December 10, 2008

November 23, 2008

Somethin's Coming?

I'm hunkered down in the Florida Keys for the week, doing some quality family time in honor of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. The porch is filled with Adirondack chairs, water-stained glass globes filled with beach stuff, and it's also the stomping ground of a spry cat, who pops out of the surrounding hedge occasionally for a few sniffs and a behind-the-ear scratch (I'm the scratcher, she's the sniffer).
My dad tells me I resemble Ernest Hemingway in my afternoon chair, though I'm sure Ernie wouldn't be leaning back against a heating pad to nurse his recently strained back, and would be tossing back tumblers of scotch rather than sipping green tea. At my side, a bag of M&M's rather than an elephant gun.
But my world-view is Hemingway-esque, perhaps. Watching the Obama administration gather steam, I am impressed by the way he is garnering the kudos of naysayers like David Brooks. But I wonder if we're really psychically ready for the challenges ahead.
I know that there is particular trepidation in the arts community, and wasn't surprised to see it mentioned by James Wolcott, who is and has been in the thick of things.

I have a larger sense of disquietude about what's looming ahead culturally, the oncoming economic disaster that will wipe out a lot of dance and theater companies, cripple museums, and kill off print publications. A hunkered-down, bunkered-in period of cautious retrenchment smothers creative energies, and art is in what infuses life with meaning and pleasure, takes our minds off of death and paperwork. The recent passings of John Leonard and Clive Barnes underscore this uneasy sense that we are in a season of endings and closings, at the last stop before the train's taken out of service for good.

Appropros of that, I've been spending much time in the pleasureable company of John Leonard and Studs Terkel, not to mention David Foster Wallace. They saw the world as I want to see it, with great curiousity, insight and joy.

September 9, 2008

Political Set Design 101

I'm still getting caught up on reactions to the conventions, and some of the best analysis is coming from Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones. Here's his take on the relative scale of the Obama and McCain acceptance speeches:

Barack Obama's eloquent inspirational words sailed out into a stadium and danced with potentially dangerous independence on a huge, populist sea. The Republicans took the opposite tactic, focusing the viewer ever more inwards on McCain's gripping, heroic, explicitly personal story, which McCain told in quiet, direct, declarative sentences that grew only more intimate and confessional as the speech progressed.

Even when everything is reduced to flat-screen images, space and architecture can shape the message in potent ways.




September 7, 2008

Music to the Max


Like the other minimalists of his day, John Adams used to fool around with short, repetitive phrases and structures. But he soon discovered the joy of big orchestras and forms.
His "Son of Chamber Symphony" isn't exactly big, but it's awesome in its speed and dexterity. Like a relay race staged on a roller coaster, the melodic batons are passed deftly between instruments as they swoop and tumble past each other. At Turner Hall Saturday night, Present Music's had a bit of trouble keeping things firmly on the tracks, but Adams "Son," the "big number" on the program, was great fun nonetheless, with the ghost of Karl Stalling, the great musical mind behind decades of Warner Brothers cartoons, hovering over the proceedings with tapping toes and a toothy grin.
Read more about the Present Music concert at Milwaukee Magazine's Culture Club.

September 5, 2008

Going Local


Okay, enough about the theater of politics. Milwaukee's performance scene is about to kick in to high gear, and it's time to pay attention. I'll be at Turner Hall tomorrow night for Present Music's season kickoff, which plays on the history of the ballroom by including various dance variations, as well as featuring fencers, and various other Turner fitness aficionados. I'm eager to hear John Adams' "Son of Chamber Symphony" and will certainly stay for the postmodern vaudeville of Scarring Party. I talked to PM's Kevin Stalheim and the Turner's Julilly Kohler for WUWM's "Lake Effect": Listen to it here.

September 4, 2008

The American Idol Candidate

Any theater type knows that it's all about casting.
My initial "what-were-they-thinking" skepticism about the Sarah Palin choice withered painfully on the vine as I watched a little of her acceptance speech. It's not surprising that it took so long to sink in, but with all the punditry surrounding her political positions and inexperience, the obvious is often invisible.
When Palin talked of her husband, and told the cheering crowd, "He's my guy," she surely warmed the hearts of millions, both men and women, who don't give a hoot about her politics or affiliations. Clinton and Bush's image management teams went way out of their way to craft their "just plain folks" image. But Clinton's birthin' in a town called Hope and Bush's (some say) calculated and well-honed simpleton rhetoric just tried to mask their silver spoon or liberal elite pedigree.
Palin, on the other hand, is the real thing for many Americans. And that geniuneness is her appeal. It offers a solid tap into the font of American cynicism about politics. And it makes her someone to root for. In a country where American Idol and its variations are watched by more people than conventions and even Olympic contests, McCain and his people knew that we love seeing (and falling in love with) people like us rise to the top--whatever their song or whatever they stand for.

