Jean-Gabriel Fernandez
Josh Bryan, a founding member of Cabaret Milwaukee
Cabaret Milwaukee is a small, local, performing arts company that made a name for itself by recreating 1940s-style radio dramas live on stage, complete with original stories. Last season, they staged three episodes of The Jealous Revolver, a pulpy crime series rhythmed by jazz music. This season, they are focusing on Milwaukee’s socialist past in a noir crime drama. Off the Cuff discussed their upcoming episode and ongoing season with Cabaret Milwaukee’s founding member, Josh Bryan.
Cabaret Milwaukee models their shows on old-time radio shows. Can you tell us more about that?
A Cabaret Milwaukee show has everything you’d expect from an old-time radio variety show of the 1930s and ’40s: host, house band, jingles for our sponsors, news updates (pulled straight from old newspapers), period comedy (like Mrs. Millies’ tips for the happy housewife), and, of course, an episodic radio play.
Radio-style live theater is not uncommon; plenty of theater groups stage readings of scripted plays and call it “radio-style theater.” They can be fun and sometimes translate well into podcasts. What makes Cabaret Milwaukee different is that our productions still take full advantage of a live theater performance: They’re fully rehearsed with period costumes, and if you see a pistol onstage, you’re likely to see a pyrotechnic muzzle flash go off as well. We love our stagecraft.
Why model our shows in the radio-variety format? Quite simply, it gives us a chance to incorporate several different performance mediums into our storytelling and social criticism. Our shows swing back and forth, alternating scenes from the radio play with individual segments from the radio show.
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Cabaret Milwaukee is a vehicle for a multi-disciplinary group of performers to contribute to one overarching story. It’s not often that script writers, actors, stand-up comedians, jazz singers and musicians all share equal creative value in one project.
What is Cream City Crime Syndicate?
Cream City Crime Syndicate (CCCS), our episodic radio play this season, is a mix of real Milwaukee political history of 1918 (think socialism and Mayor Daniel Hoan), as well as fictitious, noir crime drama inspired by the wave of kidnapping that was popular in criminal enterprises of that same era. The intermittent segments from the radio show (news and election updates of 1932, advice and special interest bits, period comedy, a fair amount of scripted banter and back talk between the performers) give us a lot of material with which to talk about 2020 social issues while still maintaining a veil of historical retrospect.
CCCS is more like three separate stories that take place in the same city, around the same time, and share some of the same characters. It’s the era of Milwaukee’s socialist heyday. Mayor Daniel Hoan struggles to maintain his socialist tenure in the city, even as his political foes work against him and the Socialist Party of America is under extreme scrutiny across the country. Our first show this season was Cream City Crime Syndicate: Politics & Anarchy, which centered on Hoan’s first election campaign. Militant groups were active in the city (one Italian faction accidentally blew up a police station!), and Hoan’s political rival, Wheeler P. Bloodgood, would try anything legal (or otherwise) to thwart him. An unlikely hero in the form of Hoan’s old friend, Detective Jack Walker, saved the day and cemented their working relationship.
What can you tell us about Ransom Is Relative, which opens soon?
Picking up sometime after the end of Politics & Anarchy, we find Hoan again embroiled in political turmoil, for which the unorthodox methods of his old pal (Walker) might just be a kidnapped girl’s only chance. It’s absolutely not necessary to see previous episodes to see Ransom Is Relative! If you recall one trope of old episodic dramas, the host was all too keen to remind the audience of any relevant details, “When we last left off...”
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) is approaching; what are you planning to do for the occasion?
Our show this season has quite a bit of fun taking a retrospective glance both at Milwaukee’s socialist history as well as the election campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and incumbent Herbert Hoover. Our shows are now recorded live for later broadcast on WMSE 91.7FM’s Frontier Radio Theater on Sunday mornings. It is my hope that other radio stations across the country might also be interested in broadcasting our show. Thanks to this partnership, we will broadcast the entire season on the radio during the DNC. I certainly hope to perform a repeat of the whole season during the DNC as well, but putting on a live show during the DNC on our own budget is a bit too risky at the moment.
Cabaret Milwaukee writes the Shepherd Express into scripts. Why do you do that, and what might the audience see in Ransom Is Relative?
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Several local Milwaukee businesses that have shown support for the show regularly have jingles and fun little skits that have become audience favorites in our program. As a newspaper, the Shepherd Express doesn’t fit neatly into that format. However, as we do news updates throughout our show, working a local paper into the segments offers some fun opportunities.
You’re likely to see a vintage-looking Shepherd Express used as a prop to announce arts and entertainment news, as well as some commentary on the role of news media in society. In our November show, for example, we wrote a bit about the Mexican Repatriation. In our bit, it was a fictitious Spanish-language newspaper named El Pastor—which translates to The Shepherd—that reported the news.
