to reveal his hypocrisy. Jonathan Gillard Daly is shrewd as the honest, respectable Cleante. This is a thoroughly professional cast putting in a thoroughly professional production, but it’s moments like […]
May 1st, 2007
The Nerd
An unwanted houseguest can make for good comedy so long as it isn’t your house. Put such a houseguest onstage and, ideally, no one has to suffer. It’s comedy for everybody because no one actually has to live with the person. Such is the case with the late Larry Shue’s smash hit The Nerd. The Milwaukee Rep returns once more to the play it debuted over two decades ago in a production directed by original Nerd star James Pickering. Looking into Geoffrey M. Curley’s set, one sees the ‘70s slowly bleeding out into the ‘80s – a distinctly awkward time for popular aesthetics. It’s the house of Willum Cubbert, a successful architect who is nevertheless living in Terre Haute, Indiana. Cibbuert is a single guy with friends who include Tansy McGinnis, a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend leaving for the east coast, played by Melinda Pfundstein and a theatre critic named Axel Hammond played by Torrey Hanson. (The Hammond thing throws me a little. Precisely how big is the theatre scene in Terra Haute, Indiana in 1979? Do they really need a full-time professional theatre critic?) Shue’s dialogue, always predictably witty, gradually sketches out the casual conflicts of the play until the subject of the title character finally surfaces. As it turns out, the man who saved Cubbert’s life in Viet Nam is in town and just might be stopping by for a visit. He’s a guy from Wisconsin who works in quality control at a chalk factory. Hs name is Rick Steadman and he’s played here by accomplished local comic actor Gerard Neugent. Rick is abrasively difficult to be around, which makes things difficult for Cubbert as he is in negotiations with a client named Warnock Waldgrove (Chris Tarjan). Waldgrove and his wife Clelia (Laura Gordon) are visiting Cubbert to discuss the hotel he is designing for them. As a whole, the production is solid. Pacing and delivery are every bit as impeccable as one would expect from the Rep. The script my be a classic, but it’s not particularly provocative comedy. The play’s comedy relies pretty heavily on the weird. At one particular high point, Steadman leads the cast in a nearly indecipherable game of “Shoes and Socks.” Nugent is great in the role, carrying it off with a nasally whine that is both annoying and endearing. Shue hands some of the best lines in the play to the critic Axel Hammond. If you’re going to be handing most of the best comic lines in a play to a single actor at The Rep, you’d better be handing them to Torrey Hanson. Hanson is brilliant here, throwing wry lines out from the corners of the script. This is a comedy that doesn’t take itself seriously and Hammond is the vice it uses to mock itself. Laura Gordon also puts in a notable performance here as Waldgrove’s librarian wife. A meek woman with some strange habits, Clelia would be all too easy to play as a comic prop. Gordon’s performance feels natural enough […]
May 1st, 2007
Who I Was Yesterday
Moct Bar sits in an area just south of downtown that is rapidly being carved into an upscale, trendy haunt for the young, wealthy and reasonably hip. Amidst shiny new condos and expensive restaurants, nestled in a space that apparently is a converted machine shop, Kurt Hartwig’s theatre outfit Bad Soviet Habits is staging a trippy little show involving stilts, puppets, the number 93 and quite a few other things. Who I Was Yesterday is a dreamlike neo-mythic fairy tale that touches on quite a few things without much regard for depth or coherence. To be fair to Writer/Director Kurt Hartwig, Who I Was Yesterday is a very ambitious project. The story goes a little something like this – twin humanoid sons of a Manticore (face of a woman, body of a lion, tail of a scorpion) are being raised by their towering humanoid grandparents. Their fate as offspring of an evil monster is to be hunted by it until they reach the age of 18. Apparently Manticores are quite insistent about eating their children. It’s a mythic coming of age story fitting somewhere between the age of fairy tales and the contemporary world. A story such as this could be produced for the stage in a variety of different ways. Hartwig’s vision as realized here is incredibly complex. The twins are whimsically presented as Andy North wearing one mask and holding another, occasionally switching them for effect, which is simple enough but there’s a lot more going on here. The twins’ grandparents are played by Amie Segal and Kurt Hartwig himself. On stilts. In makeup. Susan Currie plays Mother Manticore by wearing a huge, bulky metal mask complete with glowing eyes. While this probably takes a great deal of focus and