More satisfying than a whole box of Jeez-Its™, Carte Blanche’s production of Reefer Madness! The Musical is easily the single most enjoyable musical comedy this season. A charmingly well-balanced cast takes a show without much complexity to it and manages to keep it obscenely fun from beginning to end. This is a slick, sexy, stylish production. I enjoyed this show quite a bit more than I’d...

George Tabori’s Mein Kampf could easily have been very, very bad. A comedy about Hitler could go in a number of awful and shaloow directions. It’s a relief to know that the comedy about a young, pre-Nazi Hitler is actually really funny. Tabori’s irreverent swipe at one of the 20th century’s greatest villains manages to be funny in both a silly, superficial way and in funny (and, well, ki...

Sometimes there’s just no way to deliver news without it sounding kind of weird. Carte Blanche Studio Theatre had announced some time ago its plan to stage a production of the George Tabori political spoof Mein Kampf. Though it had been acclaimed those times it saw the stage in Europe, the comedy has rarely been staged here in the states. (I don’t know . . . maybe it has something to do with...

A Carte Blanche Studios show always ends up being something of a surprise in some manner. Quite often the surprise is a pleasant one. With its latest offering, there are far more unknowns than knowns as Carte Blanche presents its “First Annual” New Plays Festival. The festival, which had previously been scheduled the same weekend as the Milwaukee Comedy Festival, has been moved to the follo...

T. S. Eliot said it was "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written." And it was written by Shakespeare. Mr. Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock wasn'™t alone in his assessment of Titus Andronicus--a work that had been almost universally disliked by critics up until only relatively recently. The work was staggeringly popular in Shakespeare's time, however: a commercial box office s...

There�s a kind of nobility to the legend that 17th Century playwright Molière died after collapsing onstage performing in the title role of his final play. The weird irony of it was that Molière was playing the title role of The Imaginary Invalid when he collapsed onstage. Moliere�s last performance was in the role of a hypochondriac named Argan. This being only the fourth performance of a the...

Brendan Behan had been out of prison for about a decade when he’d written The Hostage. His ties with the Irish Republican Army were more or less in his past by that time. The Irish poet/writer had reached a considerable level of success before he had passed away in 1964 at the age of 41. His 1953 comic drama The Hostage relates the story surrounding the planned execution of an 18 year-old IRA...

The unique personality of Carte Blanche Studios’ latest farce is apparent from the first moment you walk into the theatre. The general rhythm and language of a traditional farce has been bent and twisted into a strikingly bizarre parallel world. Quite often the focus of this kind of comedy is the comedy itself, but Carte Blanche seems to have taken a different approach to this one that slants ...