September 3, 2008

I gotcher theatuh right-chere!!



Milwaukee stages have not been completely quiet this summer. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Well was a funny and trenchant look at real life, and what theater can and can't do to capture and perhaps shape it. Ruth Schudson sat in the center of the production with great charm and gravitas.
Danceworks also hosted another great summer series of local and national choreography. The UWM Dance Department offered concerts as well.

But why am I thinking that everything this fall will be upstaged by McCain-Obama slapdown? It couldn't be the rhetorical circus surrounding Gov. Palin? Or the convention spectacles? I'm not quite ready to call it Shakespearean or Shavian. That would be a disservice to a world that is very much its own.

August 30, 2008

It's Time

The summer offered me a goodly number of distractions this year. An exciting start to the Brewers season finally turned me into a bit of a baseball fan. Politics had a herky-jerky attraction, but the one-two punch of the Obama acceptance speech and the McCain VP announcement finally grabbed me by the lapels and shook me into the pol-watchers fray. Oh, and I and my family moved, setting up shop a few blocks east of our old house. Clearing away 18 years worth of domestic detritus and weathering a home sale and purchase in the current market kept my hands and mind from getting too idle.
But the season is upon us. I've already been doing several preview interviews on WUWM's "Lake Effect," and writing a survey of the arts season for Milwaukee Magazine's September issue. Next week, you will start seeing regular postings here and on my Culture Club blog. And hearing me chat with Bonnie North every Friday on Lake Effect's "Arts on Deck." It's now available as a podcast. Stay tuned for more on that.
Until then....

May 1, 2008

Gwilt or Innocent

Speaking of battlefields (see below). And blood and thunder. Let me introduce you to Miss Lydia Gwilt, the anti-heroine of Armadale, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s latest world premiere. Several years in the making (I offered my two cents to the script process when I worked at the Rep), Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ longest novel is a remarkable bit of dramatic storytelling, filled with some of the most diabolically entertaining characters you’ll see this side of Sweeney Todd.
Charles Dickens’ dark side, Wilkie Collins was a leading proponent of the “sensation novel,” a genre in which interest in reader “engagement” was taken to new levels. Here, every pulse-quickening gasp or shudder is a literary accomplishment. And while modern audiences may not react the way Collins’ Victorian readers did, there are still loads of guilty (or perhaps Gwilty?) pleasures in this well-spun yarn. Murder, say. As well as malice, general mayhem, and yes, monkeys.
It is story theater at its best, a style made famous by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s groundbreaking Dickens marathon, The Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. Hatcher and the Rep actors have done a great job of painting in the supporting characters with a few deft strokes. Peter Silbert, with rheumy eyes and pallid skin, changes from the bombastically priggish Reverend Brock to the simpering Bashwood with the flip of a scarf and the slapping on of a bad toupee. Jim Pickering puffs his chest as Major Milroy, Armadale’s harrumphing future father-in-law. Then caves it in, dangling his arms nervously about his groin, to become Dr. Downward, the director of a shady and nefarious surgical establishment. Rose Pickering flutters nervously as Mrs. Milroy, then pops a cleavage-revealing button or two, and sneers her way into Mrs. Oldershaw, Downward’s partner in crime.
Part of the pleasure of Armadale is watching these transformations, and seeing the story unfold on Michael Ganio’s edifice of Victorian hardware and bric-a-brac. Here, a curtain hides what goes on behind closed doors (quite a lot, as it turns out), but also become a ship’s sail. Chairs become window grates, and a center-stage fainting couch (an emblem of Victorian “sensation" if there ever was), gets enough mileage to require several oil changes and a wheel balance.
A ballad of good and evil that spans generations, Armadale gets all the iniquity it needs from Lydia Gwilt (Deborah Staples). Gwilt is the actor’s actor, transforming herself from charming governess to diabolical murderess with ease. Ozias Midwinter, with shadowy eyes and a leather coat, looks like he could open for Fall Out Boy, but Michael Gotch saturates him with the ennui suggested by his ramblings about fate and dark destiny. And Brian Vaughn, dressed as a Victorian Sun King, exudes charm and fortune feelings, embodying the naïve goodness that always prevails in such stories.
Or does it?

