Peggy Sue Dunigan - Page 8

In an on-stage adventure that will thrill any secret buccaneer, Theater RED world premieres Bonny Anne Bonny in collaboration with the Department of Theatre at Milwaukee's Wisconsin Lutheran College's (WLC). Set in the WLC Performing Arts Center's Raabe Theatre, WLC students along with Director Christopher Elst steer Liz Shipe's swashbuckling tale into one very enthralling version of 18th century Irish pirate Anne Bonny's life. Theater RED's world premiere production takes the audience's breath away when the cast ascends swaying ladders, swings on ropes across the stage and flashes their sword play while these men and women 'pirates' cast about for a new ship to find plundered treasures.

Three women--all seduced into marriage and relieved of their lives and fortunes--beautifully retell their rather unfortunate stories in Renaissance Theaterworks (RTW) The Drowning Girls on stage in the Studio Theatre. A play written by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomilnson and Daniela Vlaskalic, the play relates the true story of George Joseph Smith, a man who married three vulnerable maids during England's early 20th century and then immediately drowned them in their own bathtubs.

In a world premiere commissioned by First Stage and Oregon Children's Theatre, R.L. Stein's famous 'Goosebumps' series comes to stage life in Milwaukee at the Todd Wehr Theater. First Stage Associate Artistic Director John Maclay and the award winning Danny Abosch wrote the original book, lyrics and music to Goosebumps The Musical: Phantom of the Auditorium from one of more than his 62 books Stein wrote between 1992-1997. Stein's youthful horror fiction, often believed to be the second best selling children's series of all time, was created as he says so 'Children could use their own wit and imagination to escape the scary circumstances.'

This fall, Boulevard Theatre raises the curtain once again (metaphorically speaking, yes!) at Plymouth Church with a nostalgic, noteworthy collaboration between Boulevard and Plymouth Chorale along with inspiration from Milwaukee Opera Theatre.  Artistic Director Mark Bucher produces an original production in the church sanctuary creating the charming and kitschy Where the Streetcar Bends the Corner, Down by the Zoo!

What other regional or national theater company can be credited with producing 61 total world premieres? Professional children's theater company First Stage began a legacy 30 years ago, and continues in their new season under the theme 'Theater You Never Outgrow.' Artistic Director Jeff Frank believes the company creates the strongest theater, at home, in Milwaukee, which eventually reverberates around the country. Now authors and producers nationally recognize First Stage and knock on the company's door, approaching them with opportunities, so the company can envision new legacies in Theater for Young Audiences.

Two men enclosed in a boxing ring--one black and one white-vie for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship and a transformative match that might knock out race relations for decades to come. Milwaukee Repertory Theaer imports Marco Ramiriez's The Royale to the Stiemke Studio in sophisticated style starring David St. Louis playing the African American boxing champion Jay 'the Sport' Jackson. Jay Jackson represents the actual heavyweight champion Jack Johnson who defeated the previous World Heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries, a white man, on July 4, 2010 to win freedom for the black boxer. In the stunning Rep production, Ramirez's script loosely retells the story that changed the course of boxing history where Jackson became the first African American Heavyweight Champion in an era when the Klu Klux Klan lynched black men for merely the color of their skin.

For the 2016-2017 no 'shrinking violet' opening of the Cabot Theatre Stage, Skylight Music Theatre presents the 1997 award-winning musical, Violet. Set in the mid 1960's, the Broadway Theatre Center production relates to a young woman's journey when her father accidentally disfigured her face and left a traumatic facial scar amid the burgeoning civil rights movement and beginnings of the Vietnam war. When Violet travels from North Carolina to Oklahoma carrying her dream and hope that a faith healer will remove the scar, the young Southern woman encounters various people on her Greyhound bus ride to remind the audience life's miracles arise in multiple forms when the heart opens the eyes and mind and removes the mundane from the material world.

