Voices Found Repertory conjures a snug, little island to the tiny space Inspiration Studios in West Allis as it presents a staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An ensemble of five swiftly spins through many more than five roles in the course of the immersive, little comedic drama. Under the direction of Alex Metalsky, weightier dramatic elements fade out in a flurry of well-aimed comedy that speaks to various aspects of the human condition. Local theatre veteran William Molitor performs as the central anchor of the cast in the sole role of the wizard and displaced nobleman Prospero. The rest of the cast play castaways and spirits in a tumultuous tumble of comic conflicts, murder attempts and various other bits of scheming on an uncharted Shakespearian island. Hannah Kubiak deftly inhabits a few different prominent characters including one quarter of the indentured spirit Ariel and drunken butler Stephano. (Everyone onstage but Molitor plays a quarter of Ariel in a well-modulated quartet.) Kubiak’s sense of comic conception and tasteful exaggeration serves the role well. Relative newcomer Grace Berendt makes quite an impression in a few roles. She plays to the darker end of the drama as the crafty usurper Sebastian. Berendt does an impressive job of taking-on the characters from every end of the play, making them her own and giving them life without undue exaggeration. It’s a lot of fun to watch. She’s powerfully present with physical and intricate verbal comedy in the meekly funny role of Stephano’s partner Trinculo and the sweetly romance of Prince Ferdinand. Ferdinand falls for Miranda--daughter of the island who also falls for him. Miranda is given earnest life by Chloe Attalla. Towering Cory Fitzsimmons rounds-out the cast most prominently as Caliban. Fitzsimmons’ high-gravity presence could easily overpower everyone and everything else onstage. He does an impressive job of muting his physical presence to play a shambling slave. In the intimate confines of Inspiration, it’s quite apparent that Caliban could easily become the single most powerful character in the whole story if only he were confident enough to stand upright and stand-up for himself. This dynamic makes for an interesting contrast to most other stagings of the story that I’ve seen over the years. The only true native of the island is subjugated by interlopers. Fitzimmons is vividly portrays the innate power of the island itself in an enjoyably immersive comic staging of Shakespeare’s final script. Voices Found Repertory’s production of The Tempest runs through Feb. 19th at Inspiration Studios on 1500 S. 73rd St. in West Allis. For more information, visit Inspiration Studios online.
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A sad and wistful drama fairy tale is given a fun and playful staging as Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks present Rusalka. Dvořák’s opera playfully glides across Danceworks’ cozy space somewhere between Downtown and the East Side in a brisk 80 minutes without intermission. The Czech version of the Little Mermaid legend is presented in a graceful dance and beautiful song that is hosted by narrator Jason Powell as The Moon. Powell also adapted the opera for the production, which conjures a crisp, contemporary atmosphere for the ancient story. Stage Director Jill Anna Ponasik has found a clever variety of ways to keep things light while remaining true to the original opera. Quite a lot of this involves some very sharp and nuanced work by choreographer Christal Wagner. Not long after a few mood-establishing moments, Powell enters to welcome everyone...dressed exactly like the moon in sparkly athletic shoes and something resembling a white jumpsuit with a sewn-on name patch that clearly identifies him as, “Moon.” Saira Frank is equal parts powerful and vulnerable as the water spirit Rusalka who has fallen in love with a mortal man. Colleen Brooks summons a darkly droll craftiness in the role of Ježibaba--the witch who agrees to turn Rusalka into a mortal girl in exchange for her voice. Tim Rebers is quite charming as the guy that Rusalka has fallen for. He’s completely unaware of the magic in the world around him, but deeply connected with the whole idea of romantic love as witness by the fact that he falls for Rusalka and a visiting foreign princess who becomes an integral part of the story’s central conflict. Powell, Ponasik and Wagner’s best collaboration involves a party. A romantic triangle between Rusalka, her love and a foreign princess is given clever presence. The dancers move about in a brilliant fusion between a casual party mood and graceful ballet amidst the overwhelming iconic presence of shiny, red plastic solo cups. Kaitlyn Moore has a sharply witty presence onstage as the somewhat bored foreign princess who has kind of a lot to drink. Moore’s drunken grace has the same kind of understated precision that her disaffected, unengaged