All You Need

Helen loves war movies—Von Ryan’s Express, The Guns of Navarrone—but during a particularly sweet bit of pillow talk in Renaissance Theatreworks' Fat Pig, she hits the TV mute button so she and her new beau, Tom, can have a quiet heart-to-heart. When the talk is over and lust again calls, she stops mid-kiss to reach for the remote. The lights fade on passionate kisses, and the sounds of rumbling Panzer tanks and exploding Howitzers.
Love has always been a battlefield for theatrical provocateur Neil LaBute, but here (sound effects aside), the most devastating moments hit you like the silent knifework of a guerilla behind enemy lines.
Helen (Tanya Saracho) is the title character, a large woman who meets Tom (Braden Moran) in the play’s first scene. He is awkward and unsure; she is girlishly bold and charming. She is obviously comfortable in her size-14 skin, and he is smitten with her unaffected warmth.
LaBute takes us through the trajectory of their romance, and follows Tom’s struggles to tell his co-workers, one of whom is a former girlfriend, about his new love. While the play has a lot to say about body image and America’s obsession with muscle tone (LaBute wrote it after his own 60-pound diet see-saw), its message isn’t nearly as one-dimensional or didactic.
Instead, LaBute’s subject is the fragility of the human spirit, the hopeful—and often hopeless—ways we bolster our egos against a world of pain and uncertainty. Tom’s attraction is obviously rooted in his own insecurity. He’s a bit of a commitment-phobe, and vague about his place in the world. His bliss with Helen is reserved for the time when that world disappears and they can be “completely honest,” a phrase from the relationship lexicon that is never as simple as it sounds.
The world that comes crashing in on Tom and Helen is a doozy. Embodied in his office mates, Carter and Jeanne, it’s a maelstrom of personal complications and social ugliness. On Sunday night, a “pay what you can” performance, the cruelty drew both laughter and pause. One of the brilliant things about LaBute’s dialogue is that he pushes comedy conventions to make you laugh one moment, and then feel guilty about it the next. Director Susan Fete’s production finds the space between those moments, and makes the experience profoundly unsettling.
Casting Wayne T. Carr as Carter is one of Fete’s bolder moves, and it pays off. To hear an African-American character give LaBute’s most “edifying” monologue adds an extra layer of irony. Tom’s romance is doomed, says Carter, because it’s best to “stick to our own kind.” Whether or not you think “weight-ism” is the new racism, the speech and the exchange that follows speaks volumes about the complications of living in America.
It doesn’t hurt that Carr is spry and funny, and has a good partner in Leah Dutchin’s Jeanne, who finds just the right balance of narcissism and women-scorned frustration.
The final scene, of course, is at the beach, where we celebrate the body beautiful. It’s here you expect the dramatic fireworks, confrontations worthy of an MTV reality show. But LaBute deftly goes out with a whisper instead of a bang. With one line—again an innocent and romantic cliché--you see a brave and beautiful soul crumble. No screams or epithets. No blood and thunder. No tears. Except, perhaps, your own.

Photo by Jean Bernstein: Braden Moran and Tanya Saracho.

Romeo & Juliet: The Real Story

Those who came to the Florentine Opera last weekend expecting a familiar story were in for a surprise. Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi is based on the pre-Shakespeare stories that informed the Romeo & Juliet we know so well. There’s no nurse, no balcony and when the opera begins, Mercutio is already dead. In the first act, there’s a good deal of martial posturing as the two families more toward war (here, it’s not just a Hatfield-McCoy-type squabble—my friend Anne Reed called it Verona’s equivalent of “trash talk”). The second act moves into more familiar territory--Juliet’s fake poisoning and the entombed finale--and actually contains some moments with great dramatic potential. A duel between Juliet’s bethrothed, Tebaldo, and Romeo is interrupted by her funeral cortege passing through the woods. In Bellini’s story, Juliet wakes after Romeo has taken the poison, but before he dies. So there’s time for a tragic duet, most of which Romeo sings with his head hanging upside down over the edge of the tomb’s marble futon.
Bellini’s opera is by no means standard fare, and it's rarely performed. Musically, it’s first-rate Bellini, but its sense of story and drama is hopelessly old-fashioned. My guess is that the Florentine Opera wanted to offer an example of Bel Canto, and also thought that the familiar story (it was billed as Romeo and Juliet rather than its more unfamiliar true title) would attract its own audience.
Those who showed up were exposed to a pedestrian production (Bernard Uzan was the stage director) peppered with moments of great singing. There's some nice choral writing, and here the singing was well-balanced and solid. And Joseph Rescigno's orchestra played with spritely energy when required. And soloists Todd Levy (clarinet), Scott Tisdale (cello), and William Barnewitz (horn) played some beautiful turns.
As for the soloists, Romeo is a taxing role, and Marianna Kulikova wavered a bit as she tried to fill every scene. On Sunday afternoon, the third performance in three days, her voice was musky and deep in her chest, and occasionally had a hard time rising above the orchestra. Georgia Jarman’s Juliet fared better. Her first moment, the achingly beautiful solo, “Oh Quante Volte,” was a thrill, particularly when her voice flew into the cascades that can make Bel Canto singing so breathtaking. But her soprano, too, showed some strain in the high register. The most dependable singing of the night came from Scott Piper, as Tebaldo, whose confident tenor conveyed his character’s heroic bluster.