Everyone eventually wishes for an impossible dream to be fulfilled-In a musical where that song, 'The Impossible Dream,' continues to inspire an audience, Milwaukee Repertory stellar Man of La Mancha opened the final weeks of September and proved why the musical won five 1966 Tony Awards. The first production in the Quadracci Powerhouse season, the iconic musical written by Dale Wasserman combined with brilliant music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion transforms Cervantes groundbreaking novel into a two hour, no intermission musical set in the dungeons of the 16th century Spanish Inquisition. Cervantes and his servant Sancho Panza must prove their worth to their prison mates. To do so, the pair performs the poet's 'Man of La Mancha' in the Spanish dungeon, where all the prisoners participate as actors, which eventually awakens the impossible dream inside those attending in the audience

Misfits: The 2016-2017 theme for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's season. A little known Tennessee Williams play, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur provides Williams' misfits, four 'women of a certain age,' a stage for exposing their misfortunes in St. Louis, the 1930's. In a place 'just a street car ride away from a cooling Sunday afternoon picnic' at Lake Creve Coeur, Missouri, the misfits uncover what their lives might be in the future. A stage where their adventures appear courtesy of the up and coming Director Leda Hoffman who transforms Kay Allmand, Kelly Doherty, Molly Rhode and Karen Estrada on a set where 'roses explode like a bombshell of clashing colors' designed by Courtney O'Neill. In fact, the entire production becomes a tour de force for women in the theater, on stage and behind the scenes.

"No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it ain't music." spoke jazz singer Billie Holiday. No singer duplicated Billie Holiday's inimitable voice or immortalized jazz singing and standards quite like this legendary diva.. While Holiday herself idolized Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Lady Day" as she was nicknamed, captured the audience's imagination while breaking their hearts when speaking of her tragic childhood. Unfortunately, the singer's personal demons in love and life were also legendary In a tribute to Holiday's career, Milwaukee Rep's opening Stackner Cabaret Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill features the award-winning Alexis J. Roston portraying the star in her declining years after release from a year's imprisonment on drug related charges, which plagued the star her entire life.

Knock on the card table and the Gin player who does so wins the game if ten points or less remain in their hand. Knock on Third Avenue Playhouse's door in Sturgeon Bay to appreciate their new production of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize wining play The Gin Game. In this fascinating battle of wills and wits, Weller and Fonsia fight for their dignity in a dilapidated nursing home, where the nurses become condescending and the Methodist church choir continually sings to entertain them.

Once again, Peninsula Players imports a fresh new play first produced in 2015 direct from Utah to Door County. Playwright Kenneth Jones' Alabama Story received a first regional premiere at the award-winning Fish Creek theater in a story where an innocent children's book by Garth Williams--'The Rabbits' Wedding'-incites civil unrest in Montgomery, Alabama, 1959.

When the audience arrives at American Players (APT) Up the Hill Theatre for the opening of William Shakespeare's King Lear, they might believe a presidential press conference will be staged. Green lawn expands into the audience, actors place contemporary white chairs in a distinct pattern and a glass podium greets the audience--and plenty of paparazzi appear to capture the King, the Duke of Gloucester and Duchess of Kent, and Lear's three daughters entering the lawn party. At night under the stars, the royal staging opens when the King appears announcing his 'retirement,' dividing his kingdom to his three progeny. Two dutiful daughters ascend to the podium pronouncing their love, while Cordelia speaks from the back row of chairs, the front of the Up The Hill Theatre. Goneril, Regan and Cordelia were 'dressed to kill', so to speak in sophisticated, fashion worthy coats and the appropriate fascinators, for English royalty, as were the men.This beginning places the audience firmly in a King Lear crafted for the current day, up to the very minute audiences.

What happens in Bucks County, Pennsylvania-Upper Back Eddy, Bucks County to be specific? Playwright Christopher Durang called Bucks Country home and set his award winning comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike in their country house right there. A place where almost nothing happens except a blue heron visits a pond on the property each morning that Vanya and Sonia wait for while drinking their morning coffee. Milwaukee Chamber Theater opens their 2016-2017 season in the Cabot Theatre with this 2012 Tony Award for Best Play that captures three siblings, one adopted, contemplating their midlife regrets and revelations. Or as Durang would say: 'Their hidden reservoirs that haven't been tapped.'

