Advanced art forum coming theatrical shows is always interesting. The poster images that a theatre company uses to sell its upcoming season are worked out well in advance of final decisions on set and costuming and such . . . and that's particularly strange where it involves actual photographs of actual people . . . quite often characters are represented by models . . . cast lists get annou...

The seventh annual Milwaukee Comedy Festival unleashes itself upon the city this week with a popular mixture of stand-up, improv and sketch comedy. This year, hosts Matt Kemple and Patrick Schmitz are bringing the fest to Next Act Theatre...

    Traditional Hollywood-style comedy is not done particularly well by Hollywood. Watch nearly any traditional light comedy from the past ten years and you'll see something that is screamingly desperate to be funny. With The Comedy Kid, writer/director Patrick Schmitz manages a light comedy that doesn't seem ay all over-eager. That lack of desperatino translates into a far more comfortable an...

Whether it takes place on the stage or the screen, acting can be an all-consuming occupation. If it is true that only an actor can truly understand another actor, perhaps this is why actors so often become romantically involved. Acting couples tend...

    Summer is kind of a wild, unpredictable time in local theatre. It's that weird hazy zone between the end of one season and the beginning of the next. Established year-round venues like the Alchemist Theatre announce their summer shows well in advance, but all too often, smaller independent productions don't give much more than a few weeks' notice. I would like to point out that I'm not comp...

Patrick Schmitz hosts an improv comedy workshop mid-day today at the Alchemist Theatre in BayView. A two hour improve comedy class facilitated by Milwaukee Comedy Fest co-founder Patrick Schmitz is followed by a coupe of hours of  improv comedy open jamming. The Project Empty Space workshop is the latest in a series of classes that has included subjects as diverse as stage combat and properly f...

I do sincerely hope that I am not the last person to have found out that there'™s sort of a hipster optometrist's place in Wauwatosa. I suppose it makes sense . . . I mean . . . they're looking for anything offbeat to turn trendy with their asymmetrical haircuts and what have you . . . (I probably sound very, very old but a hipster spelling bee? Really?) In any case, the hipster optometrist's i...

Having been around long enough to safely be considered a “long-running,” comedy tradition, Patrick Schmitz’s Sketch 22 celebrates it EIGHTH outing this coming January the 7th. The idea is cute . . . not altogether unlike another similar longer-running program in town that has come across as being more than a little in-bred over the years . . . 10 groups of writers, 10 directors and no less...

SATURDAY By the third night of the festival, things started to feel a little bleary. I’d been to ComedySportz before, but not THREE DAYS IN A ROW. The laughter started to stick together between the beer and the humidity. And I was enjoying the effect quite a bit. Christy Watson opened the evening with some stand-up. The first group on the evening was Meanwhile. The Milwaukee-based improv group...

Return To The Fest At A New Place The next annual Milwaukee Comedy Festival takes the stage of ComedySportz this weekend. ComedySportz is in such a strange area of town—that weird hinge between downtown and Walker’s Point that is home to paint and carpeting stores, an active pair of train tracks and a couple of empty spaces patiently waiting to become vacation condos for rich Chicagoans. O...