There are some shows that just don't sound fun until you read the cast list. Such is the case with an upcoming benefit reading for the Boulevard Theatre. A reading of Neil SImon's The Odd Couple? Couldn't possibly be more boring. David Flores as Felix Ungar and Mark Bucher as Oscar Madison? Sounds great. Maybe I can work it into my schedule...   Boulevard Theatre Artistic Director Mark Bucher is...

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...

There’s no question that the single best university theatre program in town is that of UWM. I say this, of course, as a neutral graduate of UWM’s psychology program. (With a focus on cognitive and behavioral neuroscience…you know…we were running rats around little obstacle courses and then looking at the changes in the dendritic structures of the Purkinje cells in the paramedian lobule of...

The late �60�s counter-cultural experimentation developed some compellingly interesting shows . . . at least, they sounded like compellingly interesting shows. I remember dibing into a college library in high school and reading weird stories about one group of actors in Chicago who were so obsessed with continuing their run of a political psychodrama that, even after they had been evicted from...

Months after staging a brief production of The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged), The World’s Stage Theatre Company presents one of Simon's lesser-known works. Star-Spangled Girl is kind of a curiosity. Debuting in 1966, the romantic comedy made it to the stage one year after the debut of The Odd Couple and one year before The Plaza Suite. Critics panned it. It had a brief run...

As busy as things are this coming weekend with no less than three shows opening, next weekend promises to be even busier, with another three openings AND a the 5th Annual Milwaukee Comedy Fest. Aside from Soulsitce’s production of Chess, the fare making it to the stage next weekend is all comedy. In and amidst shorter works found in the sketch and improve of the comedy fest and the short comed...

Broadway once supplied Hollywood with the material for many movies; in recent decades, Broadway, now less a hive of creativity than a tourist attraction, often takes its lead from Hollywood. But in the early 1960s, the Great White Way had already ventured into a film-based production with Promises, Promises. Drawn from Billy Wilder�s classic critique of amoral corporate culture, The Apartment, t...

As easy as it is to wince at the quaint and hackneyed comedy of Neil Simon, in the right frame of mind it can actually be kind of relaxing to see a style and rhythm of comedy that is as familiar as Simon’s. This is the experience I had sitting in a crowded Sunday matinee of Rumors in Elm Grove. Simon’s style of comedy, which gets its lineage from sitcom-style humor that goes back to the gold...

� The name Neil Simon has become something of an automatic punch line in the younger crowd of Milwaukee theatre people. The playwright who was so popular .in the middle of last century continues to have appeal all over the country, but with so many contemporary comic playwrights providing such life to contemporary theatre, Simon seems a bit antiquated and out of touch. In spite of this, ther...