Youngblood Theatre opened its first show to a sizeable group of people last night. 7:30 pm: The theatre space in UWM’s Studio Theatre has a minimalist feel to it. Everybody settles in. (It's opening night and there are some really talented people in the audience . . . people I’d seen onstage before. People I’d interviewed in the past . . .) and then Youngblood’s Michael Cotey introduces ...

Michael Cotey has shown remarkable talent since his first appearances onstage as a theatre student at UWM. Now fully graduated from UWM, Cotey and a few others are starting a new theatre company—Youngblood. I had the opportunity to speak with Cotey outside Alterra at the Lake during a particularly frenetic Summerfest weekend.As the conversation progressed, we got to talking about Youngblood�...

Michael Cotey has shown remarkable talent since his first appearances onstage as a theatre student at UWM. Not only working with UWM, he’s made a number of appearances in professional theatre over the years. He boldly took the stage in the male lead of an In Tandem’s Equus . . . later appearing in a student production of The Dumbwaiter—a production that he also directed and landing a minor ...

As appealing as the life of a traveling artist seems to me, I’d never really be able to pull it off. Coming from a childhood of virtual poverty, I have very little experience traveling. I’ve never really been able to communicate all that coherently during or within 24 hours after returning from a road trip. And yet, when Michael Cotey said he wanted to talk about his new theatre company at Alt...