A Day in Hollywood/ A Night in the Ukraine is a clever, nostalgic package. The two-part tribute to 1930s Hollywood cinema packs just enough intellectual edge to keep the show interesting beneath the surface of a light...

Three Other Sisters, the fine new work by Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson that opened last weekend, is beautifully composed and deeply felt...

The amount of talent finding its way to local stages is a promising indicator for the future of Milwaukee theater. The title of “newest theater company in town” doesn’t rest in any one place for very long. The latest group to bear that distinction makes its debut at the Off-Broadway Theatre this week as BITE Theatre premieres a program of shorts written by playwright...

Isabelle Kralj has received five grants from the Slovenian government and the U.S. Embassy to create new works in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with dancers and composers from the European nation. In 2006, she created a performance using the music of Vlado Kreslin, Slovenia’s most beloved singer/songwriter. Now, with her co-director...

Beginning this week, Skylight Opera Theatre presents one cast performing two one-act musicals in A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. The straightforward opening act offers a celebration of old Hollywood musicals. It’s set in the lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in the 1930s. In costumes designed by Shima Orans, who did a breathtaking job on Skylight’s recent production of South Pacific, the ensemble will perform a musical revue that...

Any politician trying to make meaningful change is in for a tremendous challenge, as noble ideals become complicated by real-world concerns. Playwright August Wilson examines this idea in Radio Golf, the final play in Wilson’s exhaustive 10-part...

The Wiz had the children in the audience at First Stage Children’s Theater enthralled throughout the show, from the moment Dorothy took to the stage with a real-live Toto in her arms to the finale 90 minutes later when her long, strange trip through Oz brought her full circle...

Over the decades, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town has almost become a U.S. theater cliché. So while it’s nice that UW-Milwaukee’s theater department will be staging this classic bit of Americana on its main stage in a production directed by the talented Bill Watson, it’s also good to see...

A couple of years ago actor/playwright Jeff Daniels wrote a follow-up to his 1993 hit Escanaba in Da Moonlight, a comedy about hunting in the Upper Peninsula. That follow-up (which is actually a prequel to the original), Escanaba in Love, makes it to the Sunset Playhouse in a production directed by Artistic Director Mark Salentine...

The Secret Garden has been a beloved classic ever since it debuted as a serial in a magazine a century ago. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of Mary, an unhappy British girl sent to live with her reclusive, widower uncle after her parents die, has...

When a script has the distinction of getting its playwright into an MFA program in Las Vegas, you know it’s good. For UW-Whitewater grad Neil Haven, Stuck is that script. The contemporary comedy about Ella, an agoraphobic elevator operator at a retro hotel, debuted locally with a UW-Whitewater production at the Tenth Street Theatre...

This past weekend the Boulevard Theatre’s intimate All’s Well That Ends Well joined Shakespearean productions by two other studio theaters to add to a Bard-filled month in Milwaukee. Off the Wall Theatre presented Macbeth and Carte Blanche Studios produced Much Ado About Nothing. As of this writing, all but two...

Duet for One, which opened last weekend at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT), is based in part on the life of renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose successful career was cut short when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 28. She lived another 14 years, watching from a wheelchair as the career of her husband, pianist and conductor Daniel...

Boulevard Theatre’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well is a casual affair, as the rarely produced play is brought to the stage without much costuming. The seats of the intimate studio theater have been planted throughout the performance space, creating a comfortable atmosphere in which to experience one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known pieces. Actors take on the quality of faces...

The Seafarer takes its title from an ancient English poem hearkening to man’s spiritual struggle for peace and endurance. The Milwaukee Rep’s new production comes courtesy of talented Irish playwright Conor McPherson, whose early years of alcoholism are not lost in this Irish morality play. Card-playing men at a whiskey-besotted Christmas Eve celebration...

Shakespeare’s pairing of the reluctant Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing is one of the classiest romances in stage history. The romantic comedy makes an appearance on an intimate local stage this week as Carte Blanche Studios presents its version of the classic tale through March 7...

This February the Milwaukee Rep invites theatergoers to hang out at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater to watch four Irishmen play poker with the devil, as it presents Conor McPherson’s contemporary drama The Seafarer. Judging from the cast, this should be a thoroughly enjoyable evening at the theater. Lee Ernst plays Sharky, an alcoholic...

The Waukesha Civic Theatre explores some rather dark ground with its production of Beth Henley’s tragicomedy Crimes of the Heart. Donna Daniels plays Lenny Magrath, the eldest of three sisters...

Memories Dinner Theater begins 2010 with the Midwest premiere of Sam Bobrick’s Baggage. The title has more than one meaning, referring not only to a mix-up of luggage at the airport, but also the emotional impediments we tend to carry through life. For Bobrick, who offered...

A play featuring little more than two characters in a single room could easily lose an audience’s attention, even if the two characters are based on Jason and Medea and the room is in Purgatory. Despite the inherent...

The last full month of winter opens with a pair of local productions that explore the strange convolutions of human passion and the lengths to which people will go to pursue...

In the years since it opened, the intimate stage of the Off-Broadway Theatre has served as countless locations. Now through the end of February, it transforms into a sort of afterlife in Next Act Theatre’s production of Ariel Dorfman’s Purgatorio. It’s a place the playwright envisions as “A white room. Austere. No decorations.” Staying true to the script...

Milwaukee’s top-notch children’s theater, First Stage, recently opened a world premiere production of The Thief Lord. The show, based on the best-selling novel by Cornelia Funke, continues through Feb. 14. The book is ripe for a stage version, as it contains magic, mystery, adventure...

Ah, midlife: There’s the forgetting of the car keys, repeating one’s self, trips to the doctor, repeating one’s self, adult children back living at home, repeating one’s self… And then there’s Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical, which pokes fun at the onset of middle age and all its accompanying challenges. Within an hour and 50 minutes of musical vignettes, Sunset Playhouse covers all the recognizable signs...

Cornelia Funke’s novel The Thief Lord is hardly the type of book one would expect to be adapted for children’s theater. Indeed, the story of two brothers who run away to Venice, Italy, and join a band of juvenile thieves breaks from the popular impression of children’s theater as the stuff of wholesome, harmless fairy tales...