My busiest month ever covering theatre ends this week with three shows opening and another two one-weekend-only theatre events. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going on:STATIONS OF THE CROSS  The Boulevard Theatre’s premiere of Beth Monhollen’s comic play about waiting tables makes it to the stage this Wednesday. The challenges of the service industry are told in a format patterned after...

Referring to themselves as The Artists Formerly Known As Milwaukee Shakespeare (and really, who doesn’t enjoy an early-to-mid-‘90’s Prince reference?) a group of actors under the direction of Paula Suozzi will be performing a staged reading of Othello at the Live Artists Studio at 228 South 1st St. in Walkers Point May 1 – 3. The play was originally scheduled to close Milwaukee Shakespeare...

A few odds and ends—MILWAUKEE SHAKESPEARE CLOSES DOWN MID-SEASONThere’s a different frazzled-looking Wall Street broker on the front page of nearly every daily paper these days. The distinctive visual of a jagged line plummeting to the right has become all too familiar. The local theatre scene seems to be adapting. The Milwaukee Rep, possibly one of the most financially solvent of the local th...

Past scholars have often decried Love's Labour's Lost as wholly insignificant, a self-indulgent piece by William Shakespeare before he moved on to more serious work. More recently, Cambridge University's Anne Barton described the play as "relentlessly Elizabethan," with dialogue that is mostly inaccessible to modern audiences because it's filled with in-jokes and references that are specific to the 1590s. Despite these beliefs to the contrary, director Jennifer Uphoff Gray hopes to prove that the comedy can appeal to today's theatergoers when Milwaukee Shakespeare opens its production in the Studio Theatre of the Broadway Theatre Center on Sept. 6.

As Milwaukee Shakespeare makes its way off the stage at the end of the 2007-’08 season, the company is taking on one of the Bard’s more challenging plays, Cymbeline. The play, which opens March 22, can be difficult to define in terms of Shakespeare’s other work. Some historians have looked at the convoluted nature of the plot and come to the conclusion that Shakespeare merely wrote it to amuse himself.

Paula Suozzi, who has been breaking rules since she was in college, continues to think outside the box as artistic director of Milwaukee Shakespeare. This season’s new innovations include Director’s Brunches and Milwaukee Shakespeare Coffeehouse Chats at the Third Ward Starbucks to allow audiences...