silence manages at the top of the scene. The flow of action feels a bit strange. The sudden crash of events at the end of the story IS quite sad. Somehow Powell, Ponassik and Wagner manage to maintain the overall playfulness of the production without compromising the sadness of the ending. It’s not really all that clear how they manage this. It's playful. It's witty. It's sad. It's tragic. It's romance and indifference and dance and song. And it's like...80 minutes in a cozy, little theatre. Things are so cleverly balanced onstage that the mood seems to make sense even if it really has no business doing so. There’s a kind of magic in turning a 3-hour-long show into a more manageable 80 minutes. It’s a magic that allows for whimsical, little dichotomies to peak out of the shadows and tumble across the stage in a graceful and deeply satisfying fusion of music and dance. Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks’ production of Rusalka runs through Feb. 12 at Danceworks Studio Theatre on 1661 N Water Street. For mor information, visit Milwaukee Opera Theatre Online. A hell of a lot of fantasy is coming to inhabit small stages in Milwaukee this month. Fairies, time travelers, nymphs a Shakespearian wizard, a dragon and at least one Hobbit are drawn to small Milwaukee stages this month. The month ends with an opening featuring Cassandra Bissell. It may not exactly be fantasy, but Bissel is kinda magical in her own way. Here’s a look at what’s opening on small stages in February. Shakespeare. Time travel. Sunstone Studios explores something new with the big premiere of playwright Rick Bingen’s Whirligig of Time. There’s a Shakespeare-themed pub in London. There are Shakespeare-themed drinks. Things happen. (The aforementioned time travel and such.) Sounds like fun fantasy in the intimate space of one of Milwaukee’s smallest theatre spaces. Tim Kietzman directs a show featuring original musical compositions by Kaila Bingen. February 3rd - 18th on 127 E Wells St. Bingen’s script calls for seven actors, which should feel like a relatively large crowd for this month’s trip to Sunstone. (The space has recently been home to smaller casts.) For more information, visit Sunstone online. I love how ambitious projects can find their way onto even the smallest of stages. Sometimes it’s like...it’s like a hobbit walking into Mordor. This month First Stage presents a small-stage adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien classic as it stagesThe Hobbit at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center on 325 W Walnut St. Some 96,000 words are lovingly compressed into a 90 minute stage drama as Bilbo, Smaug, Sting and the One Ring all come to inhabit a cozym little stage attended by parent and children Feb. 3 - Mar. 5. For ticket reservations and more, visit First Stage online. Music and dance fuse in a cozy space as Danceworks and Milwaukee Opera Theatre present a staging of Antonín Dvořák’s classic story of magic, nymphs, love and the moon. Between the Stage Direction of Jill Anna Ponasik and the choreography of Christal Wagner, this should be a spellbinding experience. The traditional runtime of Dvořák’s opera is like...three hours. I ran into Ponasik recently and she assures me that the show is actually like...one hour long. As I recall, she also assures me that they haven’t abridged it or messed with the fabric of space and time or anything like that. Ponasik didn’t exactly explain to me how they manage this...but she didn’t NOT tell me either. Evidently it has something to do with Jason Powell, who not only adapted the opera for the production...he also plays The Moon. I will not question his powers further. Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks’ production of Russalka runs February 9-12 at Danceworks Studio Theatre on 1661 N Water Street. For more information, visit MOT online. Voices Found Repertory chooses the coldest month of the year to go tropical as it presents The Tempest at Inspiration Studios in West Allis. William Molitor plays Prospero in a streamlined 5-person cast that includes charming longtime VFR-er Hannah Kubiak, Chloe Attalla, Grace Berendt and Cory Fitzsimmons. It sounds like kind of a tricky thing to manage, but these guys know what they’re doing. The warmth inhabits the stage for two-hour stretches February 10th - 19th on 1500 S 73rd St. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook page. The one big non-fantasy to open on a small stage this month is a romance that is delivered entirely in rhyming verse. Cassandra Bissell and Neil Brookshire play a couple of university professors who had engaged in “coitus on a campus green.” They take turns explaining themselves in a romantic comedy that is cute in the best possible way. Playwright Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is runs February 23 - March 19th in a production with Next Act Theatre. For ticket reservations and more, visit Next Act online.