The Rite Stuff


It’s hard to pick out a favorite moment from last weekend’s Danceworks/Present Music collaboration at the Humphrey Scottish Rite Center, so maybe I’ll just make a list.
Christal Wagner’s explosion of yellow started the concert by defiantly proclaiming that spring had arrived, regardless of recent weather patterns. Play, set to Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages, was childlike and celebratory, lead by the puckish energy of Melissa Anderson.
Sang Shen’s gorgeous playing of Kamran Ince’s sweet melody in To Wander With brought an extra level of depth to Kim Johnson-Rockafellow’s meditative What Remains.” Johnson-Rockafellow’s focus and intensity was as passionate as Ince’s music. At one moment, she seemed to emerge from a dark pool, arms thrown back and her shoulders and face registering the shock of sun and air.
In Simone Ferro’s Blue Silence, set to music by Kevin Volans and Elena Kats-Chernin, the dancers seemed a bit crowded on the square stage, but in the last movement, the nonet erupted into a three-by-three canon, and moved with new clarity into the final haunting image.
Dani Kuepper, using a rich vocabulary of taut duets and beautifully massed conglomerations of dancers, created the best work of the evening, Lying, Cheating, Stealing. She used the space impressively, dividing it into discreet areas, each with it own style and tempo. David Lang’s music was raw and clanging (it included hubcaps as instruments), and Kuepper caught its spirit of anxiety and eventually, release. It’s the finest piece of her work I’ve seen to date. She also got to have a lot of fun with “Where the Wild Things Are,” a retelling of Maurice Sendak’s story that’s a little bit Austin Powers and a little bit Cirque du Soliel.
Jason Seed spins out long, searching melodies in Politiscapes, and Kelly Anderson matches his lines with explorations of mirror images and other symmetries spun out across the floor.
Photo by Rory Kurtz: Melissa Anderson

April 24, 2008

Duet for Two Hearts

A little over an hour into the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s big-hearted production of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, Jonathan West stands center stage, looming over the audience under the tattered gazebo of the Talley family boathouse. “People in Europe are very wasteful of people,” he muses, remembering a horrific event of his past. The entire play has lead to that moment, and West brings it home with a wizened detachment that masks a pain that has nearly paralyzed him all his life. But more than that, he embodies a particular clash of American cultures at mid-20th century. A European Jew looking back (and presciently forward) at horrors visited on his people, framed by America’s sunny infatuation with tradition—faux Victorian brick-a-brack, frayed and crumbling as history marches forward.
Wilson’s play is decidedly a personal story, but also one that resonates with the echoes of global events. West is Matt Friedman, a Jewish tax lawyer who has come to Lebanon, Missouri, to woo Sally Talley, who has done nothing less than revitalize his faith in the power of love and humanity. She’s not exactly a life force. As wonderfully played by Laura Gray, Sally is bitter, fatalistic and closed off from the world. But Friedman senses in her the possibility of connection, and the play spends its 97 minutes peeling away layers of the characters’ psychic armor until those possibilities are beautifully clear to everyone.

Read the complete review at Culture Club.

Photo: Jonathan West as Matt Friedman and Laura Gray as Sally Talley. Amanda Schlicher Photography

Amphibians 'R' Us

Children’s theater has a lot of street cred these days, and part of the reason is A Year with Frog and Toad, a sweet little tadpole of a musical that gave The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis a Broadway hit in 2003. The show received three Tony nominations, and helped CTC nab a Tony award for Best Regional Theater the following year, a first for a youth-oriented company. Based on Arnold Reale’s charming, simple children’s books, the show’s strengths are, well, its charm and simplicity.
There’s plenty of that in the new production by First Stage Children’s Theatre. There isn’t much story here—the play doesn’t really aspire to anything but what its title suggests—but, director Tony Clements is a music theater veteran, and he knows how to keep things springing right along.