concentration, it may be the single greatest waste of acting talent to make it to the local stage this season. Currie is a remarkable actress; she can do a lot more than serve as support for a metal mask onstage. Aside from the main characters, there are a lot of puppets. Some of them are effective. Some of them aren’t. And some of them meet with mixed results. The bedbugs that haunt the twins, for instance, make a clever rattling, scratching sound as their thin metal bodies scrape across the bar’s stage, but they don’t offer much of a visual impact. For the most part, all we’re seeing of them is the puppeteer pushing them across the floor. It looks a bit silly unless you make a conscious effort to focus on the puppets. One of the more effective puppets in the show is The Marionette, a character which acts as sort of a narrator who sometimes interacts with the twins. A puppet sits high above a curtain that covers the puppeteer. The apparatus holding the curtain and the puppet are harnessed to the puppeteer (Tom Thoreson) who is free to walk around the stage. It’s a lot more effective than it sounds, even if the puppet itself […]
May 1st, 2007
1 Henry IV
Sometimes theatre hurts. Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV can attest to this, having suffered a few minor injuries early in its run. When Jeffrey Withers sustained a show-stopping injury to his lower back, it was only a short while until someone else had suffered a minor broadsword wound to the hand. After a few days, however, the show was back on its feet to start the second weekend with a flourish. Milwaukee Shakespeare continues its multi-season staging of The Henriad, closing its 2006-2007 season with 1 Henry IV. Jeff Allin stars as King Henry IV, the consummate politician who has taken over a tumultuous empire. Allin’s performance echoes that of any contemporary politician in poise and presence. As the play opens, the audience is made aware of an uprising against him in the south lead by Welshman Owen Glendower (an intense Lawrnce O’Dwyer). Meanwhile, supposed Henry loyalist Henry Percy (a charismatic Brian J. Gill) is refusing to send reinforcements from the north that Henry had requested. As the play opens, the King is summoning Percy back to the court to explain his actions. The play’s center rests with Henry’s son, Prince Hal (Jeffrey Withers), who has taken in with bandits and highwaymen. Some of the production’s most intense moments happen at a tavern between Hal and the thieves. Hal is caught somewhere between royalty and thievery as he associates himself with the likes of the rotund rogue Sir John Falstaff (Richard Ziman). Hal and Falstaff play an intricate game of subtle wits at the tavern that plays out particularly well in the intimate space of the studio theatre. Shakespearian subtleties that don’t normally get rendered in all that much detail burst with texture here. Milwaukee Shakespeare further ratchets up the intensity by having the audience flank the stage. Actors play between halves of the audience in a captivating 3-dimensional space that lends the play a very accessible earthiness. Action is particularly intense in the tiny space. The fight scenes are meticulously choreographed with painstaking attention to detail. Careful thought was put into the psychology and motivations behind aggression and it all comes through with a remarkable degree of clarity. Fights are played out in epic slow motion, which runs the risk of seeming silly in such close quarters were it not all so well executed. The interaction between Withers and Ziman is particularly captivating. Both perform with a style and poise that serve as a memorable high point of the production. The production leads directly into part two without much of a feeling of finality. Local theater audiences will have to wait until next season to see Henry IV wrap up at the Broadway Theatre center. It’s a bit of a strange experience sitting through something like three hours of Shakespeare and not having it reach a final conclusion, but there’s more than enough that reaches some form of resolution to satiate audiences until next season. VS Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV runs through May 20th […]
May 1st, 2007
A Walk In The Woods