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the final preview performance of the midwest premiere of playwright Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living. The show makes its local debut in a remarkably vivid Renaissance Theaterworks production. Two pairs of people deal with the complexities of human connection in the course of two hours on an intimate stage. Director Ben Raanan shepherds the dramatic energies through alternating scenes between the two pairs in a deeply moving emotional drama. Bryant Bentley and Regan Linton are an estranged couple who struggle to find some common ground in the face of tragedy. Bentley is quite charming as Eddie--a trucker who is turning his life around. Majok’s script arms him some of the sharpest lines in the script. He’s matched in grit and wit by his wheelchair-bound wife Ani. She’s been through hell. Thanks to Eddie, she’s going to be through a bit more before things can have a chance to turn around for her. Linton carves together a gruff appeal of her own as Ani tolerates the company of a man she has not spent much time with in recent months. Raanan has helped Bentley and Linton climb their way through some very tricky emotional territory between the two characters. The tragedy that binds the two of them is beautifully crushing on a deep emotional level. Jamie Rizzo and Valentina Fittipaldi captivatingly fill their half of the two-hour drama as John and Jess. John is a man suffering from neuromuscular challenges that leave him largely wheelchair bound as well. As the play opens, John is looking to hire Jess as a personal aid to help him with the arduous tasks of shaving, showering and so on. Fittipaldi and Rizzo carefully manage the dauntingly complex relations between John and Jess. The unlikely pairing of a wealthy man and his financially challenged aid hit the stage with a deeply engaging emotionality. Fittipaldi is crushingly endearing as a woman who has been through far too much to be able to casually trust anyone. Her performance might be one of the most memorable performances of the whole season thus far. Fittipaldi makes clever and beautiful use of the chance to deliver great complexity in a wide spectrum of silences in and around a charmingly pensive performance. The alternation between the two different stories sometimes felt a bit interruptive. Just as things were really developing between Eddie and Ani, Majok jumps over to Jess and John. Jess is such a deeply interesting character for me...and Fittipaldi was so good at bringing her to the stage that I found myself taking a bit more time to warm-up to the perfectly charming gruffness of relations between Bentley and Linton. The two stories inevitably fuse at the end of the drama’s two hours onstage. It’s a very touching end to the whole thing, but I wish I would have been able to focus a bit more on things with Eddie and Ani. Renaissance Theaterworks’ production of Cost of Living runs through Feb. 12 at the theatre space on 255 S Water St. For ticket reservations and more, visit Renaissance online. The set is kind of an advanced-looking fifth grade classroom. The theatre in question is Sunstone Studios. It isn’t really a whole lot bigger than most fifth grade classrooms. A teacher’s desk and a few kids’ desks are visible. A few essays are tacked-up on the walls amidst posters of various gods and goddesses. It’s the site of a cozy, little two-person drama called Gidion’s Knot. Specitic moments might falter a bit here and there, but Director Caroline Norton has done an excellent job of fosters an environment which delivers the depth, shadow and nuance of a very sophisticated script by Johnna Adams. Sarah Mankowski-Lathrum shows strength and compassion as Heather--an elementary school teacher who is relatively new to the job. (She’s already had a career in advertising and moved on to education.) She’s dealing with a couple of different traumas and quite unprepared for a parent-teacher conference. One had been scheduled for the afternoon, but she hadn’t expected it as the child in question had died at his own hands. When the mother of the late student does, in fact, show up, she’s taken more than a little off-guard. Sarah Mankowski Lathrum maintains a light-but-firm handle on the gentle emotional shifts that Heather undergoes as she and the mother discuss the late student. Tina Nixon is a strong and formidable intellect in the role of the mother Corryn. She’s made an appointment and she intends to keep it. Her sone had been suspended for doing something that the teacher had felt was inappropriate. Corryn was contacted. Now that he’s dead, the mother is looking for answers. Heather would rather the school principal be present for the discussion, but Corryn is insistent. Nixon has a powerful silent presence onstage as Corryn deftly navigates her way into some sort of an explanation for a suicide that she feels Heather may have been responsible for in some way. An investigation into the