Self-referential art always runs the risk of coming across like a pair of mirrors facing each other. You can tell that the light is probably having a lot of fun bouncing back and forth between the two mirrors, but it isn't anything that is always terribly entertaining for an audience. Sometimes, though . . . sometimes the mirror turns in on itself and comes up with something beautifully whimsi...

nnYesterday afternoon, Theatrical Tendencies announced that it would no longer be around. Effective immediately. This is kind of a big disappointment, as it had produced some really promising shows over the course of the recent past.nI hadn’t seen the company’s opening production—the musical Thrill Me, but their production of Corpus Christi was interesting and their Little Dog Laughed was p...

Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed is a staggeringly well-balanced contemporary comedy that finds a remarkably well-executed production with Theatrical Tendencies at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center this month. David J. Franz plays Mitchell—a rising Hollywood star struggling with his sexuality. It’s difficult to play that sort of thing without over-playing it in gasping indie movie...

As a legally married man, I would like to once again offer my apologies for those who would like to keep it bizarrely exclusive. The desire to keep marriage between a man and a woman is staggeringly bizarre when one considers that it had essentially started out as an arrangement between a man and his property. Things change. Things evolve. And some people have a tremendous amount of difficulty h...

Theatrical Tendencies'™ first show of the coming season is The Little Dog Laughed--”a comedy from a few years back written by Dogulas Carter Beane. A playwright who has also worked on at least one Broadway musical (the book for Xanadu) has also worked in Hollywood (he wrote To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.) It'™s the Hollywood end of his experience that he seems to have draw...

On a technical end, Theatrical Tendencies’ production of Corpus Christi has strikingly clean feel to it. There’s an overriding sense of crisp precision about the group’s presence at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center in every detail. Comfortable padded chairs fill the storefront studio space in exceedingly conscientious rows. Look-up and there’s a lighting grid that seems hung with a very ne...

I kind of knew going into this week that it was going to be kind of weird for me. I’d scheduled myself to see two different modern mutations of the basic story arc of the New Testament. Last night’s opening of UWM’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot was kind of overwhelming. If you go see the show (and you probably should

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The relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Judas Iscariot carries a lot of weight with some people. The two guys, if they did, in fact, exist in a traditional historical way beyond biblical texts, might have been suprized to find out that people would still be putting weight and significance on their relationship 2 thousand years later. Jesus was a political troublemaker. The Romans wanted hi...

I don’t know that� I ever recall a new Milwaukee theatre company quite as well organized as Theatrical Tendencies.�There’s a correlation here—they also appear to be impressively well-funded. I missed their debut show Thrill Me—The Leopold & Loeb Story. I’ve seen pictures, though . . . judging from production pics, the show had a very stylishly rendered feel about it. And so I’m reall...