A park bench seems innocent enough until you get it on stage. What might casually be seen as an unsuspecting piece of furniture in its aural habitat takes on a whole new personality when it is placed in front of an audience. In Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, a bench is a silent witness to murder; it may as well be an accomplice. In Mark St. Germain’s Ears On A Beatle a park bench bears witness to meetings between FBI agents whose values slowly shift. And in Lee Blessing’s Walk In The Woods, a park bench takes center stage in the impressive space of the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre. The bench in question is Swiss. It sits on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland in the mid-1980s. Scenic Designer R.H.Graham sculpts the ample space of the Cabot’s stage into a grand sylvan setting. The ground is very earthy and organic. The trees are stark vertical lines far in the background and there is a winding path leading off the stage on the left. It is here that two men meet, away from the conference, to hammer out a few agreements involving weapons that could wipe out most of the life on the face of the planet. Peter Reeves plays John Honeyman, an American. Robert Spencer plays the Soviet Andrey Botvinnik. Relying entirely on two actors playing two characters for an entire story can strain any feature-length play. Thankfully, Reeves and Spencer develop a rapport within Graham’s script that is interesting enough to swiftly carry four scenes with relatively few tiresome stretches. At the beginning of the first scene, we are seeing two people who have just met and begun working with each other. They’ve been hired by opposing employers and both want to work out an agreement. Honeyman is a young, lean and bureaucratic man who seems to want to meet success in negotiations for the sake of his own achievement as a professional negotiator. Botvinnik is an older gentleman who has been working away at brokering an arms agreement between the U.S. and the USSR for a number of years. He wants to get to know Honeyman as a human being. Much of the appeal of the play unfolds in the first scene as Botvinnik tries desperately to reach Henyman’s human side so that they can talk like normal human beings. Any appeal that the rest of the play holds resonates from that first scene. Spencer’s charisma here is much the same as it was in the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Tuesdays With Morrie some time ago. Spencer has a gift for portraying wise older man with diligent ethics and complex personalities. Reeves plays the straight man with such ferocity here that his suspicion of Botvinnik is palpable. With Spencer’s precise execution of Honeyman’s smart professionalism, it’s easy to side with his suspicions. Maybe Botvinnik’s efforts to reach a more friendly level of rapport with him are actually an attempt to control him. As the conversations play out, it is […]
Apr 23rd, 2007
Ears on a Beatle
John Lennon mastered the deceptively simple genius of finding his own voice and speaking with it. He spoke it deftly and frequently enough to have made quite a few people uncomfortable over the years and some of these people were in rather prominent positions in the U.S. government. As a result, Lennon was trailed by the FBI for a number of years. Agents were assigned. Reports were written. A stage comedy about this could be done a lot of different ways. With Ears On A Beatle, playwright Mark St. Germain delivers a competent script that mixes some clever bits of comedy with an overall natural sense of drama about two FBI agents assigned to trail John Lennon. Under the direction of frequent Rep actor Jonathan Smoots, Next Act Theater closes its season with an enjoyable production of the hit comedy. St. Germain chose for the play to follow the two FBI agents over an extended period of years. Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cescarini plays Howard Ballentine, the older, more cynical agent who’s been on the job for a very long time. Ryan Schaubach plays younger, more idealistic FBI agent Daniel McClure, who goes undercover as a young hippie. This sets up a youth/experience theme that sees cynicism slowly change hands between generations as the ‘70s slowly fade-out into the ‘80s with the death of Lennon. The story is painted in fairly broad strokes, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling than a more intricate plot might have been. For the most part, we focus on the two agents and their lives and their interactions with each other. Other characters appear in the production as rendered in dialogue. J. Edgar Hoover is a silent character in the play, making his presence known subtly throughout the story. It was Hoover’s FBI that opened the file on Lennon in the first place. Dialogue ranges from very obvious jokes about the nature of work at the FBI to very, very subtle moments passing between two agents in idle conversation. Lennon himself is evident in so much of the dialogue, but nowhere is he more present than St. Germain’s depiction of the era of which he was a part. Cescarini brings his usual charisma to the role of Agent Ballentine. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of a public servant who just happens to be following around one of the most popular musicians of the 20th century. Cescarini has an impressive presence in any role and his performance here is no exception. His sympathetic portrayal of a practical conservative who comes to an understanding about the man he’s being paid to follow has a great deal of depth to it. Schaubach plays McClure as the nice guy who comes from a proud military family but gets shifted off to the FBI instead. He seems to believe in the idealism of his country, but understands that there’s a moral code that it doesn’t always live up to. His idealism outweighs his patriotism, leaving his personality […]
