The theatre year continues to transition from the standard season to the summer as Uprooted stages its latest. Caleen Sinnette Jennings; Hair, Nails & Dress makes its debut here. A longtime professor at American University in Washington D.C., Jennings has had work published and staged both adult works and children's fare.  She'd received a $10,000 grant from the Kennedy Center for her work.�...

  With Soulstice Theatre opening the first show of the new season last week, Milwaukee Theatre rolls into New Year's . . . the Milwaukee Theatre year starting in August with the first new shows of the new theatre season and closes at the end of the following July with the last openings of the summer theatre season. Here then is part two of a look back at it all . . . November 2010 This past Nove...

    Neil Haven’s work has been an interesting and uneven mix. From the heartwarming holiday show Who Killed Santa? to a cleverly-constructed comedy about an agoraphobic elevator operator, Haven’s work has an enjoyable energy about it. My wife and I still occasionally talk about a comic short he wrote for Pink Banana Theatre featuring a group of ducks in a fountain in Las Vegas. Ha...

It’s all too easy to get the impression that Tennessee Williams’ classic drama A Streetcar Named Desire is a bit overrated. Very few modern plays have the kind of longevity and high profile awarded the story of Stella, Stanley and Blanche. Having seen a staging of it in the past couple of years, its status as a classic is undeniable. If the 65 year-old play feels at all cliché it’s becau...

The exterior architecture at the Harley Museum (and much of what I’d seen in select places inside) is dominated by straight lines and right angles. This is a bit odd considering the company’s image is so defined by beautiful curves and skews. I was there last night for my first of two events of the evening—a formal welcome party for Mark Clements: the new Artistic Director of the Milwauke...

This week sees the debut of a new Milwaukee theater group, Uprooted, an African-American company introducing itself with a staging of the one-woman drama Beauty's Daughter by Dael Orlandersmith. An extended monologue about a woman trying to transcend the ghetto, Orlandersmith's 1995 drama speaks with a poet's tongue...