With theatre being pretty active in Milwaukee year-round, there are people I know in the business who don’t even really pay attention to the concept of a theatre season. In an attempt to frame a cohesive year around the theatre season, I arbitrarily think of the beginning of a theatre “year” as being August, when the summer season wraps-up and the earliest shows of the coming fall/winter/spring season start-up. The year ends at the end of the following July, when much of the summer season is over. This past week, the Boulevard Theatre stretched this concept of a year by opening its first show for 2009/2010 in July, but I’m still sticking to a August-July theatre year . . . and what with it being the first of August, I thought I’d post my take on the 2008 – 2009 Year In Review . . .
AUGUST ‘08
The year started with the last ever Milwaukee Sketch and Improv Festival. (From this year forward, the annual multi-day program has changed its name to Milwaukee Comedy Festival.) Each year, the festival is a bit bigger than the last and the scope of this past year's festival was phenomenal, featuring a great deal of variety for such a short series of days. The three days of comedy were intermingled with the first big opening of the year, Milwaukee Chamber’s Well. Angela Iannone has spent the better part of the year directly addressing audiences in various narrative appearances, but this one was by far the most fun. Iannone played a stage artist who was attempting to stage her relationship with her mother (played by Ruth Schudson.) Very fun stuff, but the funnest part of August by far was the Milwaukee premiere of Neil Haven’s Stuck
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The charming comedy of an agoraphobic elevator operator finding true love was one of last year’s more memorable shows. In Tandem Theatre will be staging the play next February with an entirely new cast. Hopefully, the cast is every bit as good as Haven’s original production--a production that was staged in the exact same space . . .
SEPTEMBER ‘08
Last September opened with an exceedingly classy Milwaukee Rep cabaret show featuring Jimi Ray Malary’s charming personality in Isn’t It Romantic? The Rep’s most impressive production this season by far was staged last September downstairs from the cabaret.
In I Am My Own Wife, Michael Gotch delivered an incredible one-man performance as true-life World War Two era German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf . . . and about 29 other roles. Gotch wove a fascinating path through a fascinating story, easily holding an audience’s attention from beginning to end. This is proof of what is capable when the right actor paired with the right production.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention Next Act's production of Lombardi--The Only Thing. David Cecsarini played the title character in a very well-produced bio of the late Packers coach. By far, Next Act had the most consistently entertaining theatre season this year. Every show they did this year was excellent.
OCTOBER ‘08
October opened with In Tandem Theatre’s frenetically funny production of All The Great Books (Abridged) featuring Doug Jarecki, Kevin Rich and R. Chris Reeder.
The month also featured a compelling Soulstice Theatre production of Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, and a Rep show on the main stage with an extremely memorable set (and not much else worth speaking of, actually. The cast was really good, but the script was abysmal.)
The most satisfying show I saw last October was with Theatre Gigante.
As a historical (and historically long) presidential election season reached its close, Theatre Gigante staged a hugely entertaining look at the modern Americn presidential election with The Perfect Candidate. An impressive ensemble distilled the many ends of a thoroughly sophisticated and refreshing take on an election season that was becoming very, very long.
And then, the first of the two big offstage Milwaukee theatre stories hit: On October 28th, it was announced that Milwaukee Shakespeare had to shut down due to lack of available funding. It may not have been as big in national news as the Skylight thing, but this was by far the biggest story in Milwaukee theatre this season. I still don’t think I’ve had enough time away from it to say anything more on the subject . . .
NOVEMBER ‘08
November was a strange, strange month for theatre. What opened in the intimate space of a now closed Brady Street Phamracy/Astor Theatre with RSVP’s enjoyable production of Show People ended in the immensity of the Pabst Theatre as the Rep opened yet another production of A Christmas Carol. Somewhere in there, I remember a provocative memoir by Jonathan Gillard Daly, Jonathan West sharing the stage with a fake pigeon, and the glowing face of Mike Jacobs projected on a high school auditorium ceiling while delivering news regarding the end of the world.
The best show of the month by far was Next Act’s production of the Jeffrey Hatcher show Murderers. Ruth Schudson, Norman Moses and Linda Stephens did a series of cleverly written monologues. The combination of a staggeringly good script and a really solid cast made this one of the best plays of the season.
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DECEMBER ‘08
December is usually quite heavily dominated by Christmas and holiday shows, but December ’08 was positively over-saturated. Yes, the Rep opened an entertaining non-holiday one-woman show with Deborah Staples and Boulevard Theatre opened a fun epistolary play the day after the 25th, but those two programs were crowded-out by the opening of no less than seven holiday shows . . . many of them local productions and many of them returning this coming December, including Patrick Schmitz’s hit Rankin and Bass parody Rudolph The Pissed-Off Reindeer and Carte Blanche’s Who Killed Santa? . . . a puppet show with a variable ending. And a particularly memorable performance by Sophia Dhaliwal as an alcoholic Rudolph.
Local sketch comedy group The Show had to be the most evenly-balanced evening of holiday comedy this past December. Featuring a funny, well-composed series of sketches, many of which had been done before elsewhere, but this was a very classy evening of comedy.
JANUARY ‘09
Always kind of a slow month for local theatre, January ’09 featured fewer than half a dozen openings in the area, including Renaissance Theaterworks’ premiere of a new Marie Kohler play The Dig, starring a brilliantly sedate Brian Mani as a burnt-out archaeologist thrown back into the memories he’d rather not have.
Also making a big impression last Janury was the Rep’s staging of Alice Childress’ Trouble In Mind . . . a story of conflict between cultures in the days before the civil rights movement.
