Post Script

There’s no doubt that the slightly scruffy Huck Finn (an astonishing Luke Brotherhood in the Clemens cast) could use some “civilizing,” as his elderly guardian Widow Douglas (a chameleon-like Kat Wodtke) pointedly suggests with demanding thumps of her cane and an accusing finger pointed at Huck’s chest. In First Stage’s soulful and enchanting production of “Big River,” she sings admonishments in “Looka Here Huck,” while many of her castmates join in the chorus and provide accompaniment on the fiddle, guitar, ukelele and washboard. Among other pronouncements, she asserts that Huck should go to school, eat all his vegetables, and start behaving like a responsible adult. Of course this is Huck’s cue to playfully disobey, running off to the banks of the Mississippi River to commence loafing on the shore and fishing under the warm sun.

According to historians, German composer Carl Orff was so pleased with his new composition “Carmina Burana,” a spectacle which combined Medieval poetry, a full orchestra, choirs, dance, and many theatrical elements, that he sent the following note to his publisher: “Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With ‘Carmina Burana,’ my collected works begin.”

After experiencing Skylight Music Theatre’s multi-media, multi-disciplinary performance of the symphony/concert/opera/dance piece with the unforgettable hook, it’s easy to see how an artist would regard this as a bold new chapter in his work. Often performed as an orchestral piece with a standard chorus, this version, running in the Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through March 31, is probably much closer to what Orff had in mind.

It’s such an attractive offer when, on a cold night in March, the energetic Emcee (Erin McConnell), with her pixie haircut and a bawdy twinkle in her eye, implores you to come in to the Kit Kat Klub and leave your troubles outside. But after a few playfully naughty chorus numbers in Cabaret, it becomes clear that having another drink of gin or doing another line of cocaine to forget about the increasingly dire world around you is a recipe for heartbreak, or worse.

For four decades Spring Green, Wisconsin, has been synonymous with American Players Theatre, the much-lauded classical company that draws more than 100,000 patrons a year to the sleepy rural town, all summer long. Now theater-goers have a reason to visit in the colder months as well. Two Crows Theatre Company is finishing up its inaugural season, right off the town’s main street in a building that, until recently, was home to the Village Tavern. Under the guidance of artistic director Robert Doyle and associate artist Brian Byrnes, the space is being reimagined and slowly transformed into The Jefferson, featuring a speakeasy style cocktail bar called Rosa Lee's Lounge in the front and a versatile black-box theater in the back, with a capacity for seating between 80 and 100 patrons.

Tibet Through the Red Box is a cultural exploration focusing on the spiritual connection between a bedridden boy in 1950s Prague and his filmmaker father, who is lost in Tibet after an avalanche killed most of his crew. On March 9, Children’s Theater of Madison kicked off a short run of this visually stunning production for young adults and teens, which runs through March 17 in Overture’s Playhouse.

Murder ballads -- story songs that tell of a gruesome killing and its aftermath, frequently involving former lovers -- have been popular for hundreds of years. A standard in American folk music, they combine the sensationalism of a crime of passion with a warning to the audience that getting mixed up with the wrong man or woman could lead to one’s downfall, or death.

It is refreshing to see a play open with really high stakes. “The Velocity of Autumn,” playing at In Tandem Theatre through March 17, does this in spades. Chris (Stephen Marzolf) a 40-something-ish, restless artist breaks in to his mother’s home by climbing her favorite tree up to a second floor window and flinging himself inside. But instead of welcoming her prodigal son home after a 20-year absence, she immediately orders him to leave or suffer the consequences: she’s prepared to blow up her entire Brooklyn brownstone using homemade Molotov cocktails, fueled with her late husband’s photograph developing fluid. And we can see that Alexandra, the determined, 79 year-old mom (a steel-spined Angela Iannone) means business; she holds a mason jar of accelerant in one hand and her father’s Zippo lighter in the other. She may be old, she may be a good candidate for an assisted living community, but she’s not leaving the building without a fight. Or so she threatens.

For decades audiences have been revisiting the pain of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, and the fraught return home by many of its veterans. From David Rabe’s three play trilogy, including “Streamers,” and “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” to the docudramas “A Piece of My Heart,” and “Tracers,” to the current touring favorite “Miss Saigon,” writers have been examining how the soldiers who fought in one of the country’s most horrific and unpopular wars have transitioned back to civilian life.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s current offering “Strange Snow,” by Stephan Metcalfe, is another entry in that category.

When I was a kid our family made an annual trip to The House on the Rock, Wisconsin’s own monument to weird and wonderful artifacts, architecture, and oddities. In the 1970s it had not yet transformed into the mega mall of collectibles it is today, including a life-size sculpture of a whale, a plethora of dolls on a three-story carousel, and a disturbing number of winged manequins. What it did have, were a lot of very strange music machines. Put in a few quarters and you could see an entire orchestra of instruments play classical pieces without a human musician in sight. Complicataed machinery bowed the strings, rang the gongs and crashed the symbols. Like ghostly concerts with rows and rows of horns, organ pipes, bells and whistles that operated themselves, they were mesmerizing.

I see a lot of plays. I read a lot of play and I read about a lot of plays. I know how challenging it is to find the great ones that will fit into your season and wow your audience. The following list is a group of new plays by women that I’ve seen, read, or read about, that more people across the country should be seeing and talking about. Please consider adding these to your reading lists — and then getting them onstage!