Intro   Being a theatre critic who attends 100+ shows annually, my year is defined a bit differently than a standard calendar will allow for. My year starts in August with the first shows of the new theatre season,  continues through May as regular season switches gears for the summer shows and finally ends in July as the new theatre season gets underway the following month . . . and so each ...

  Romeo and Juliet is such a tired plot that it rarely gets produced. This is weird considering that there have been quite a few productions of Macbeth and Hamlet over the course of the past few years. Overexposure never slows THOSE productions. Why then is it the case that there have only been a couple of local productions of Romeo And Juliet over the course of the past ten years?    Whateve...

Modern productions of Shakespeare sometimes switch things up with respect to gender. The late Milwaukee Shakespeare created a memorable production of The Taming of the Shrew in which men played all of the roles. This summer...

So often it's the substance of things beyond the stage that make for a theatre experience. When I went out to see a show last night at the Alchemist it was snowing. Heavily. For various reasons I guess I decided to walk it to the theatre in what is likely to be one of the last sniwfalls of the season. Michael Gene Sullivan probably didn't have a snowstorm in mind when he adapted George Orwell's...

Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard's Greater Tuna seems like an unlikely success story. There is very little that is novel or original about the play—essentially, it is a sketch comedy show featuring two guys in a variety of roles in the setting of...

  Next March, Bad Example Productions (perhaps inadvertently) follows a pattern established a couple of years ago by New York’s Godlight Theater as it presents George Orwell’s 1984 as the dystopian follow-up to a production of Fahrenheit 451 a little while back. In conjunction with Alchemist Theatre and Project Empty Space, Bad Example Productions will be staging the dystopian tale ...

With Soulstice Theatre opening the first show of the new season last week, Milwaukee Theatre rolls into New Year's . . . the Milwaukee Theatre year starting in August with the first new shows of the new theatre season and closes at the end of the following July with the last openings of the summer theatre season. Here then is part two of a look back at it all . . . May 2011 May of 2011 was ...

New theatre company Bad Example Productions opened its first show last night—Ray Bradbury’s Faherneheit 451 at the Alchemist Theatre. A modest crowd turned out for the second dystopian drama to open at the Alchemist this summer. Stuffy Background Criticism In 1951, author Ray Bradbury wrote a short story set in a world where books were routinely rounded-up and burned by government officials ...