Read the complete review at Culture Club.

We (heart) Edo!

Milwaukee’s love fest with Edo de Waart continued last Thursday night, and he gave back in sonic spades. The Music Director Designate conducted Holst’s The Planets in the informal setting of the Milwaukee Symphony’s Classical Connections series. Taking the stage after a snappy promotional video, De Waart received a standing ovation from the substantial crowd even before he lifted his baton.
Classical Connections concerts are designed to appeal to the less snooty music fans. This one featured a video program with images (both real and computer generated) from around the solar system. It was originally scheduled for all the concerts, but the MSO scrapped the screen for the “serious” weekend program. The Connections concerts are also shorter, and are peppered with conversations about the music in between selections. Tonight, however, there was very little said about Holst and a whole lot said about De Waart. Both concertmaster Frank Almond and principal cellist put on their Regis Philbin hats to ask De Waart about his history and his path to Milwaukee (they have both worked with him in the past). Charming but hardly gregarious, De Waart chatted about his early years.

Read the rest of the review in Culture Club.

April 15, 2008

An Armitage Sampler

Karole Armitage is used to a nomadic life. She’s spent much of the past two decades bumping around Europe directing ballets and operas. But in 2005, she decided to set down roots in New York with a new company, Armitage Gone! One of the major projects of that company is “The Dream Trilogy,” the final segment of which premiered in New York in January.
Armitage brought a very pared down version of that trilogy to Alverno College’s Pitman Theatre Saturday night—or it might even be called a sampler. The six dancers performed the first (of three) section of “Ligeti Essays” (2007) without its frozen landscape set by David Salle. And they followed it with a shortened version of “Time is an echo of an ax within a wood” (2004).
So rather than an extended exploration of a particular themes or ideas, we got two short, contrasting works that said a lot about what Armitage is up to with her new company. The “Ligeti Essays,” set to short songs by the much loved Hungarian composer György Ligeti who died in 2007, lost some of its visual resonance on the bare stage (you can see an excerpt of the original staging here). Set on David Salle’s ice-rink in purgatory, the tender duets evoked tenderness on the edge of oblivion, the dance equivalent of Schubert’s long, lonely walk in Die Winterreise. On the Pitman Theatre stage, you could feel the ice with each slide (the dancers wore socks, which allowed an assortment of skate-like moves), but you felt none of the chill.
Still, the movement was remarkable for its viscous fluidity. Though the mood of each of the 15 pieces vary wildly, this is a cozy armchair of a dance—soft, plush, perfectly captured by Peter Speliopoulos’s simple velvet costumes. The partnering is athletic but giving. When William Isaac gently pushes head of Mei-Hua Wang, their whole bodies pulsate like amoebas in a Petri dish. Even as Ligeti’s music shifts from elegiac to wacky, the style of the dance is loose and rubbery. And the sextet has the astonishing technique to render these ideas with amazing ease.
In “Time is an echo…” the mood is completely different. The look is taut and metallic (including Salle’s beaded curtain which ripples sensuously when the dancers step throuth it). The Bartok music (“Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) is gently propulsive, and the dance’s energy drives it as much as follows along. The style here is equally smooth and flexible, but it has more the feel of bodies at war with themselves. There’s a throughline of tension that isn’t as much resolved at the end of each sequence as held in check until the next phrase starts.
But through both pieces, you can see a brave new combination of Armitage’s influences: Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, her years of dabbling with more pop forms. It’s a dense, beautiful collection of ideas executed by astonishing dancers, even if they didn’t seem to capture the full picture of Armitage’s original vision.
"Ligeti Essays" photograph by Paul Kolnick; "Time is an echo..." photograph by Amitava Sarkar.

April 13, 2008

The Irma Vanishes


If I had my druthers, you'd be reading a review of Next Act Theatre's The Mystery of Irma Vep on this very page. But that's been sabotaged by the sheer popularity of the show. Unable to attend on opening night, I tried to nab a seat last week, only to be faced with a big fat SOLD OUT. That's OK. There's always next week, and knowing my 10-year-old son likes a good mummy joke as much as the next guy, I thought I'd catch the show with him. No such luck. In fact, the current Next Act calendar shows the sell outs stretching into the second week in May. Good for John McGivern and Chris Tarjan, who I'm sure have great fun with Charles Busch's script. Good for David Cescarini and Charles Kakuk and all the folks at Next Act.