nature of passion, aggression and emotion gradually reveals itself in a single conversation that isn’t much longer than an hour. Adams packs a hell of a lot into that hour. There are some pretty tight narrative corners with tensions shifting back and forth at breakneck speeds. The delicate shifts of aggression, intension and emotion don’t always flow through the performance quite as swiftly as the script might require. Suicide is one of the more difficult subjects to dive-into in a two-person drama. Even without the subject of loss and grief, the whole concept of fifth grade is absurdly complicated on so many levels. People on the edge of childhood who are tumbling across the precipice of adolescence have a dizzying amount going on in their lives. Adams’ script handles that complexity without much in the way of direct interaction with them. The kids who are characters are only presented in their writing. Crushingly bewildering concepts are held at a distance as two people try to figure out what went wrong. It’s a very, very beautiful and brief moment of drama on a small stage. Gidion’s Knot runs through January 28th at Sunstone Studios on 127 E. Wells St. For ticket reservations and more, visit Sunstone online. It’s been an unseasonably warm new year, but there’s little doubt that the cold is coming. A warm comedy opens 2023 in a month dominated by some very serious and weighty dramas that are certain to accompany some of the coldest days of the year. A charming southern musical warms the Milwaukee stage in a month that also finds topics of suicide, infertility and basic human survival inhabiting the heart of winter on the live stage in Milwaukee. A couple of 20th century classics join some remarkably compelling works from the past ten years in a very promising month for local theatre productions. Bombshell Theatre Company stages a classic 1970s country-western musical at the beginning of 2023 as it presents The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Director Eric Welch brings the show to an intimate studio theatre space that should amplify the small-town feel of the show. Robbyn Wilks plays the proprietor of a brothel that finds itself in jeopardy due to a TV expose. Promo pics of the upcoming production reveal a classy, vintage boudoir feel about the costuming by Welch and Madison Nowack. January 6 - 15 at the Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove. For ticket reservations, visit Bombshell online. Director Caroline Norton brings weighty drama to one of the smallest stages in town this month as it presents the classroom drama Gidion’s Knot. Sarah Mankowski-Lathrum plays a grade school teacher who is confronted by Corryn (Tina Nixon)--a parent of a student who committed suicide. The tiny space at Sunstone Studios serves as a grade school classroom in a very tense and provocative 90-minute drama. Johnna Adams’ script dives into intense complexity that is compellingly explored between two characters. The whole of society is reflected in a single tragic death. January 13 - 28 at 127 E. Wells St. For ticket reservations, visit Sunstone online. A cast including a couple of Milwaukee theatre veterans is brought together for a look at one of the most acclaimed dramas of the 20th century as Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? January 20 - February 12 at the Broadway Theatre Center Studio Theatre. Laura Gordon and James Ridge feature prominently in 0ne of the more haunting stage dramas to come out of the 1960s. A casual get-together between a couple of couples turns very serious as the evening progresses. Things are never as they appear. For ticket reservations, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online. Renaissance Theaterworks closes-out the month with the Midwest premiere of Martyna Majok’s clever 2016 comic drama. Ben Raanan directs the story of four mismatched characters. A former trucker and his paralyzed ex-wife are contrasted against the concerns of a young man with cerebral palsy and his new caregiver. In contemporary America, survival is expensive. Life can be incredibly difficult in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Four people struggle in a show that’s brought to a cozy space January 20 - February 12 at 255 South Water Street. For ticket reservations, visit Renaissance Theaterworks online.
