November ushers-in a really impressive mix of drama on local small stages. There’s a high school girl with super powers at UWM, a team of indoor soccer players as Marquette, mid-1960s tensions at the Sunstone and quite a bit more. Here’s a look: Teenagers with superpowers can wind up in pretty drastically different circumstances depending on the author and the era. A telekinetic girl written by Jack Kirby in 1963? That’s superhero Jean Grey of the X-Men. A telekinetic girl written by Stephen King in1974? That’s horror icon Carrie. One of them’s a hero. The other’s...not Back in 2007, playwrights Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews and Jake Minton wrote The Sparrow a drama about a high school girl dealing with superhuman powers. The drama comes to the stage with the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. UWM’s production runs Nov. 2 - 6. Amiri Baraka’s intimate 1964 drama Dutchman is explored on one of Milwaukee’s smallest stages early this month. DiMonte Henning directs the story of a man meeting a woman on a subway car in New York in the early 1960s. He’s black. She’s white. Hannah Ripp-Dieter and Denzel Taylor perform the show Nov. 4 - 19 at Sunstone Studios. If Henning and company up for it, Sunstones’ space can be lined-up almost exactly like a slightly enlarged New York City subway car. Baraka’s script is tight and uncomfortable. This could be a very powerful production. About ten years ago, playwright Will Eno debuted Title and Deed. The guy who wrote the monologue Thom Paine (Based On Nothing) develops an entirely different monologue. This one is about a guy who lived in another country and now lives in the U.S. Theatre Gigante brings the character to the stage of the Kenilworth 508 Theatre on 1925 East Kenilworth Pl. Gigante’s Isabelle Kralj directs the talented Michael Stebbins as the guy from another country. Kralj and Stebbins have been working together for a long time...both are quite familiar with the space they’re working with. This should be a captivating evening with a single character. The show runs Nov. 18 - Dec. 3. At mid-month, Marquette University Theatre presents playwright Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 locker room drama The Wolves. The story of a girls indoor soccer team finds a cast that’s roughly the perfect age to be playing a bunch of youth athletes. It’s a portrait of a group of American girls looking to score some goals. The show runs Nov. 18 - Dec. 4 Marquette alternates The Wolves with the drama of one man confronting memories of high school while watching The Academy Awards. Playwright Michael Perlman’s From White Plains explores the lasting effects of prejudice. In an acceptance speech, a man publicly denounces the high school bully he believes is ultimately responsible for pushing his best friend to commit suicide 15 years ago. Marquette’s production of From White Plains runs Nov. 19 - Dec. 3. So...uh...the holidays are coming-up. It was just...it’s Halloween weekend as I write this. In just a few days...it’s...the holidays. This year First Stage returns to the cozy cathode-ray era of Rankin/Bass TV specials with a live stage adaptation of Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer the Musical. The show runs Nov. 25 - Dec. 24.
