I’ve seen over 850 shows as a theater critic in the past dozen years. In all that time I’ve never once gone to the Northern Lights Theater in Potawatomi Hotel & Casino. It’s an interesting venue. From the nearest bus stop I could find, it’s a long walk-in to the space across alien terrain. There is the smell of industry. There are slowly blinking, red lights on smoke stacks. The highway is far overhead. There’s just so much open space. Off in the distance is the glowing, red Potawatomi logo. Above it is the video projection of a perpetual fire.
The lobby of the hotel feels very sleek and modern. There’s a car being displayed between the lobby and the casino. I’ve never been to the casino either. With the pleasant environmental sounds and the pleasantly dizzying maze of video screens it’s kind of like nirvana for someone who grew-up in a video arcade in the 1980s. Between the warm embrace of video screens and the soothing environmental sounds I got turned around more than once actually finding the Northern Lights Theater.
The Northern Lights itself has a pleasantly organic feel about it. The seating wraps around the room in a way that reminds me of the interior of an eye. With a raked seating and a low balcony, the audience is the retina at the back of the eye processing what seen through the lens of the stage. You get this with any a lot of theater spaces, but the warm curves of the Northern Lights amplify the organic feel of the space.
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It’s a lot of fun to see this show. The cast of Shear Madness may be mostly Equity, but this is no touring group of regional actors. Granted, there’s one guy who has been in productions of the murder mystery comedy elsewhere, but most of those in the cast are people who have been appearing in local shows for years. Of course, John McGivern is charming as the guy who runs a hair salon in Milwaukee. I love Mary MacDonald Kerr as a stylist working in his salon. It is light comedy, yes, but there’s kind of a rich depth to the details behind the plot to get the audience interested in motivations and minutia when it’s their turn to help out in the investigation. Kerr’s performance cleverly synthesizes the details into kind of a complex portrayal that doesn’t interfere with the more basic, superficial end of the comedy. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be as much for the talented Jenny Wanasek as a patron of the salon. Milwaukee theater icon Norman Moses fares a little better as another patron who has come for an appointment. I could never quite place it before, but his performance here really reminds me of Stan Freberg. There’s something about the quality of Moses’ voice and his sense of comic delivery that feel very Frebergian. I think that’s a good thing it’s a vintage of stage presence that fits the script quite well.
Honestly it feels weird to me that I like the script as much as I do. The play has been running in various productions on various stages for well over thirty years. It’s light comedy with a murder mystery gimmick. Some of the humor is quite dated. Even some of the updated humor is quite dated. (A reference to the Spice Girls, for instance, might have been quite current right around the show’s 20th anniversary, but that was over ten years ago.) Shear Madness is a sitcom with sitcom-level humor. So why do I like the script? I like the way it’s presented here. The core of the ensemble have all been in Milwaukee theater for quite some time. There’s a real “work family” feel to the ensemble. Opening night McGivern went just far enough over-the-top in one seen to cause a break of character to ripple through the ensemble. the cast is really having fun here and I think it allows the script to be a lot better than it actually is.
Shear Madness runs through Nov. 15 at The Northern Lights Theater at Potawatomi Hotel & Casino. For ticket reservations, call 414-847-7922. A concise review of the show run in the Shepherd Express next week.