Apr 2nd, 2007
The 2007-2008 Fine Arts Season Preview
By Russ Bickerstaff and Evan Solochek Having survived the uncertainties of a Milwaukee winter, things settle down as our performing arts groups begin to look forward to next season. As usual, 2007-08 events closest to the present happen to also be the furthest from Milwaukee, as spring pushes performances further away from the theatre district for the summer. West of Madison, The American Players Theatre in Spring Green is one of the most consistently satisfying theatre companies in the state. The outdoor repertory group starts its season this June with a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which may have a difficult time topping Milwaukee Shakespeare’s outstanding production of the same play earlier this season. With a talented APT cast including Michael Gotch and James DeVita, it’s definitely going to be good. Along with the usual Shakespearian bits, the APT will be performing Shaw’s Misalliance and Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. To the north and east, The American Folklore Theatre in Fish Creek starts its season in June as well with the world premiere of A Cabin With A View. It’s a musical romantic comedy based on E.M. Forster’s novel of the same name, with the AFT’s usual touches of Wisconsin charm. AFT’s season also includes reprisals of two of its biggest hits: Belgians in Heaven and the irrepressible Guys On Ice. Further in the future but closer to home, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens its season in August with a production of Ron Hutchinson’s comedy Moonlight and Magnolias. The impressive cast of Michael Herold, Marcy Kearns, Daniel Mooney and Gerard Neugent relate the story of those strange hours that passed as the script for Gone With The Wind was written. The Chamber’s season also includes performances of short monologues (with Talking Heads, which opens in October) and a play based on the very, very long Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment. The Boulevard Theatre opens its 2007-2008 season in August with David Mamet’s brilliant dramatic tribute to the art of the sale with Glengarry Glen Ross. The Boulevard’s freshly announced season features some clever choices for its tiny space, including the holocaust drama The Last Letter, a play about Clarence Darrow, a romantic French farce and Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare continues to catch the stage in rather unexpected places as The Milwaukee Ballet’s upcoming season features graceful interpretations of both Hamlet (in November) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in April). In keeping with the production standards of the Ballet, set and costuming for April’s show should be every bit as impressive as the performance itself. In addition to the familiar standards of the Nutcracker and the annual trip to the Pabst, the Milwaukee Ballet’s season also includes what should prove to be a lavish production of La Bayadere, a sumptuous tale of love and jealousy. And now to raise the curtain on the coming season…. ACACIA THEATRE COMPANY Integrating art and faith, Acacia provides occasion for all to consider their lives in relation to God. Season […]
Apr 1st, 2007
String of Pearls
Michele Lowe’s String of Pearls follows the title object through 30-years, as it passes from owner to owner to owner. Slowly, the necklace makes its long journey full circle as it leaves its mark on the lives of a large number of characters. Featuring some impressive talent in a small space, Renaissance Theaterworks’ production of the play is an enjoyable collection of dramatic moments. For the most part this is a string of disjointed moments held together by a single prop. The prop itself isn’t always extremely prominent in each of the stories that the play consists of, so it ends up feeling like more of a symbolic gimmick than a character that mixes with the rest of the play. The action onstage is largely spoken directly to the audience, making String of Pearls feel like a collection of monologues that aspires to be a single, cohesive play. It may not quite make it, but there are so many genuinely touching moments here that it hardly seems worth the effort to string them together at all. Renaissance has put together a cast for its production that not only captures attentions and imagination throughout the play’s many