Unlike some American heartland cities, Milwaukee was settled by Germans, Jews and other immigrant groups with an appreciation for theater. The Pabst was built to satisfy that love, touring companies came to town often in Milwaukee's early decades, local companies proliferated and two of the early 20th century's great stage actors, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine, lived nearby in Genosee Depot.
The latest in a series of booklets on Milwaukee by Arcadia Publishing, Milwaukee's Live Theater, travels along the memory lane of limelight from the earliest performances through the present. As with all Arcadia books, black and white photographs of varying clarity scoured from archives and scrapbooks outweigh the text. But author Jonathan West, an Equity actor who co-founded the defunct Bialystock and Bloom and currently manages the long-running Sunset Playhouse, capably puts the pictures in context and maintains that Milwaukee was "one of the first metropolitan areas in the Midwest to establish a theatrical tradition as part of its civic personality." From those roots sprang the Milwaukee Rep, the Skylight and other institutions.
The pictures are fun, including playbills from the Melody Top, a poster of a very young (and thin) Jackie Gleason at the Davidson Theater and many snaps of Milwaukee actors such as John Schneider, Ruth Schudson, Montgomery Davis, David Cecsarini, Laura Gordon, Dale Gutzman and more.
Milwaukee's Live Theater will be published in April.
