Novelist James Jones’ romantic war drama From Here to Eternity was a steady success when it was released  in 1951. Not too long afterward, a Hollywood film adaptation of the novel was released which turned the story of a WWII veteran into a runaway smash hit at the cinema AND ​the bookstore. Years later, legendary composer Tim Rice has adapted the story into a musical. The show makes its way to Milwaukee in a production with Skylight Music Theatre. 

The show runs April 12 - May 5 at the Broadway Theatre Center. For more information, visit Skylight online.

The elevator pitch: a concise pitch for a new project that can be delivered between floors in an elevator. Rebecca Anne Nguyễn’s new play Hypotheticals is its own kind of elevator pitch: among attractive, young woman (played by Selena Milewski)  is in an elevator on her way to her psychiatrist’s office. She has a brief kiss with a stranger on the elevator. (Such a cool springboard for a story. Really looknig forward to this one.) That stranger turns out to be her new psychiatrist. Sounds like a fun idea. Also featuring Susan Kelly as Dr. Gwen. Kith and Kin presents the world premiere production directed by Maura Atwood. The show runs April 12 - 21 at Inspiration Studios in West Allis. For ticket reservations and more, visit Kith and Kin online.

​Next Act Theatre enters the Spring with a family story. Reese Madigan plays the title character: an adult son of a woman who has spending habits that require him to assumer the financial responisibilities for his mother. David Flores and Alexis Green round-out an impressive cast for an intimate drama that rounds-out a very satisfying season for Next Act.  The show runs April 24 - May 19 at the space on 255 S. Water St. For more information, visit Next Act online.

It’s billed on the official Milwaukee City website as “the single deadliest event in national law enforcement history” prior to September 11th, 2001. November 24th, 1917 a bomb was detonated at Milwaukee’s Central Police Station. 9 officers and 2 citizens were killed. This coming April, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre present a stage drama based on the aftermath of the incident. Martin Zimmerman’s THE NOT-SO-ACCIDENTAL CONVICTION OF ELEVEN MILWAUKEE "ANARCHISTS” runs April 26 - May 12 at the Broadway Theater Center’s Studio Theatre. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.

It’s a tiny, little motel room in Memphis in April of 1968. It’s modest. There’s a chair and a couple of beds. It’s raining outside, but the outside is inside. The motel room is onstage in Milwaukee in the March of 2024. It’s an intimate, little space in a studio theatre. Bryant Bentley plays Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the last night of his life. N'Jameh Russell-Camara plays a woman working at the motel on the first day of her new job.


Directed by Dimonte Henning, the drama settles-in quickly amidst the onstage rainstorm and quickly settles its way into the drama of life at the center of the civil rights movement during the late 1960s. The drama grabs hold of the stage and doesn’t let go for a full 100 minutes or so without intermission. It opens in an earthbound search for cigarettes in the middle of the rain and ends in a fantastically nebulous space that still manages to find a deep grounding in the heart of human emotion.


Henning orchestrates things with a fairly deft mastery of the shift from realism to something more than realism. It’s a gradual shift that sometimes runs the risk of lurching forward too far into something bigger, but Henning keeps everything onstage firmly focussed on the heart of matters for long enough to keep it all totally emotionally captivating from beginning to end. The balance between realism and something else is a very, very difficult thing to manage given the nature of the drama. This is the last night of a man who has become a legend. This is the motel room in the evening--backstage in the theatre of human endeavor before his death on the balcony beyond the front door the next morning.


Bentley is handed one of the most difficult jobs imaginable onstage. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Is a force of nature in US history. His name instantly conjures images and audio of unimaginable gravity that echo through the decades. No one actor could do justice to that legend onstage. Playwright Katori Hall isn’t focussing on the legend, though--she’s focussing on the man. Bentley provides a solid emotional grounding for a man who knew that there were people who wanted him dead...a man in desperate need of a cigarette who was suffering from stresses of all kinds. Bentley cleverly renders those stresses for the stage.


N’Jameh Russell-Camara is handled the job of doing much of the heavy lifting in shifting the background of the play from simple historical drama to something much heavier. She manages the transformation with grace and poise as she plays one of the countless, nameless victims of racial violence that have tragically etched themselves into the soul of the US throughout history. N’Jameh Russell-Camara is playing a woman on her first day on a new job. The tension of untested energies in that role cascade through the actress with emotional acrobatics that render an impressively complex picture of a single person meant to represent so many others.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop runs through March 24th at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.

​There’s a primal  emotional intensity in ASL that doesn’t often make it to stage or screen. Truly impassioned sign language is capable of delivering a deeply affecting emotional intensity that words alone aren’t capable of delivering. This month, Skylight Music Theatre illuminates the overwhelming emotion of the grunge rock musical Spring Awakening with high-intensity sign for a truly unique theatrical experience that is unlikely to be duplicated again in any other format for quite som time.

Based on the 1891 German drama of the same name, the 2006 rock musical Spring Awakening follows a class of kids in a private high school coming-of-age in an era of repressive social norms and catatonically stifling societal control over the individual. In the midst of a large ensemble dealing with a great many problems, Wendla and Melchior enter into a dangerous romance that threatens to tear their lives apart completely. Somewhere in the periphery, Melchior’s friend Moritz suffers from intense desires he does not comprehend as scholastic stresses threaten to cave-in around him.

The Skylight has done a phenomenal job of staging a fusion between traditional rock musical and ASL drama. Every character is accompanied in some fashion by sign language...except for the towering figures of authority, (played with forceful dominance by  Joel Kopischke and Karen Estrada.) When the lead faculty of the school speak, their words are projected larger-than-life against the bare backdrops of the main stage at the Broadway Theatre Center. Everyone else communicates in sign...in AND out of song. In-your-face grunge rock is performed with amplified emotionality as the entire chorus performs the lyrics accompanying infectiously catchy grunge-inspired songs with names like “The Bitch of Living,” “My Junk” and “Totally Fucked.”

At the center of it all is the romance between Wendell and Melchior which plays out in tandem between two different sets of actors...Erin Rosenfeld and Caden Marshall sign the drama in the center of the action between the two romantic leads as Emma Knott and Edie Flores speak and sing the action in the periphery in nearly identical period costume.

The intensity of everything in the show is deeply rooted in a story that...seems to cover just about every “adult” topic in some way on some level. The musical stops just short of what would be beyond the pale of an NC-17 rating at the multiplex. It’s beautifully vulgar in places as it treads into horrifyingly dark parts of the human soul.

The Skylight’s Spring Awakening feels like a once-in-a-lifetime show that really SHOULDN’T be once-in-a-lifetime. The musical theatre format is capable of being so very, very fluid and amorphous. The intensity of dramatic passions then to get drizzled-away in the tedium of contemporary musical theatre. The rock of Spring Awakening keeps it all very powerful and vital throughout while the ASL ground the visual reality of those emotions in something irresistibly palpable. Over-priced mainstream musical theatre can’t do this. It’s SO very cool that Skylight CAN.

Skylight Music Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening  runs through March 17th at the Broadway Theatre Center on 158 N. Broadway. For ticket reservations and more, visit Skylight online.