stories, it also manages to keep things flowing gracefully enough that each story seems to naturally flow from the one before it. And though we are, for the most part, watching a string of monologues, the actresses here have a strong enough chemistry as a whole to make it feel like they are all interacting with each other in a single story. Each actress holds several roles over the course of the play. None are so pleasantly wide-ranging as those performed by long-time Milwaukee stage actress Mary MacDonald Kerr. The butch, overweight lesbian gravedigger she plays at the end of the show may not fit her physically, but she plays it sympathetically with more than enough heart to make her performance truly engaging. Earlier on, she plays a comically annoying mother of an adult daughter, the comically hip mother of a much younger daughter and more. Kerr stands out in a script that hands many of the fun roles to her with only a smattering of truly heavy drama. While Tracy Michelle Arnold plays a number of roles herself, nowhere is she more memorable than in the role of an Irish funeral home employee who is looking after her aging mother. Arnold plays both high comedy and endearing drama from the subtle, Irish intonations of a woman whom seems to have spent a great deal of time pummeling. She’s brilliantly reserved in the role. So much comes out of so little in her performance here. Making her Renaissance debut in this production, it’s nice to see the American Players Theatre actress on a much smaller local Milwaukee stage. Tammy Workentin and Laura Birmingham round out the cast. Birmingham renders some really powerful moments as a woman looking back over her life at the beginning of the play and perhaps looking forward to new life […]
Apr 1st, 2007
Jake’s Women
Everyone who has ever known anyone has talked to people while they weren’t there. The little fractions of imagination required to talk to people without them knowing about it keeps most people psychologically well adjusted. Everyone knows that. Not everyone writes a play about it, though. With Jake’s Women, Neil Simon explores imaginary conversations as they relate to writers and other people who suffer. The Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove continues its season with a thoughtful, tender production of Simon’s comic drama. Michael Chobanoff stars as Jake, a frazzled writer trying to confront his wife Maggie (Coleen Tutton) about the growing emotional distance between the two of them. Jake’s imagination is frequently visited by women he’s known over the course of his life. When he needs advice, for instance, he imagines conversations with his sister Karen (a brashly witty Jamieson Hawkins). When he feels the need to be comforted in a variety of different ways, he has conversations with his daughter Molly (played as a precocious girl by seasoned child actress Molly Langhenry and as a young adult by Shannon Ishizaki). Stand out performances by actresses playing women in Jake’s head include Bonnie Krah as Jake’s therapist and Lindsay Nylen as his late first wife Julie. The fact that Jake is having imaginary sessions with his therapist is one of the more inspired bits in the script and Krah delivers on it with a very precise comic presence. Nylen holds the right amount of charm and beauty to convincingly play that perfect woman in Jake’s past. Her character gains a dimension when she asks for Jake to have imaginary conversations with the whole her – imperfections and all. Nylen matches the character’s extra volume in very subtle but palpable shades. Ruth Arnell rounds out the cast as a young woman named Sheila. When Jake and his wife try some time away from each other, Jake dates Sheila to fill the void of intimacy in his life. She’s attractive. She’s affectionate. But she doesn’t know him, so there’s no real substantial intimacy. We see him speak with her while his mind is casually falling apart. It develops into a cleverly written dialogue between Jake, Sheila and Jake’s uncontrolled imaginary interruptions by Maggie. It’s an almost musical bit of three-part comedy. Arnell (who appeared as the female lead in Sunset’s production of The Seven Year Itch last season) is an excellent comic beauty, almost flawlessly performing her part in the three-person interaction. Happening early on after a 15-minute intermission, that dialogue is the last bit of truly inspired work on Simon’s end of things before the final curtain. Much of the last act is spent slowly wrapping things up in the most obvious way possible. The ending is far too tidy for the complexities Simon introduces in the hour or so before intermission. The cast glides through Simon’s occasional flashes of wit and brilliance with only a few moments of friction between stage and script. Chobanoff tackles the central role here remarkably […]
Jan 15th, 2007
