One of the most surefire comedies of the past 30 years, Greater Tuna has become almost an industry. Greater Tuna and its several sequels have been...

Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard's Greater Tuna seems like an unlikely success story. There is very little that is novel or original about the play—essentially, it is a sketch comedy show featuring two guys in a variety of roles in the setting of...

Community theatre doesn’t always get the kind of respect it deserves. Wtiness the discrepancy in ticket prices between a perfectly solid community theatre show and say . . . a touring Broadway show—there’s a kind of a doubles standard in the way people think about theatre. Honestly, touring professional actors lack much of the vitality found in smaller productions. And while the a...

Though thoroughly accepted as a perfectly valid way to acquire fish, most people think of ice fishing as more than a bit odd. Fishing in a wooden closet above a hole in the ice has been described with horror, admiration and, often, equal amounts of both. The appeal of the subject matter has caused Guys On Ice to become an immensely successful musical. The James Kaplan/Fred Alley musical made i...

In what optimistic eyes could see as evidence that the economy is turning around, a couple of job openings in local theatre have recently been posted. The Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove� recently announced a couple of jobs in their office. And since such work usually goes generally unnoticed, I will take a little bit of time here to pay tribute to the people who will eventually go on to perform t...

� 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...

Fighting Bob Fest, a gathering inspired by Wisconsin’s leading progressive of the 20th century, Robert La Follette (former Wisconsin governor and senator, as well as a presidential candidate in 1924), returns to Baraboo on Sept. 12. Headliners include Jim Hightower, Blackwater investigator...

The organized objections against the presidential school address on right-wing talk radio have been nothing less than a hate campaign. “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,”...

Happy hour comes in the morning at Le Cakery, a charming bakery and cafe in the village of Elm Grove. When Hakan Hare purchased the business last year, he found the prevailing thought to be that Le Cakery made only cakes. If he could only get customers in the door, he thought, they would find that in addition to...

The first eight or nine pages of Pat Cook's script are written as casual conversation held by three elderly women in a domestic environment. All three women are talking at the same time- no one's listening. It's a comically surreal way to begin the season in Elm Grove as the Sunset Playhouse opens its production of Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner . . .