Just as a weekend of half a dozen live theatre openings fades into its second weekend, six more shows open in the next few days.
The early edge of the openings comes courtesy of Milwaukee Opera Theatre. Leonard Bernstein's musical adaptation of Cadndide--the classic work of satirical literature opens tonight. Directed by Jill Anna Ponasik and Catie O'Donnell, the production features a number of talents including Brian Myers, Colleen Brooks, Kerry Hart, Henry Parker Hammond and others.
Much like its title character, the production is doing quite a bit of traveling.
Tonight's performance takes place at UW-Parkside's Rita Tallent Picken Center on 900 Wood Road in Kenosha. The performance starts at 7:30 pm. For details on the rest of Candide's journey, visit Milwaukee Opera Theatre online.
In an entirely different UW school, Theatre Gigante stages its next show. Me, You Art and Trout is performance/spoken word artist Mark Anderson's autobiographical work that also manages to discuss you and the subject of trout. Seriously. Theatre Gigante continues to produce memorable little experiences in studio theatre environments that resonate throughout the rest of the season. The group opens its 25th anniversary season with the production, which runs for only one week before fading out into the firmament of memory.
Me, You Art and Trout runs Septembe 27th through 29th at UWM's Kenilworth Studio 508. For more information, http://www.theatregigante.org/tmp_1348601450671.
It's a great relief to see Theatrical Tendencies returning to the stage this weekend. The company which has so recently announced that it was closing down has re-established itself with a couple of shows on the season. [Title of Show] is a clever musical about a couple of guys writing a clever musical about a couple of guys writing a clever musical. The creative process becomes the subject of art in what promises to be a highly accessible evening's musical at Soulstice Theatre's Keith Tamsett Theatre. September 28th through COtober 13th. For more information, visit Theatrical Tendencies online.
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Also opening its season this week is the Next Act Theatre . . . with what might end up being the single most interesting show to open this month. Mike Lew's Microcrisis explores the substance of discord in a show that explores where the NEXT major global financial collapse is going to happen. It's a comedy . . . and from what I've read a very cleverly crafted one as well.
For more information on tickets and showtimes, visit Next Act online.
This looks really, really cool so you might want to get your tickets now. Go ahead, follow the link. (Trust me.) I'll be right here when you're finished . . .
okay now:
Edward Morgan directs a cast that includes Milwaukee veterans like John Kishline and David Cecsarini as well as those from the younger end of the local acting pool. Really excited to see Alexandra Bonesho make an appearance off the campus of Marquette University . . . She's one of the more striking acting talents to come out of that institution in the past few years. Later-on this season she will also be appearing in a show with Youngblood directed by Michael Cotey who also appears in Microcrisis. With those four actors alone, the cast here is really impressive. . . but it's interesting to note that Cotey isn't the only Youngblood Theatre co-founder who will be starring in a show that opens this week . . .
. . . because a respectably scruffy-looking Andrew Edwin Voss is also in a show that's opening within walking distance of the Next Act Theatre. . . one day after Microcrisis official opens. in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Broken and Entered, Voss plays Wally--a thief who falls in love with a wealthy African American woman from whom he has burgled. (She's plays by Uprooted Theatre co-founder Marti Gobel.) To backtrack . . . Wally and his brother Vern (played by Jonathan Wanwright) are adult brothers who have returned home to find that they need to burglarize nearby upscale houses just to make ends meet. Kind of an interesting premise for a drama . . . and really interesting that it happens to be a world premiere production by playwright Kurt McGinnis Brown . . . one of several world premieres that will have opened in Milwaukee at the end of theSeptember . . .
Broken and Entered runs through October 4th at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre. (Right next door to a host of musical puppets.) For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber online.
Also opening a world premiere production this weekend, Carte Blanche Studios presents an all-new stage adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Bill Jackson wrote and directed the show, which finds a home just south of Downtown in the month prior to Halloween. The cast includes Jimmy Dragolovich and Emily Craig among others with the final climactic scene hopefully being every bit as memorable as it was in the original text. That. of course. is the real challenge here: bringing the graphic visual nature of that story to a small and eery intimate stage. I'm really, really hoping this lives up to its source material. If it does, it will stand as one of the best productions of the season. And if not it would probably stand as something of a minor disappointment.
Carte Blanche's The Masque of the Red Death runs September 28th through October 27th at Carte Blanche's space on 1024 South 5th Street. For more info, visit Carte Blanche online.