In a stellar setting at the Touchstone Theatre in Spring Green, a superb American Players Theatre (APT) cast plays out Samuel Beckett's Endgame. An uncomfortable production to watch on stage, Director Aaron Posner breathes humor and touching life into Beckett's classic one act tragicomedy, a treatise on the end of personal and possibly global life. The desolate, tiny room, which was noted by Beckett himself in the original stage directions to be completely empty, was designed void of any beauty except for a lone terrarium filled with sand and a few artifacts from the lost, viable earth along with loose pages and stacks of books, where Beckett's characters barely survive.

Could life be portrayed similar to a steaming cup of tea that eventually grows cool, and finally stone cold? That premise represents one possible physical property of energy, specifically heat, in Tom Stoppard's 1993 play titled Arcadia. At American Players Theatre (APT) Up the Hill stage, Stoppard's contemporary, complex and cunning production poses the duality to life and questions theoretical polar opposites such as order versus chaos. In this absorbing and provocative play where the heat of romantic love interferes with life's scientifically charted course, where the unpredictable and predetermined meet, this APT cast features excellent poetic form when playing what Stoppard also contemplated: 'It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.'

Does a comic opera from 1910 resonate with contemporary audiences? The answer would be with certainty, yes. Third Avenue Playhouse's Madame Sherry with original book/lyrics by Otto Harbach and music by Karl L. Hoschna, would be completely entertaining in the under James Valcq's impressive adaptation and direction along with a talented acting troupe who possess triple threats---they act, dance and sing. Valcq adapted the vintage comic opera from a found script and stage manager's notes discovered in New York's Public library and produces this effervescent theater experience on stage in Sturgeon Bay. With more than 20 songs, romantic smooching and clever choreography, Madame Sherry rings in summer entertainment and chases away any cloudy skies appearing on the horizon, literally or figuratively.

'Everything which is necessary, the entire thing, the whole shebang.' This was the original meaning of the British slang term 'the full monty,' before the 1997 British film of the same name. At Peninsula Players (PPT) in August 2016, everything which is necessary, the whole shebang, appears on stage in their marvelous production of The Full Monty. Ever since the 1997 British version heralded this cult classic term, these words have transformed in meaning to mean, 'full nudity.' Which is exactly the meaning Terrence McNally, (book), and David Yazbek (lyrics and music) displayed in their 2000 adaptation musical production reset in Buffalo, New York and applies to six unemployed steel workers. Or named in an alternate title completely reality, 21st century: Desperate Men, Desperate Moves, Desperate Mania.

While William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar dramatically retells history through rich verse, Door Shakespeare at Baileys Harbor's Bjorklunden gives the play a fiercely human touch in this intimate garden setting. Here a serene rose garden might be enjoyed before the show, directly accessible from the bleacher theater seating. While Director and Milwaukee Rep Artistic Associate James Pickering focuses Shakespeare's political tragedy on the personal relationships between Brutus and Caesar, Cassius and Brutus or Brutus and Portia, Marc Anthony weaves between these relationships before laying rest to the murdered dictator in his famous, 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' oration... In the lush garden on this moonlit stage, the tragic drama acquires a highly intimate and personal interpretation between the litany of interconnections crossing the moral lines between friends and foes, honor and honesty.

'The course of true love never did run smooth'...so quotes William Shakespeare in his popular comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. Door Shakespeare heightens that famous line in this rousing, high energy romp at Bjorklunden Garden in Baileys Harbor this summer. Former Milwaukee Rep Artistic Director and Door County resident Joseph Hanreddy personally stamps Shakespeare's forest fairies and lover's magic with an inventive blend of mayhem that includes some countryfied music for the audience's pleasure.