Off the Wall Theatre kicks off its season Sept. 2 with a production of Charles Busch’s campy comedy Psycho Beach Party. Jeremy Welter directs the talented Liz Mistele and Dear Ruthie. A week later, the Sunset Playhouse goes in a less campy though similarly silly direction with Steve Martin’s The...

Vaudeville was a huge, network of variety performances that proliferated in an era dominated by only one major broadcast medium. By the late 1920’s, Vaudeville had almost died out due to the proliferation of cinema. About twenty years after the fall of Vaudeville, a theatre opened-up in Elm Grove, Wisconsin that remains there to this day. The Sunset Playhouse rounds out its 50th anniversary s...

� The Sunset Playhouse�in Elm Grove recently announced a office job available. The Sunset� is looking to fill the position of Patron Services Manager�immediately. This individual will have the pleasure of reporting directly to local theatre icon Jonathan West—the Managing Director of the theatre. True, the job isn’t actually a creative opportunity, but it sounds like relatively stress-free ...

Set in a small town bed and breakfast, Houston playwright Pat Cook’s comedy You Can’t Get There From Here tells the story of a business that gets most of its clients from cars that have broken down. A tabloid reporter shows-up, possibly looking to expose the place and slowly falls in love with it. It’s been compared to the work of Frank Capra and it’s coming to Elm Grove. � The Sunset Pl...

I think (I hope) I managed to do a pretty good job of writing a balanced review of Sunset Playhouse's�Hair for next week�s issue of the Shepherd. This in spite of the fact that I honestly don�t like the musical . . . but as easy as it is to dismiss a glossy, commercial Broadway adaptation of a raw, experimental culture late �60�s counter-culture, one has to respect the difficulty of the dichot...

Carl Sternheim could�ve been seen as sort of a German mutation of Oscar Wilde. His plays picked ever so gently at the moral sensibilities of an emerging middle class. A century or so ago, he wrote a Die Hose �a farce involving a woman seen in her undergarments. The play was revised as recently as 2002 by intelligent comedian Steve Martin in The Underpants. Deborah Staples starred in a Milwauke...

It’s been more than 40 years since Hair debuted Off Broadway, but the musical remains popular due to a steady stream of productions over the years. Last year’s Broadway revival further increased the demand for this enduring musical about the counterculture of the tumultuous 1960s. Within a month of the...

July 16th: A production of Hair opens at the Sunset Playhouse In Elm Grove. July 22nd: A production of Hairspray opens with Greendale Community Theatre in uhh . . Greendale

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As contemporary farces go, Ken Ludwig’s Leading Ladies is pretty nondescript. Two down-on-their luck actors find themselves impersonating long, lost female relatives of a dying woman in order to obtain an inheritance. In the process of doing so, they begin to fall for a couple of girls and things begin to get a bit complicated. With passages and overall style loving lifted directly from Shakes...

The Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove has announced that it will be holding auditions for its upcoming show Gaslight Revue. It’s a vaudeville-style variety show, which means that the Sunset is really looking for any kind of talent at all here. Comedians, dancers, singers and other specialty acts are encouraged to audition. The press release asks those classic three questions asked of all aspiring ...