March 23, 2008

Milwaukee Shakespeare's Vivid Cymbeline


There may not be many memorable stanzas in Cymbeline, but Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of the Bard's ornate romance takes place in the space of pure poetry. Josh Schmidt’s and Victoria Delorio’s sound design saturates every scene in atmosphere and punctuates almost every significant gesture (and offers a beautiful setting to the song, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”). Dominated by a huge sheet of shimmery gold fabric (even Christo would be envious), Misha Kachman’s set is as elemental as the story. A huge tree branch spreads across the ceiling of the space, suggestive of the plays convoluted plot and complicated family tree. The walls are a textured, saturated red, filled with shadowy figures that split the difference between Surrealism a la Joan Miro and cave paintings. A shock of arrows pincushions one wall, another opens onto a heavenly space of blazing light (for the entrance of the gods, of course). The playing space is lovely, dark and deep, and it has to be to make room the cast in the almost comically exhausting final resolution scene. It packs more coincidences and “surprises” than a year’s worth of General Hospital.

Without any conceptual heavy-handedness, director Jeffrey Sichel captures the essence of Shakespeare’s play in all its fairy-tale sprawl. The story includes familiar elements: lost siblings, damsels in hiding, manufactured deflowerings, poisons that aren’t really poisons, not to mention buffoonish royals and noble savages. Other than Posthumous, the play’s heart and soul, the characters are only So Deep. But Sichel’s cast finds lots of comic, fiendish and romantic possibilities. Todd Denning, acting in a wheelchair due to a broken ankle late in rehearsals, finds the oily heart in the Italian Iachimo, who incites Posthumous’s jealousy by pretending to seduce his wife, Imogen. And Sarah Sokolovic plays her with a pure, unaffected grace. One could wish for a little more sturm und drang from Wayne T. Carr, but his Posthumous is filled with that sweet nobility we expect in Shakespeare’s romantic heroes.

And besides, too much emoting (unless it is from the hilarious drama queen, Cloten, played deliciously by Joe Foust) would detract too much from the one-two- (three-four-five-) punch of the story. It’s no small feat that this Cymbeline spins its tale with clarity and a surfeit of rich images, inventing a magical world in which trust and truth can be fragile and ephemeral, but can be joyfully recovered through the keen vision of a generous heart.

March 20, 2008

Another Opening Another Wet, Slushy Snowstorm

With another bevy of theater openings on tap, the Mother of All Easter snowstorms bears down on us. It's bad enough that the Milwaukee Rep was forced to schedule their opening of Endgame on Easter Sunday (the production schedule there is merciless), now they have to deal with a weekend snowstorm as well. Milwaukee Shakespeare opens its Cymbeline on Saturday, right when the soggy wet stuff will be tapering off.

Including two shows which opened last weekend at the Rep and the Skylight, there's plenty to choose from. See excerpts from my reviews below.

March 19, 2008

The Rep's Night Is a Child


Some plays are vexing intellectual puzzles, posing questions that can be pondered long after the lights go down. Others are nearly pure expressions of heart. Charles Randolph-Wright’s The Night Is a Child is a play of the heart, but one that deals with such a toweringly ominous event that it lands deep in the soul.


Read the entire review at Culture Club.

Skylight's Charming Souvenir

As the 1940s anti-diva Florence Foster Jenkins, Linda Stephens is a little bit Margaret Dumont, a little bit James Lipton, and a whole lot of fun. Jenkins was a New York socialite who became notorious for her recitals—orgies of bad intonation and excess emotion. Stephen Temperley’s charming, often hilarious play, Souvenir, playing at the Skylight until March 30, wants us to see the spirit behind her determination to “live inside the music.”
When Stephens channels Jenkins, singing Rigoletto (Gilda’s aria “Cara Nome”), she’s a sight to behold. She sings with her shoulders, with her jaw, and her hips. and her forearms, flinging them forward as if the notes need a little extra push to get to the audience. Holding one long uneasy note, her body palpitates like a skein of limp fettuccini, eventually deflating as she moves down a long slow glissando that sounds a little like a Cessna coming in to land.

Read the entire review at Culture Club.

March 16, 2008

Film Watch

The doors are now shuttered on the Milwaukee County Historical Society, which will be a major location for Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Local actor John Kishline has snared a part in the movie. Others? Let us know.

Charles Randolph-Wright, whose The Night Is a Child opened Friday at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater (stay tuned for a review), was in town for the premiere with the producer for his next movie, which Randolph-Wright is thinking of setting and shooting in Milwaukee. Since the film concerns a man in a mid-life crisis, one of their stops this weekend was, of course, Harley-Davidson.

