Peggy Sue Dunigan - Page 12

In the 1940's, women managed factories while welding to build warships and also sat in a bomber's cockpit, climbing into the air to aid America's war efforts. Produced by Renaissance Theaterworks (RTW), the World War II story titled Censored on Final Approach and written by a former Marquette University Director of Theater, the late Phylis Ravel, takes flight on stage in the Studio Theater to reveal how these women coped. RTW collaborated with current theater students and technicians to remember these women pilots who sacrificed their lives for the war. To do this, these courageous WASPS (Women Air Force Service Pilots), females ahead of their time, confronted their male competition and tradition to fight for their right to fly and live everything their feminine selves could be.

The battle between saying 'yes' and 'no,' wages a magical war when spoken by a princess.,First Stage's World Premiere Ella Enchanted arrived at the Todd Wehr Theater this past weekend based on Gail Carson Levine's popular award winning novel. Company Associate Artistic Director John Maclay fill this turned on end adaptation of 'Cinderella'  with joy through the book/lyrics written by Karen Zacarias and her musical collaborator Deborah Wicks LaPuma. This fabulous artistic team complements equally fantastic double young performer casts. On opening night, Alison Pogerelc, Grace Becker, Elizabeth Robbins and Max Pink completely enchant the audience.

With two world premiere ballets and ten Beatles songs front and center on the Uhlein Stage, Milwaukee Ballet presented their Kaleidoscope Eyes at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in an exquisite opening night performance. Emmy award-winning Lighting Designer David Grill, a dream team technician for the ballet's Artistic Director Michael Pink, collaborated with three acclaimed choreographers, Garrett Smith, Timothy O'Donnell, and Trey McIntyre, for a triple dose of 'Oh Wow' contemporary dance' performed with love, as the Beatles would say, 'From Me to You,' the ballet to the city's audiences.

Women of the World unite for Milwaukee Rep's poetic, powerful world premiere titled Sirens of Song featuring the musical history through a women's perspective sung through familiar melodies of the 20th century. While the music begins in December 1901 with the Daughters of Freedom, the Stackner Cabaret provides the ultimate setting for Scenic Designer Scott Davis' abandoned clothing shop filled with manikins dressed in period costumes-all surrounded by a grand, gilt broken picture frame where these three actors make their Rep debuts. A revue written by Kevin Ramsey and his niece Pearl Ramsey, the two collaborators weave world events through a century worth of popular music. Woo a women's heart at Milwaukee Rep's poetic, powerful world premiere titled Sirens of Song featuring  history tuned to a women's perspective and sung through familiar melodies of the 20th century. While the music begins in December 1901 with the 'Daughters of Freedom', the Stackner Cabaret provides the ultimate setting for Scenic Designer Scott Davis' abandoned clothing shop filled with manikins dressed in period costumes-all surrounded by a grand, gilt fragmented picture frame where these three actresses open their Rep debuts. A  world premiere revue written by Kevin Ramsey and his niece Pearl Ramsey, the two collaborators weave world events through a century worth of popular music.

What allows a child or person to say yes or no to any request. To use intellect and free will to voice their choice? First Stage follows a World Premiere with another World Premiere this spring by presenting an adaptation of Gail Carson Levine's 1997 Newbery Award winning book Ella Enchanted. The novel garnered a cult follwoing for this Cinderella story turned on edge. First Stage commissioned the production together with Adventure Theatre MTC in Maryland while two more women Karn Zacarias wrote the stage play and lryics alongside composer Deborah Wicks LaPuma. With more than ten original musical numbers, the production celebrates young girls and women in every sense, although young men have a place in Ella's heart.

Perhaps only someone looking from the the outside can see more clearly than those living on the inside of the United States. This principle operates with brillant clarity when Milwaukee Reperatory Theater presents the World Premiere American Song by acclaimed Ausstralian author and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. The Rep commissioned the play almost four years  iago in 2012 and then opened on the Quadraccie Powerhouse stage this past weekend. Set in the America's heartland, a supposedly rural Wisconsin town, American Players Theatre actor James DeVIta gives an incomprable portrayal of a parent in agony, a father in midlife named Andy.

The former star of television's 'Adventures in Paradise' Gardner McKay, also an author, sailor and man of the sea his entire life, wrote Sea Marks in 1981. The two person play portrays an unlikely couple, one living in Ireland, and the other in Liverpool, past their passionate youth who revive the age-old art of writing love letters to woo. While Gardner wrote his play in the 21st century, and subsequently won a LA Drama Circles' Critics Award, the 1960's setting remains more than half a century removed from contemporary cell phones with email and texting at one's fingertips. Soulstice Theatre stages the heartwarming, winsome play in their intimate St. Francis Theater with winning results.

First Stage World Premiere The Snow arrived this winter to the Todd Wehr Theater, while famed playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer traveled from half way across the world to appear on March 6 for the play's production debut. Commissioned by Oregon Children's Theatre and Magik Theatre in collaboration with First Stage, Kruckemeyer's The Snow told a tale of two towns both named after Margareta 'Mama' Kishka and the huge snow walls surrounding the towns in isolation, cut off from sun and supplies. A tiny boy Theodore together with a gentle giant named Oliver try to solve this never-ending winter through their courageous adventure written in the tradition of Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson.

With little more than 25 seats available att the Off the Wall Theatre (OTW), Artistic Director Dale Gutzman presents William Shakespeare's Hamlet--An intimate, visceral, up close and personal Hamlet condensed by Gutzman after several years of research and eleven weeks of cast rehearsals. Working also as Production Director, Gutzman doubles acting several roles in his interpretation he states was inspired by the English, multi award winning Peter Brook, hailed to be one of the greatest living directors of contemporary theater.

