The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre  has announced auditions for its Young Playwrights Festival. This year’s festival (which hits the stage of the Broadway Theatre Center December 17 – 20th) consists of a program of three short plays by area high school students. Judging from the brief teasers for the three shorts available on the website, there’s some interesting stuff in here. One of the sho...

  Not too long ago, I used to work at a huge industrial-office complex south of downtown. Back then, there was a remarkably resilient guy who’d been working there for decades—knew the place and all of its bewildering corridors inside and out. This guy could make his way from an obscure point on the fifth floor to an equally obscure point in the basement in less than ten minutes on a busy day...

Soulstice Theatre has announced auditions for its production of the Robert Harling comic drama Steel Magnolias. Set in a Beauty Parlor in Louisiana, the story revolves around 6 women. And so . . . Soulstice theatre is looking for six actresses ranging in age from their early 20’s to 70’s. (Actually, that’s: one woman in her late teens, another in her mid-twenties, one in her 40’s, one in h...

In the midst of all the Milwaukee theatre companies celebrating big anniversaries this year, there’s one that will likely be overlooked by a great many people. One of the longest standing theatre traditions in greater Milwaukee, The�Bay Players will be celebrating their 60th anniversary this season. The Whitefish Bay-based community theatre group will be staging three of its most successful play...

The Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove is getting set to start its new season. The opening show is a production of the Jerome Lawrence/ Robert Lee adaptation of the classic Patrick Dennis novel Auntie Mame. It’s the story of a young man who finds himself in the custody of an iconoclastic individualist with no sympathy at all for conformity. It’s difficult to imagine any stage adaptation of the nov...

The upcoming Alchemist production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago aside, Sam Shepard's True West is possibly one of the most uber-masculine plays to be written in the past forty years. It's the story of two men--brothers. One of them is a screenwriter (Austin) working on a script for his next film while housesitting for his mother, who is vacationing in Alaska. He's just settling-in to work on ...

As mentioned yesterday, The Boulevard Theatre will be hosting a weekend of staged auditions patterned after a certain bafflingly popular TV show.  Yesterday’s listing of judges featured in the program is followed today by a list of some of the actors who will be facing them. Here are some of the personalities competing in the program— Michael ChobanoffIs a towering local actor—instantly r...

The Boulevard Theatre recently announced that its final production of the season, Stations of the Cross broke all previous records and now stands as its most successful production ever. The extended run of its show sold-out within 36 hours of being announced. Coming off the biggest success in its history, the Boulevard will be hosting an interesting program at the end of the month in what is fast ...

Auditions announcements flutter into my email occasionally. Here are three upcoming auditions that sound promising: FAME—YOU’RE GONNA LIVE FOREVER (MAYBE) The Sunset Playhouse in Elm Grove is staging an upcoming summer production of the1988 David De Silva/ Jose Fernandez musical FAME. Based on the 1980 film and subsequent long-running TV series, the story follows a group of students at a New Y...

This May, Racine’s Over Our Head Players will be staging another schmeater program. Last year’s was evidently successful enough that they’ll be doing it again this year. This year's Theatre/Schmeatre program (which comes perilously close to being the name of a theatre company in Washington state) will run May 15th - June 6th. It’s a collection of original comic sketches (which I assume ...