Intro Being a theatre critic who attends 100+ annually, my year is defined a bit differently than a standard calendar will allow for. My year starts in August with the first shows of the new theatre season,  continues through May as regular season switches gears for the summer shows and finally ends in July as the new theatre season gets underway the following month . . . and so each year I l...

    One of the heavier stage dramas to come out of the '50s, James Baldwin's The Amen Corner concerns itself with family, religion and murky truths in a racially oppressed culture. First published in 1954, the three-act play follows an African-American family and the role of the church in its life. There's a kind of fearlessness in the premise . . . taking something of an unflinching look at th...

  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...

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...

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...

Katori Hall’s Hoodoo Love sprung out of an assignment at Columbia University. The assignment was to write about a pair of people fighting over an object. She wrote about a couple of people fighting over a mojo bag in Memphis in the 1930s. The story revolves around Toulou—a woman who fled the cotton fields of Mississippi to pursue a dream of being a blues singer . . . this at a time when Robe...

To save his life, a man must uncover the truth about the death of a widow with whom he has been involved and whom he is accused of murdering. The man is black; the woman is...

Bayonne, Louisiana. 1948. After World War II. Before the civil rights movement. During the era of the Jim Crowe south. A schoolteacher is sent to counsel a man on death row—a man unjustly condemned. It’s been described as a heavily dramatic piece about a time when injustices weren’t buried underneath layers of glossy PR. It’s A Lesson Before Dying-- a drama written by Romulus Linney base...

One non-profit fundraiser can pretty much bleed into the next for those with the means to attend them. The challenge for any non-profit is to put something together that is distinct and unique while still serving that basic role of a fundraiser event—to raise money. Uprooted Theatre’s October 30th fundraiser conceptually goes a few steps beyond memorable fundraising event to make kind of an...