Hat Queens--the women in Skylight Music Theatre's Crowns: A Gospel Musical call themselves Hat Queens--,and honor women who proudly wear a magnificent hat on Sunday to display their unique being and personality. Award-winning actress and playwright Regina Taylor adapted the book 'Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats' by Michael Cunningham and Craig Mayberry for the stage to produce a non-linear, almost poetic string of joyful songs and stories to bring these African American women and traditions to life that fills the Cabot Theatre with joyful music.

The night before a friend's wedding sets the stage for Theater RED's Milwaukee premiere of Bachelorette at Bay View's Alchemist Theatre. Raw, risque and x-rated, Leslye Headland's script first arrived at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival starring Kirsten Dunst, Lizzie Caplan and Rebel Wilson. Later the director and writer translated this into a stage play, and the playwright followed by producing another movie 'Sleeping With Other People,' supposedly a down and dirtier version of the iconic 'When Harry Met Sally.'  While being featured in Rolling Stone, LA Times, and The New Yorker, Headland's play attempts to deal with several mean girls suffering from hangovers and a younger generation's views on a version of the 'Romantic Comedy,' or rom-com.

In the First Stage fictional village of Kishka, 'the wall of snow did not melt, the knitted scarves grew to long to use, and the fires eventually burned out,' described the town's never ending winter....This sets the story for the company's World Premiere production The Snow. Commissioned in collaboration with Oregon Children's Theatre and Magik Theatre, internationally acclaimed author and playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer conjures a modern folk tale adventure where the villagers in Kishka rely on a tiny child named Theodore when he seeks a solution to their never ending prison of frozen snow.

Dream of visiting Costa Rica's lush jungles and warm climate this winter? Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT) imports Costa Rica to the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center in their intergenerational production Slowgirl. Directed by C. Michael Wright, and dedicated to his own niece, playwright Greg Pierce's 2012 character study places two societal runaways, an older uncle and his rarely seen teenage niece, in the dry rainforests of Central America.

An economic term defines and unravels the life of an American investment banker held captive by Pakistanis in Milwaukee Rep's current production The Invisible Hand. At the intimate Stiemke Studio, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, educated and raised in a Milwaukee suburb, travels to near future Pakistan in his play where financial markets crash and burn in the first of four Akhtar productions to be staged at The Rep over the nest several years.

Prime bridal season in 2016 begins in April, with the June summer and September fall weddings following afterwards, two of the most popular months to marry, which supports a $72 billion dollar bridal industry. Theatre RED offers an antidote to the sentimentality and excess of festive weddings currently advertised by contemporary bridal culture in their biting, chilling dark comedy coming this March: Bachelorette.

This winter at Tenth Street Theatre more than 20 lamps brighten the In Tandem Theatre Stage and recall the three generation history of an Irish American family named Duddy. Milwaukee bred playwright and Marquette University graduate Michael Neville reprises his semi-autobiographical play Lamps for My Family, where each lamp on stage remembers a light that a person in his family read by in the Duddy homestead, and metaphorically symbolizes the light they gave to Jack's life growing up. A play originally developed because of Neville's commitment to new works through his Playwrights Studio Theater, Neville lives and works in Milwaukee, and at In Tandem a beloved hometown actor Mark Corkins embodies Jack Duddy, a psychiatrist returning from New York after his divorce to care for his elderly relatives.

During February, snow falls lightly in Wisconsin this year, the powdery flakes covering the frosty earth--cold and icy white. With winter weather at the heart of the First Stage world premiere, the company introduces their 6th Wisconsin Cycle production in a play simply titled: The Snow. Internationally acclaimed playwright Finegan Kruckmeyer- who has garnered more than 30 awards from around the world during his continuing illustrious career-worked with Artistic Director Jeff Frank, Oregon Children's Theatre, and Magik Theatre when collaborating on a fantasy adventure conjuring winter white magic while honoring Wisconsin's Germanic heritage akin to the Brothers Grimm legendary fairytales.

If as Oscar Wilde wrote, 'Beauty is a form of genius, indeed a higher form of genius, and needs no explanation,' the Milwaukee Ballet and Michael PInk affirm this statement with a resounding performance of their World Premiere ballet Dorian Gray. Based on Wilde's late 19th century novella, Pink and his 'dream team,'--Lighting Designer David Grill, Composer Philip Fenney and Costume/Scenic Designer Todd Edward Ivins--sparked magical genius in the first full length ballet staged in the Historic Pabst Theater. Ivins spoke the essence of the moment when he stated, 'A historic occasion in a historic theater.'

Coming this February, Milwaukee Ballet and Artistic Director Michael Pink introduce their World Premiere ballet Dorian Gray. Based on the British 1980 novel by Oscar Wilde, Pink originally debuted another version of this story in Augsburg, Germany two years ago. This year in Milwaukee, PInk commissioned a new score by Philip Feeney, scenic and costume designs by Todd Edward Ivins, and returns Emmy award-winning Lighting Designer David Grill to envision the ominous story.. Grill will be at Super Bowl 50 on Sunday, February 7, and then 'after lighting Coldplay will light the Milwaukee Ballet.' This tour-de-force creative collaboration underscores fresh choreography by Pink to produce another full-length ballet performed for the first time in the Historic Pabst Theater over two full winter weekends.

'I have only one purpose in life-- to be loved,' believes Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll in the Skylight Music Theatre's new production of the chamber opera Powder Her Face. Staged in the Cabot Theatre defined by bravado, brilliance and bravery, Milwaukee hosts the 1995 opera by British composer Thomas Adès an artist awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize for Composition. With the libretto written by Phillip Hensher based on the sensational divorce proceedings of the Duchess of Argyll, the story toys with society's fascination of any royal's private life similar to how the Duchess toyed with the numerous men in her life.