“Hashtag Mayhem” is a well-paced program of theatrical shorts placed in the intimacy of the Alchemist Theatre by actor/playwright Jeffrey James Ircink. Six different stories move across the stage quite gracefully in two hours

 A Google image search for "sentimental Christmas movie" pulls up many images from Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Next Act Theatre does a brilliant job of bringing the sentimental story to the stage in a breathtakingly refreshing

 Philip Van Doren Stern was a 20th-century historian and editor who compiled short story collections and worked with the letters of such giants as Lincoln, Poe and Thoreau. He also wrote a 4,000-word short story called

The Old and New Testaments receive comic treatment from Phantom Cicada Theater and SummerStage in a production of The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) at the space at Next Act Theatre. Bo Johnson directs Nate Press, Emmitt Morgans...

  Considering some of what I've seen in the past couple of years, it's kind of odd that something as innocuous as The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) would be the one that ended up garnering as much controversy as it has. The light comedy about the bible has been cast out of its originally intended home at Lapham Peak State Park . . . for those still not aware of the change--the show ...

    Taken at face value the King James bible is . . . . really difficult to take seriously for all kinds of reasons. the fact that people use it to justify those things that they justify is also kind of silly. So it makes the perfect basis for comedy.    Some Time ago, the Reduced Shakespeare Company brought brought the bible to the comic stage with The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Bridge...

  The Milwaukee Theatre community is inundated with genuine talent. The talented actor-to-production ratio is disappointing, but this is a very sluggish economy. And so its really nice to see actors getting together and performing work for its own sake. To t his end, Jason A. Waszak and company have cleared out a tiny East Side apartment just beyond Brady Street and are performing a really intere...

Aaron Kopec, playwright of Murder Castle and Faust, has explored dark parts of the psyche in productions at the Alchemist Theatre. This summer, however, Kopec offers up Help Wanted, a show that should be less sinister and more subtle...

  Modern publishing on the big best-seller scale sounds a lot like Hollywood now. I recently read that when the author of Hunger Games was told about a pre-existing Japanese novel that had a lot in common with hers…she asked them if she should read it. No innate interest. No mind of her own. She's a technician working for them. They told her not to read the book. Was the author fed ideas stra...

Somewhere in the middle of the hottest days of the year, the Alchemist Theatre stages a drama set in a run-down little motel on the edge of the great American desert. Fool For Love is an interesting study in artifice. One of playwright Sam Shepard'™s least accomplished dramas, Fool For Love registers a particularly weak note for the acclaimed playwright who seemed to be desperately reaching fo...