MILWAUKEE, WI THEATER REVIEWS

Milwaukee Rep closes a successful season in sublime style staging a production of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play Fences on the Quadracci Powerhouse stage. Lou Bellamy, who worked extensively with the acclaimed African-American playwright at St. Paul, Minnesota's Penumbra Theatre Company...

American's national Mother's Day arrives, Sunday, May 8, and Next Act Theatre presents a heartwarming, poignant and powerful production to close their season at exactly the right time of year titled Motherhood Out Loud. Conceived by Susan R. Rose and Joan Stein, more than a dozen playwrights revisi...

One of the hidden elements entwined in Noel Coward's wry play Fallen Angels becomes the French love song 'Memes les Anges'--which translates the first line to: 'Even the angels succumb to love.' On stage in the beautiful Cabot Theatre,  Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's  (MCT) delightful production�...

Antigone--an ancient play first written by Sophocles in approximately 400 B.C.--challenges audiences in the 21st century and centers around strong women, political drama, and difficult moral choices necessary for the characters to choose. This classic play dramatically illustrates that over cen...

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 Univer...

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�...

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 techni...

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 Cabar...

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...

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 als...

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 o...

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 t...

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 coll...

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 ...

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 t...

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 curre...

'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 T...

Milwaukee's Next Act theater needs to be filled to overflowing and sold out each performance this winter for their new production: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Artistic Director David Cecsarini co-directs the play with Jonathan Smoots in a compelling evening where 37 characters, individuals, app...

Milwaukee Rep's Stackner Cabaret hosts a sultry, sensational evening featuring a brief biographical musical revue of blues star Bessie Smith. Their masterful production, The Devil's Music: The Life and Times of Bessie Smith, a Drama Desk nominated musical by Angela Parro, embraces the essence of t...

What designates a miracle in today's world---or in the realm of theological dogma? Artists might claim every time a concert, a dance, a live performance or visual picture appears constitutes a small creative miracle. Renaissance Theaterworks (RTW) presents numerous theatrical miracles in their trans...

In a beautiful, breathtaking evening at Milwaukee Rep, Artistic Director Mark Clements reprises his critically acclaimed production Of Mice and Men. On stage, Todd Edward Ivins' elegant, grand set design creates a wooden bunkhouse where shadows flow onto the stage and complements Jesse Klug's sensua...

Dig, dig, dig--Digging five foot deep holes, five feet wide, in a barren desert is what the teenage boys at Camp Green Lake, Texas, do every day from sunrise to sunset. Louis Sachar's award-winning, beloved novel of two boys who learn to be friends in a detention camp comes to life at First Stage's...

No stranger to acclaimed success, the Sixth Season of Milwaukee Rep Lab produced a fabulous evening of eight short plays in the Stiemke Studio. Fifteen to twenty gifted Emerging Professional Residents (EPR) enraptured the audience with their primarily comic offerings interspersed with several poigna...

What a privilege to watch Young Company produce an all feminine All's Well That Ends Well. On Sunday night at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, Shakespeare's  coming of age romance unfolded under the direction of Marcella Kearns, who produced an amazing performance. Young Company's Director John Mac...

In December, In Tandem Theatre presents their brand new 'alternative' holiday entertainment:A Twisted Carol. True to the title, Mondy Carter's (book and lyrics) accompanied by Nathan Wesselowski's music offers more than merely a 'twisted' version of Charles Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol. This ...