Wednesday, May 8, 2019 kicks off the eighth annual Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA Playwrights Festival at Hunter College. Under the leadership of Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Hunter's MFA Playwriting Program features intensive, hands-on writing workshops that foster a tight-knit, supportive community of artists committed to challenging assumptions about what theater is and will become.
Artistic Director Mark Clements and Executive Director Chad Bauman have just announced Milwaukee Repertory Theater's 2019/20 Season, which celebrates the 10th Anniversary Season of Artistic Director Mark Clements with 15 productions across four venues in the Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex.
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a timeless tale of hope and redemption that has been a cornerstone of Milwaukee Repertory Theater for more than 40 years playing to over 1.5 million people making it Milwaukee's favorite holiday tradition. Keeping with The Rep's mission to creating positive change in the community, it is pleased to announce the recipients of the A Christmas Carol Families Program and Tiny Tim Ticket Program for 2018.
Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan are in negotiations to star in directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's sci-fi thriller SYNCHRONIC. The film will be produced by David Lawson Jr. along with Moorhead and Benson for Rustic Films, with a script written by Benson. XYZ Films is handling international sales, with XYZ co-repping domestic rights with UTA.
Bay Street Theater & Sag Harbor Center for the Arts Bay Street Theater & Sag Harbor Center for the Arts held Some Enchanted Evening, the 27th Annual Summer Gala in Sag Harbor on the Long Wharf on July 7, 2018, with Jane Lynch as emcee. The event benefits Bay Street's educational and theatrical programs. The evening included special performances as well as a silent auction, cocktail party, live auction with celebrity auctioneer Richard Kind, dinner and dancing. And due to future restoration of the Long Wharf, this was the final gala to be held there.
Join Milwaukee Repertory Theater as they celebrate "A Night at the Cabaret" at the annual Curtain Call Ball on Saturday, May 12, 2018 at 5:30pm at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex (108 E. Wells St). Co-chaired by Laura and Adam Peck and Mara and Craig Swan, the 2018 Curtain Call Ball will feature dinner, dancing, live and silent auction, and a world-class theatrical experience Rep audiences have come to expect.
Gulfshore Playhouse, Naples' premier professional regional theatre, has announced Steve Akin as chair of its Next Stage capital campaign.
Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab today announced the appointment of Gregory Mosher as a new Professor and the first Jay and Patty Baker Chair of Theatre, beginning this semester. As part of the growth of this department, Mosher has Alec Baldwin as a guest lecturer today, Wednesday, September 27th. There will be other special guests brought in to meet students throughout the year.
The legendary story of Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847, arrives as artful, contemporary adaption by Polly Teale in Milwaukee Repertory Theater's season ending production at the Quadracci Powerhouse. Director KJ Sanchez follows Teale's lead and delves deeper into the psychology between Jane and Mr. Rochester's uninhibited, possible mad wife Bertha. The two characters, through actors, Margaret Ivey (Jane) and Rin Allen (Bertha) shadow each other throughout the production. In this adaptation, Bertha appears to mirror Jane's repressed Victorian feelings that literally ignite their lives and English homestead, Thornfield.
Actor Frank Ferrante begins on Milwaukee's Stackner Cabaret's stage by walking over to a small table, sitting down, and then placing the iconic thick black mustache and eyebrows defining the indomitable comedian Groucho Marx. In the The Milwaukee Repertory Theater's superb production An Evening With Groucho written by Ferrante and directed by Dreya Weber, the transformation from actor to classic comic spirt engages the audience in a collusion of laughter and humor for all audiences.
The Milwaukee Repertory Theater's multi-award winning play Grounded, grounds a pregnant woman fighter pilot while also grounding the audiences in the intimate Stiemke Studio's compelling and complex production. George Brant's contemporary 2013 play demonstrates how drones have transformed both fighter pilots and the 'games of global war' because in the 21st century, drones hover over the skies of foreign countries similar to space ships in a violent video game. Either movement controlled by one person in a solitary cubicle or sitting in front of a tiny screen. Instead of B-15 bombers that fly into the blue manned by pilots, men and women, presently sit in front of huge screens sequestered in silence waiting and watching for any movement so drones may attack from across the world in the name of 'reducing the loss of human life.'
Marquette University, Milwaukee and Al McQuire became synonymous during the coach's tenure with Men's Basketball during the 1970's. To celebrate the illustrious legacy, Milwaukee Repertory Theater captivates the audience's enthusiasm and excitement in the Stackner Cabaret. After the university hired McGuire in 1964, the showman coach propelled the men's Basketball team to a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship. Now on stage to begin the 2017 winter season, McQuire's endearing story returns to the city and university that made him famous in their intimate, stellar one man production directed by Brent Hazelton and featuring multiple award-winning actor Anthony Crivello.
A cozy, celebratory dinner party in a cosmopolitan New York penthouse ignites irreversible damage between friends in Ayad Ahktar's 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning play Disgraced now on stage at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's Quadracci Powerhouse. Eventually, each character in the no intermission production will somehow be disgraced-sometimes by their personal identity, religion or culture and determined through their own specific actions or reactions to another person. The Rep becomes the third theater company to mount Disgraced in a co-production with Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater and New Jersey's McCarter Theatre in what has become the most produced play in 2016. One only needs to attend to understand why this potent combination of contemporary dilemmas facing Americans personally and politically drew the country's theatrical attention.
What could be a better holiday gift to Milwaukee than a World Premiere adaptation of Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol? On Friday night, Artistic Director Mark Clements opened his resplendent adaptation for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the gorgeous Pabst Theatre. In this innovative adaptation by Clements in collaboration with a stunning artistic team, the production renewed holiday magic in the company's 41st year for the city that Clements and The Rep call home.
When Dickens wrote his timeless Christmas story about mid 19th century London audiences often push aside, especially at the holidays, he wanted his audiences to be transformed into seeing their world in a new way. In 2016, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater produces their 41st incarnation of Charles Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol beginning on opening night, December 2. The historical Pabst Theater houses Dickens' story, first published in 1843, with a innovative adaptation conceived by Artistic Director Mark Clements and begins a journey with Ebenezer Scrooge into his past, present and future.
Written 30 plus years ago in 1985, the late Milwaukee playwright Larry Shue's award winning Foreigner first debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. After playing Broadway in the 80's, and reprised by numerous theaters across the country on an annual basis, Foreigner returns to the Quadracci Powerhous for the holiday season. Directed by the inimitable Laura Gordon who understands Shue's incomparable blend of humor, relevance and warm heartedness, could re-envision this scenario in a rural Georgia bed and breakfast inn. At the Georgia inn, a British Sergeant, Froggy, rescues his low spirited and shy friend Charlie for a weekend's stay Here Charlie meets the winsome inn owner, Betty, a conspiring reverend, David Marshall Lee, his fiance Catherine, her younger brother, Ellard, and a rapscallion homegrown Georgian, Owen. Throw in Catherine and Ellard's recent inheritance, and the invisible white empire on a starry night, and Shue created a hilarious farce, even when seen several times.
This season Milwaukee Repertory Theater's Stackner Cabaret warms the holidays with the Great American Songbook: A tribute to the incomparable composer Irving Berlin in the musical revue I Love A Piano. When an old forlorn piano with one broken note magically reveals the instrument's history during the performance, Berlin's lyrics and melodies that defined the country's multiple generations play on. In this mesmerizing production filled with more than 50 Berlin songs, the cabaret regales America's 1910's to post World War II eras that stirs memories in the audience's heart and soul.
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.
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
"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.
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