While I'm not sure how much footage we'll get, Fox Television has just picked up a drama series pitched by Paul Attanasio, producer of House, screenwriter of Quiz Show, and brother of Brewer owner Mark. According to Variety, Courtroom K will be set in Milwaukee, and center on a judge, prosecutor and public defender. Let's just hope that Milwaukee isn't going to become the new Baltimore, city of choice for brutal and hopeless police/crime dramas like Homicide and The Wire.

The Return of the Redressed

I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds good. I did take a little break, catching up from California time and finishing a large piece about UPAF which will appear in the May Milwaukee Magazine. Several reviews will follow. And look for some changes in Milwaukee Arts in the near future.

March 2, 2008

Steinbeck for the 21st Century


The joys of the UWM Theater Department’s production of Of Mice and Men are in the lobby as well as onstage. An extensive and thorough display of original documents and photographs from the 1930s spans the outside wall of the theater. Pamphlets from political and social organizations, rallying cries, posters and photos give a palpable sense of the world in which John Steinbeck’s story is set.
Director Rebecca Holderness’s interest in Of Mice and Men as a piece of social history goes beyond the lobby, though.

Read the complete review at Milwaukee Magazine's Culture Club.

Transcendent Storytelling at Next Act

It’s strange to imagine a play in which none of the characters talk to each other, but only to themselves, or perhaps directly to us—that anonymous collection of humanity we call The Audience. Brian Friel’s mesmerizing Faith Healer mines the tradition of Irish storytelling to seemingly do the impossible--create a piece of drama with rich characters, strong narrative and devastating conflict that is composed entirely of four monologues.
Next Act Theater’s production, directed by Edward Morgan, captures the myriad richness of Friel’s script: its lilting, glorious language, its resuscitative humor, and its slow, devastating journey into the dark realities of the human soul. And its music.

Read the complete review at Milwaukee Magazine's Culture Club.

March 1, 2008

Drive-By Truckers at Pabst Theater


I was feeling kind of ragged on Thursday night, and wasn't looking forward to a night of "southern rock" at the Pabst. But I was pleasantly surprised.


Like a wayward teen taking over his grandmama’s front parlor for a night of whiskeyed debauchery, the Drive-By Truckers rocked the Pabst Theatre Thursday night with a two-and-a-half-hour set that threatened to peel the paint right off the gilded, curlicued walls.

Read the rest of my review in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

February 28, 2008

Milwaukee Ballet's A Midsummer Night's Dream

At Sunday afternoon’s performance of Bruce Wells’ Midsummer at the Milwaukee Ballet, a different vision of love lingered.
Long after the wooded shenanigans have sent the youngsters ricocheting around the forest, Titania and Oberon, king and queen of the fairies, face each other on an empty stage. Since the story has begun, they’ve battled over a child, and Titania has fallen in and out of love with a donkey. But they are still king and queen. Wells’ pas de deux charts the couple’s tenuous journey from chilly formality to genuine intimacy. Slowly, the coldness and empty pomp of the relationship gives way to little flourishes of affection. Always regal figures, Tatiana Jouravel and David Hovhannisyan never lose their statuesque bearing. But in the course of the dance they emerge as full-blooded human beings in the midst of a journey. Passion and gravitas united.

Read the full review at Culture Club. Come on, you know you want to.

Silences Are Golden





If you’ve ever skimmed through a copy of Crime and Punishment, you’d expect lots of words in the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel. And there were. Curt Columbus and Marilyn Campbell’s adaptation of the book compresses it into an impressionistic 90 minutes, but there are still moral quandaries to be debated and life mysteries to be plumbed. Still, the most striking thing about Patrick Holland’s production is its silences.