Lumpy the Golem Boy was mixing with the crowd and collecting donations as Audrey Thompson-Wallace played the harp in the center of the room. It was The Best Place...somewhere between spirits in Boozy Bard’s production of A Christmas Carol. Dickens’ classic is probably the single best-known story of any kind in the Western world. It’s been adapted so many times in so many ways that anyone could recite the plot entirely from memory without even realizing they’ve done so. And so it’s a perfect choice for a Boozy Bard show. (Or it would be if it had been written by Shakespeare.) It’s good. A lot of fun. The first of two evenings’ performances of the show happened on Friday the 16th of December. The Best Place was packed. If it wasn’t a sell-out crowd, it at least felt like one. The cozy, little bar was filled with people looking to watch Scrooge get haunted again. Stephen M. Wolterstorff served as a charismatically informal host for the evening’s proceedings as the show started. Every show with Boozy Bard is drastically different from every other show with Boozy Bard. Actors choose roles at random from a hat. Last night’s Scrooge was barefoot for the entire show. A witty puppet served as narrator. It was weird. It was cool. The group raised a lot of money for the very worthy cause of Sojourner Family Peace Center. Somewhere amidst drinks, scripts and various bits of costuming, the story unfolded. The adorably attentive, fuzzy blue visage of Lumpy the Golem Boy looked-on from as the all-too-familiar story shuffled across the stage with tastefully comic exaggerations of drama. It’s a weird improv comedy sort of an atmosphere that’s elegantly tethered to a streamlined adaptation of the classic holiday story. Audience and cast members took turns heckling the wealthy, old anti-hero in a fun and festive atmosphere. Every now and again, there’s something truly unexpected to anchor a Boozy Bard show. Last night it was Thompson-Wallace’s serious gravitas as Belle, who delivered a heavy weight to the evolution of Scrooge’s personality. Scrooge chooses greed over love and Lumpy is seen in the background comically slamming his face against the script in frustration. It’s such a weirdly unrehearsed energy the animates the moment...the type of thing that makes a Boozy Bard show as truly appealing and unique as it is. There’s real warmth in a holiday crowd that has such an open distain for wealth. Want to go to a fancy adaptation with big sets and costuming that’s attended by people with money? You know where the Pabst Theatre is. There’s plenty of seating there. Want a closer, less formal brush with Dickens? The Best Place is...well...the best place for that. But here’s the catch: there’s only one performance left. The show starts at 7 pm. And y’know...get there early because last night seating filled-up pretty fast. (The line for the bar is pretty crazy too. So...y’know...consider that as well.) Boozy Bard’s production of A Christmas Carol (Raw) emerges for its second and final performance tonight, December 17th at The Best Place Tavern in the Historic Pabst Brewery on 917 W Juneau Ave. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook Events Page. As the weather continues to lack warmth outside, there’s actually kind of a lot of it coming from the small stages in and around Milwaukee. There are a pair of world premieres emerging onto cozy, little spaces this month. There are also a couple of holiday shows. Here’s a look at some of what lies ahead in the month of December. Who’s Holiday The deeply endearing Samantha Sostarich returns as Cindy Lou Who all grown-up in playwright Matthew Lombardo’s twisted one-woman comedy. It’s a decidedly adult mutation of Dr. Seuss’ Grinch. Sostarich was a lot of fun in this role before. She brings a badass cuddliness to the intimate stage of Sunstone Studios once more. This show is a whole lot of fun. But...it’s not exactly for everyone. No kids. Only ex-children. Catch-up with Cindy Lou Who years later. Have a beer with her in the trailer she calls home. It’s way more fun than it has a right to be. Dec. 5 - 20 at the tiny, little space on 127 E Wells Street. (The show runs Mondays and Tuesdays as Sostarich is in a much larger production on a bigger stager over the weekends through the end of the year.) For more information, go to Sunstone online. Piggsville This coming month, UWM Peck School of the Arts launches the premiere of a new drama set in the sole residential neighborhood the Menomonee Valley. Written by Alvaro Saar Rios, it’s a Hamlet-inspired drama about a man who is trying to run the family brewery after the suspicious death of his father. So....Hamlet in a Milwaukee microbrewery? Sounds cool. The show runs Dec. 7 - 11 at UWM’s Mainstage Theatre. It’s a part of UWM’s New Dramaworks series dedicated to developing new plays written by Midwestern writers. For more information, visit UWM online. Whirligig of Time Rick Bingen is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carthage College. Pretty cool, but he’s also a playwright. And it’s also very cool that a play he’s written is making its world premiere with Sunstone Studios this coming month. Whirligig of Time finds a contemporary Olivia going into a pub and traveling back in time to the late 16th century. The play features an impressive cast including Samantha Biatch, Steve Decker, Sean Duncan, Adam Raul Medina, Alicia Rice, Keighly Sadler, and Liz Shipe playing the likes of John Heminges, Richard Burbage, Will Kemp and William Shakespeare. The Sunstone debuts the show Dec. 15 - 30. For more information, go to Sunstone online. A Christmas Carol: RAW!
