Vern and Wally, adult brothers who haven’t lived together in years, return to cohabitate in their childhood home following their mother’s death. Outside, the neighborhood is falling apart, despite appearances of gentrification...

Optimist Theatre welcomes the summer with an enjoyable production of Shakespeare's classic drama Macbeth. The outdoor staging on the campus of Alverno College moved along briskly on a crisp summer evening...

  The big challenge of any stage drama is essentially the  same. The  characters need to connect up with the audience in a way that is strong enough to create a deep and powerful empathy with the story. From a certain point of view, everything else is secondary to that. Some dramas take a while to let that empathy sink-in. Caleen Sinnette Jennings' Hair, Nails & Dress finds a way to  make th...

  The theatre year continues to transition from the standard season to the summer as Uprooted stages its latest. Caleen Sinnette Jennings; Hair, Nails & Dress makes its debut here. A longtime professor at American University in Washington D.C., Jennings has had work published and staged both adult works and children's fare.  She'd received a $10,000 grant from the Kennedy Center for her work.�...

Why? Why can't this be a fully staged show? I would absolutely LOVE to see former Milwaukee Rep Artistic Director Joseph Hanreddy and Uprooted co-founder Marti Gobel in a fully-staged production of David Mamet’s Oleanna. I’ve read the play a few times. Never saw it staged, though. And while the script, (a remarkably nuanced piece which relates drama between student and teacher,) could be ju...

  For one week only, Uprooted Theatre is staging a heartbreakingly well-rendered premiere of Reginald Edmund’s Southbridge. The show is directed by Marti Gobel. There are only two more performances of the show, but it’s well worth making last minute plans to see this one. It’s brilliant. The plot plays out as a complex calculation between the desires of an ensemble of characters. They’r...

Country music legend Patsy Cline developed new range and depth for female vocals in one of the nation's most popular music genres. Her interesting life story, about a woman who achieved great critical and commercial success in the mid-20th century...

Acclaimed, young playwright Reginald Edmund has a production company in Houston, Texas. He has an agent in New York. And now he’s got a play opening in Miwaukee. South Bridge is part three of a growing series of dramas—his City of the Boyou series. It’s the story of a man who has been accused of assaulting a white widow in the late 19th century. The play, which has had readings all over t...

In and amidst everything else that theatre is, it’s way too easy to forget that it’s the simple act of storytelling in front of a live group of people. As inherently social creatures with a profound amount of neurological real estate set aside for things like . . . recognizing minute differences in faces . . . storytelling is the heart of human interaction. Arguably it was the source of lang...