Post Script

Children’s Theater of Madison’s current production for the littlest audience members, How I Became a Pirate, is rated “arrrrr” for a really good introduction to live theater. Based on the award-winning book of the same name, written by Melinda Long and illustrated by David Shannon, it’s tells the story of a pretty average little boy, Jeremy Jacob, who is taken aboard a pirate ship for a few days as the crew, led by Captain Braid Beard, tries to find the perfect place to bury their treasure.

Season announcements are always fun for theater nerds, but some are undeniably more exciting than others. That said, the 2019-20 Johnson Financial Group/Broadway Across America line-up at Milwaukee’s Marcus Center next year is breathtaking.

Regarded as an eccentric literary recluse, there are few poets more mysterious or fascinating than Emily Dickinson. Virtually unknown in her lifetime — she saw only ten of her poems published — her voice is now standard study in high school English classes and she is often grouped with Emerson and Whitman as unique and important 19th century American writers. So it’s not surprising that William Luce’s one woman show about Dickinson’s private life, “The Belle of Amherst” was such as success when it debuted in 1976. Whole generations had grown up wondering what it would be like to be a guest for afternoon tea in the Dickinson family home in a small town in Massachusetts.

When you walk in to Next Act’s theater to see Dominique Morisseau’s moving ensemble piece “Blood at the Root,” the first thing you see is the tree. Enormous and gnarled, devoid of leaves, each of its branches comes to a sharp, menacing point. Created by scenic designer Jason Fassl, the trunk’s significant girth denotes the tree’s age. Its sprawling roots, which bulge above the earth like many grasping hands, are firmly entrenched in the ground. Where there should be bark, there is rope, wrapped tightly around every limb in criss-cross patterns. Stark and foreboding, the tree is seemingly both restrained and strengthened by the layers of cord woven around it. There is a sense that it has existed for centuries and will outlive all the audience members and the teenagers that gather around it over the course of the 90-minute choreopoem.

Maybe you’ve never heard of the “King of the Jukebox” Louis Jordan. But you’ve surely spent some time drinking a little too much, nursing heartbreak after a fight with the one you love, finding refuge in songs on the radio that seem to express everything you feel in that moment, but are too wrecked to say yourself. This is the premise of Skylight Music Theater’s current production, “Five Guys Named Moe,” a celebration of Jordon’s greatest hits of swing jazz, R&B, boogie-woogie, rockabilly, blues and early rock ‘n roll, onstage in the Cabot Theatre through February 10.

Maybe the May-December romance that develops between the two characters in Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg isn’t as odd as it seems at first. In Forward Theater’s current production, running through February 3 in Overture’s Playhouse Theater, the entire world of the play unfolds in a rush of conversations between Alex, a 70-something, taciturn and weathered Jim Pickering and Georgie, a 40-something, mop-topped, free spirited Colleen Madden. On the surface his silent reserve and her energetic entropy feel naturally incongruent. But maybe they have things in common that Georgie sees right away, but Alex has to slowly warm to. For instance. . .

Presenting opera in new, vibrant and often surprising ways is Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s calling card and their exuberant aesthetic is on full display in their current production of “Zie Magic Flute,” at the Tripoli Shrine Center through January 27th. An expanded remount from two seasons ago, MOT is once again collaborating with members of the Quasimondo Physical Theater troupe and Cadance Collective, a small group of performers that combine music making and modern dance. The two-hour, new-and-improved production includes more songs and a few additional characters from Mozart’s classic opera, which has been seriously augmented with what MOT Artistic Director Jill Anna Ponasik calls “deliberate silliness.”

These days architectural firms that specialize in state-of-the-art scientific labs don’t put tiny, dark offices in the basements of buildings. They consciously create collaboration spaces throughout the structure — gathering spots where researchers are likely to bump into each other and interact informally.

And while these buildings are undoubtedly more comfortable to work in than Rosalind Franklin’s damp, subterranean office at King’s College, as described in the play “Photograph 51,” currently onstage at Renaissance Theaterworks, today’s labs aren’t just designed to be more hospitable for scientists. By encouraging collaboration among researchers, these work spaces actually speed up the pace of discovery. It turns out more great minds working on a problem are much better — and faster — than one.

“That’s not right.”

This is the refrain that the main character returns to again and again in First Stage’s exceptional production of the musical “Matilda.” The impossibly precocious five year-old English girl, who lives in the kind of dystopian world that author Roald Dahl is famous for, knows injustice when she sees it. But instead of throwing a tantrum, she calls out the crimes around her calmly and confidently, always more concerned about the wrongs done to others than any of the tragically unfair circumstances that she, herself, has to endure: Parents who didn’t want her to begin with and barely tolerate her presence, let alone her intellect. A father who is so disappointed in her gender that he insists on calling her “boy.” A mother who berates her for reading books instead of watching the “telly,” and advocates improving her appearance instead of her mind. A sadistic school headmistress who calls her a “maggot” and tries to crush her, physically and emotionally, along with the rest of the students — and teachers — at Matilda’s new school.

I saw dozens of great theater productions in Milwaukee, Madison and Spring Green during 2018. Of course, as I reflect on the year there are a few performers and productions that really stand out. Here is my idiosyncratic list of “bests.” Feel free to add to this list with your own experiences throughout the year.