Read my complete review at Culture Club

February 27, 2008

The View from Row Q

As luck would have it, I was seated in the Uihlein Hall’s Row Q for the opening night of Avenue Q. But it actually wasn’t so lucky. The Marcus Center house was pretty full, so I’m guessing that at least 30 percent of the crowd had seats farther away than mine. And mine, frankly, were too far away.
But this isn’t about my luck of the draw when it comes to seats (I should note that I received the ticket free from the Marcus Center, which I truly appreciate—it’s the only way I could afford to do what I do). It’s about how the size of a theater can affect the experience of a play.
In New York, Avenue Q is playing at the Golden, one of the smallest houses on Broadway (it seats 800). It’s rarely used for musicals (it was the home of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown and, in the early 90s, William Finn’s Falsettos). Instead, it generally hosts plays where an intimate connection between the stage and audience is important: ‘Night Mother; The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?; Master Class. While Avenue Q doesn’t call for psychological subtleties, its characters are puppets, and not big ones at that.
Which brings me to the Marcus Center performance, which was pretty much overwhelmed by the space of Uihlein Hall. I could see from Row Q; the show was “legible.” But seeing the play in a 2,300 seat house was a categorically different experience than what I might have had in New York (or in London, where the show has been playing in the 870-seat Noel Coward Theatre since June, 2006).
The conceit behind Avenue Q is juicy. Creators Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx (with help from book author Jeff Whitty) took Sesame Street-style puppets and had them tell an adult story. Humans and puppets occupy the same world. And the show’s irreverent, ironic tone draws more from the likes of South Park than South Pacific.
The main character, Princeton, arrives in New York, finding the only place he can afford is an apartment on Avenue Q, the lowest of the Lower East Side (where the real streets actually go up to Avenue D). Once there, he begins to search for his “purpose,” finding friendship and love among the curious denizens of his street. There’s Rod, the deeply closeted gay Republican; Gary Coleman, former child star who is now his apartment superintendent (played sans puppet by human actor Carla Renata); Trekkie Monster, a furry recluse with an affection for internet porn; and Kate Monster, a sweet assistant kindergarten teacher with whom Princeton falls in love.
The show takes the toddler-TV conventions and sweet talk to an extreme, with hilarious results. Digital-screen Sesame Street-style animations illustrate the definition of “one-night stand,” and the guardian angel-like “Bad Idea Bears” use their best sing-song voices when urging characters to buy beer, have sex, or order another Long Island iced tea.
So there is much pleasure in the way the show’s irreverent “adult” ideas are couched in the saccharine style of kiddie-vision. But the true magic of the show is in the performances—the way the cast can breath life into very simple constructions of felt and foam rubber. That’s the greatest loss in the Marcus Center production. From where I sat, you could see the way the vibrant Robert McClure gave Princeton his innocent edge, the way his dangly arm would swing wide when belting out a song. Or the way Kelli Sawyer made Kate Monster’s head inflect every swoop of her belt-‘em-out song phrasing. But you couldn’t feel it. Recognizing wonderful physical acting is not the same as having it work its magic on you. And while it was impossible not to enjoy the show’s arch take on Broadway conventions (its “happy ending” closing song is titled “For Now”), the venue kept it from completely working its magic.
All of which brings me to an interesting question. Musicals are either getting smaller—shows like Avenue Q or Springs Awakening that start either in small, Off-Broadway theaters or regional theaters. Or they’re very big—Disney blockbusters that require an extraordinary amount of stage technology. In either case, they present a challenge for road houses around the country. How do you make them fit? How to you wedge a huge show into a production that can be driven around the country and built and disassembled quickly? Or how do you take a small-venue musical and make it work in a large, multi-purpose theater? A good, good question.

February 25, 2008

More Oscar Grouchiness

And this moment will live on as well. All the more memorable for the smarmy Travolta introduction. "Make Art!" indeed.

Oscar the Grouch

Since I was wandering Hollywood Boulevard with my family just last weekend, I had to tune into the Academy Awards tonight. But was disappointed to see that rain had forced them to cover the red carpet, eliminating any possible "Look! We were just there!" moments. While in L.A., I saw Joan Rivers' latest project, a one-woman show of sorts (there were other actors onstage with her, but you hardly noticed them), in which she got to vent some bile about having E! yank the Red Carpet out from under her. Now Hollywood vacancy is more or less the same in any generation. But with Rivers' rants about her ill treatment still in my memory, Ryan Seacrest's bland dishing with various stars was all the more difficult to take.

Best moment of the awards? Daniel Day Lewis's sweet and eloquent acceptance speech. It's nice to know that the greatest screen actor of his generation actually prepares an acceptance speech when there's a chance he'll be called to say a few words to a billion or so people.

February 24, 2008

Everything's Beautiful at the Ballet

At the Milwaukee Ballet performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon, I was surrounded by mothers, grandmothers and little girls. And while it's easy to get caught up thinking about which choreographic ideas are fresh and which are stale. Which dancers can provide the right "zap" for their characters. Or wondering if the story ballet is truly a dead art form. It's important to remember just what a strange and wonderful trip a visit to the ballet can be. In front of me, the mother of a girl (I'd guess she was about 4 or 5) piled up coats on her seat so she could sit high enough to see. Even so, she spent 10 minutes before the lights dimmed looking in wonder around the Marcus Center's Uihlein Hall. "They're so high up," she told her grandmother as she gazed back into the upper rows of the balcony. And I'm sure she was as entranced by the princes and fairies onstage as well.

What did I think of the onstage goings on? See my Culture Club column here.