Boozy Bard returns to The Best Place Tavern with another decidedly underprepared stage adaptation of Dickens’ classic supernatural horror show. Actors take roles at random and perform from a breezily streamlined script. Cratchit, Scrooge and a few ghosts all appear in the right order, but anything could happen in an open beer hall atmosphere with some really good ales on tap. Dec. 16 and 17 at the Best Place on 901 W. Juneau Avenue. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook events page. One of My Favorites
First off: I love The Dutchman. The Sunstone Studios production that’s running right now might be one of. the best dramas I’ve seen in the past few years. I’m biased. I love the play. And as it turns out I’ve never actually seen a production of it. And...I haven’t really thought about it for over a quarter century. So...y'know...that's weird. That and a few other things didn't make it into my upcoming Shepherd-Express review of the show. A Partial Explanation I didn’t realize that Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman was one of my favorites. It is. I remember that now. Even though I really haven’t thought about it much since I first read it in 1995. I didn’t know that when I went in to see it. I only remember knowing it as being one of the best stage dramas to come out of the 20th century. And though I’ve seen over 1000 plays in the past couple of decades, I’ve never seen THIS one. Remembering Somewhere into the first quarter hour of the production, it occurred to me that I was INCREDIBLY familiar with the script: a train. A white woman. A black man. A knife. And so much of the dialogue and so many of the beatrs seem like I'd seen them a million times before. But I’d never seen it before. So where did I run into it? High school. 20th Century American Literature class. There was a substitute teacher. We read it aloud in class. I loved it. It was something that I’d always wanted to see performed. And then...I’d forgotten about it. I’d always remembered it as a great drama and then...having accepted that, never had to think about it again. Weird how the mind works. Distractions You try to be present for the performance. You try to immerse yourself in the world of the play. Everyone brings their own reality into the theatre, though. There are distractions in any performance: I now have no day job after 11.5 years in the same office. Next week I’m going to have surgery on my left eye. But man...Denzel Taylor and Hannah Ripp-Dieter did a tremendous amount of character work developing a remarkably nuanced performance. But again: there are always distraction. Taylor and Ripp-Dieter were great, though. The Kerning I know Dutchman takes place in a New York City subway in the mid-1960s. On the walk in to the Sunstone, there’s an old New York tabloid format newspaper. I wasn’t even thinking about it until someone walked onto the stage’s abstract, little subway car and started reading it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was noticing a slight yellowing of the pages. And then I noticed the font and the kerning of the text and I knew it wasn’t from the 1960s. It was more recent issue than that. But it wasn't current. I love the intimacy of the Sunstone. The way that Director DiMonte Henning has the stage set-up...the audience can get close enough to the action to notice the font on the paper being read by someone in the periphery of the action....I mean...WOW...(I really like that sort of thing.) Anyway...while Taylor and. Ripp-Dieter are winding their way through a very complex and captivating conversation between two strangers, my eye gets pulled to the page being read: there’s a column regarding the American theater on the page of that paper. In the upper-left corner of the page is an ad for the movie A Dry, White Season. And I’m thinking...”that was...what...late ‘80s? Early ‘90s?" Then I notice an ad for the Batman movie at the bottom of the page...so it’s...1989. She’s reading a New York City newspaper from late September of 1989. Batman was a big enough film in 1989 that it was released in late June and still playing in late September, so the add was kind of minimal, but very distinct. And again: Taylor and Ripp-Deiter are phenomenal in this play, but I love catching little details like that. Here’s this paper that was published in 1989 with over a million other copies. It was likely read by someone. All of the rest of them get thrown away or recycled as fish wrap or whatever. But not this one. This one made its way to Milwaukee and just...hung around in storage somewhere for a few decades. Now it’s onstage downtown Milwaukee playing a New York City newspaper from the 1960s. The Commute For me, Opening Night of Sunstone’s Dutchman was a three-hour commute. Unless I’m there with my wife, I’m bussing it downtown. It’s n hour on the 80 there. It’s an hour on the 80 back. The show itself is an hour. Three hours on public transit, but only two hours of that time were actually spent going anywhere physically. But I mean...Henning and company do a remarkably good job of locking-in the feeling of a subway car for the sake of the performance. I had a very immersive experience with the evening. It’s weird...I remember being in high school and being attracted to the female lead in the script. Ignore the disgusting racism, the knife and the homicidally sociopathic personality and...this woman is exactly who I would have been attracted to back then. And then I make it into college and I’m meeting all kinds of women like this...poetic and abstract and intellectual. It’s always really interesting until you see the knife. You see the knife and you just know there’s a sociopathic thing going on there... The intimacy of the Sunstone really amplifies that poetic interaction between two strangers that could be something more. And it turns into something more...but not the way you want it to. It could be a romance, but there’s a knife. And on some level in encounters like this...on some level it just feels like there’s always a knife. So anyway. LOVED this show. See this show. It’s...phenomenal. But I’m biased. Because it’s the type of show I’d always wanted to see since I first read it in high school. Sunstone Studios’ production of Dutchman runs through Nov. 19 at Sunstone’s space on 127 E. Wells St. For more information, visit Sunstone online. My concise review of the show is coming soon to The Shepherd-Express. 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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