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If opening night wasn’t a sell-out, it was really, really close. It’s a one-hour opera based on a classic 1968 horror film. With puppets and everything. And it’s Halloween weekend, so...it’s a perfect match. Everything else matches-up almost perfectly in Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s Night of the Living Opera. The intimate, little studio theatre venue that hosts the concert performance is a perfect fit for the coziness of Romero’s low-budget classic, which largely takes placce in a single home during a zombie apocalypse. With a libretto written by Josh Perkins, the operatic amplification of the classic horror film. No set. Minimal costuming. Everyone is performing behind music stands...but the audio of the original zombie apocalypse feels deliciously creepy in places. The production features prototypes of large-scale. zombie puppets by Angry Young Men, Ltd. These guys know from zombie puppets, having. done The Night of the Living Dead Puppet Show for a number of years now. Their presence in the studio adds to the mood of a tiny space that tumbles through zombie horror in a way that fuses perfectly with short, brutal opera. Elizabeth Blood conjures a melodic terror as Barbara. She doesn’t have many lines in the film--which is incredibly sparse on dialogue to begin with. A young Judith O’Dea delivered an overwhelming sense of vulnerability to the screen in the original movie. Perkins gives Blood a great deal of room to emote that sense of terrified vulnerability in operatic form. Ben Yela gives considerably more sympathetic depth to her doomed brother Johnny than Romero’s original film allowed for. After Johnny’s apparent death at the hands of a zombie (which happens between moments in the concert performance) Barbara finds herself in an apparently abandoned home that is defended by a heroic, level-headed guy named Ben. Jerome Sibulo is suitably heroic in the tole if Ben. In the midst of boarding-up the home, they find a small family in the basement featuring some very powerful singers...Julianne Perkins and Nathatn Wesselowski are impressive as Harry and Helen. Becky Cofta emerges from the Zombie Chorus to play their daughter. Cofta is a starkly chilling presence onstage once Harry and Helen’s daughter turns zombie. The vocalizations of the zombie chorus amplify the darkness around the edges of the opera. Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Angry Young Men Ltd’s Night of the Living Opera continues through Oct. 30 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre on 158 N. Broadway. (There are performances today at 4 pm and 7:30 pm. There is also a 2pm matinee tomorrow.) For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Opera Theatre online. This month The Milwaukee Rep hosts the world premiere of playwright Eleanor Burgess’ dark satirical comedy Wife of a Salesman. Directed by Marti Lyons with dynamically jarring scenic design by Andrea Boyce, it’s a jaw-droppingly complex comedy on many, many different levels. The post-modernist deconstruction of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is also a deep dissection of the nature of theatre, life and the socio-cultural impact of the past six decades on the psyche of the American woman. So...y’know...it covers kind of a lot of ground for roughly 90 minutes without intermission. Heidi Armbruster conjures a profound complexity to the stage as the woman referred to in the title of the play. She’s come quite a distance to present herself as someone selling fabric door-to-door. She’s got a very narrow target market for what she’s selling: one woman. That woman is played by Bryce Gangel. She’s young. She’s confident. She’s having an affair with the other woman’s husband. Armbruster and Gangel hold the central conflict of the drama together with deft poise that allows for a great deal of comedy to slide cleverly around the edges of every word. Armbruster speaks to the wisdom of experience while Gangel conspires with the energy of ambition, but there’s a hell of a lot more going on here than hits the surface. This IS a confrontation between a wife and her husband’s lover, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a social satire based on a play from over half a century ago. One might not expect it to explore the issues of contemporary life for modern women, but Burgess finds an ingenious way of bringing it altogether in deeply satisfying and provocative story of conflicting desires and ambitions. Lyons brings-out an impressively sophisticated dynamic between the two women. Bobak Cyrys Baakhtiari provides comic relief and contrast as a guy who is simply looking to do his job in and amongst the weight of so many conflicts. Burgess’ many, many layers of theme and subtext provide a vertiginous conceptual space for the story to inhabit. A meeting between two people might seem simple on the surface, but Burgess has managed to draw a complexity of perilously high thematic gravity into their orbit. The dark satire largely focusses on one very long interaction between two women who have never met before. As it is over an hour long, it’s inevitable that the women are going to find a lot of common ground. Burgess manages to keep everything running through the darkness into the reality that awaits at the end of the story. Both characters are deeply interesting people who are each admirable in their own way. Armbruster and Gangel develop deeply engaging emotional dynamics to the stage. There’s a deep desire to see these two characters getting along. In many ways both characters feel like they represent equal and opposite ends of humanity itself. If only they could come together to an understanding maybe...and maybe they WILL come to an understanding one way or another. Burgess has built such a fascinating dynamic. Lyons and company have done such a good job of summoning that dynamic to. the stage. The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Wife of a Salesman runs through Nov. 6th at the Stiemke Studio Theatre on 108 E. Wells St. For ticket reservations and more, visit The Milwaukee Rep online. |
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January 2025
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