Post Script

William Shakespeare’s genius has fascinated and confounded scholars for centuries. How could one man – with little formal education – write so many of the Western canon’s greatest plays? How could the son of a glove maker invent hundreds of new words and write 154 sonnets that have made lovers swoon for generations? If you believe playwright Bill Cain, the Bard of Avon may have had some help with one of his later works. 

In his new play God’s Spies, Cain speculates that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was locked in a London boardinghouse with a prostitute and a Scottish lawyer. They are quarantined together during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1603. Working out elements of the story with his unlikely collaborators, Shakespeare is inspired and challenged by the people he shares a room with, who each offer the Bard new insights into the human condition. This creative take on the Lear origin story is receiving its world premiere at Next Act Theatre through May 21. Presented as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, it is also the final directing project for David Cecsarini as Next Act’s Artistic Director. 

Sam D. White’s new play, Hush the Waves, focuses on the plight of two unwed mothers who are weighing their choices – or despairing at their lack of choices – generations apart. The semi-autobiographical story, drawn from experiences in White’s own family, examines the pain, confusion, shame, and isolation that young women endured when bearing children out of wedlock in two distinct eras in the 20th century – 1948 and 1978. 

Although Mary (Casey Elizabeth Gilbert), the young mother-to-be we meet in the ’40s has limited options legally and within her own family, the other expecting teen Elizabeth (Mak Strohmeyer) is pondering motherhood after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade made abortion legal and gave women more power to control their own bodies. As is revealed in conversations between the teen and her mother (Carrie Sweet), in the ’70s open adoptions were also an option and single motherhood did not carry the social stigma that it did previously. This gives Elizabeth more options, but they each come with an emotional cost. 

The story of Peter Pan – the boy who never grew up – has enchanted generations, ever since it was penned by J.M. Barrie in 1904. In the intervening years, audiences have enjoyed plays, novels, silent movies, cartoons, Broadway shows, and Hollywood blockbusters that reimagine Peter and the Darling children flying to Neverland, the Lost Boys battling the evil Captain Hook, and Peter saving Tinkerbell, with the help of children clapping. Now, as the last production of the 2022-2023 season, Children’s Theater of Madison is bringing Peter’s antics to life in the musical Peter Pan, performed in the Capitol Theatre in Overture Center through April 30. The final directing project of outgoing artistic director Roseann Sheridan, the 1954 show is perfectly framed in the historic venue; a simple story with a little bit of magic and a (mostly) happy ending.

This spring Milwaukee theaters have been looking inward to find comedy, drama, and extreme dysfunction. In March, Skylight Music Theatre presented Noises Off – a meta-intense examination of the perils of regional touring productions, focusing on a group of overly dramatic actors rehearsing and performing a play. Now the Constructivists have opened I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, by Halley Feiffer. It’s a meta-cubed two-hander focusing on a young actor (Rebekah Farr) and her famous playwright father (James Pickering) who are waiting anxiously for a review to be published of her performance in The Seagull, a Chekhov play about an author and his leading lady receiving bad reviews after performing a new play. 

And for one more layer of meta-ness, the semi-autobiographical piece I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard was written by an actress and playwright who happens to have a famous playwright for a father. 

And for a final, exhausting layer of meta-tasticness, there were several critics on hand in the audience on opening night, laughing uncomfortably during the first scene, where the characters curse the small minds, broken ambitions, and miserable, sick, petty lives of theater critics, whose opinions, they assert, are generally worthless. 

There is an enchanting, captivating quality to the light in the work of 17th century Italian painter Artemisia Gentilieschi, who is known for her masterful use of highlights and shadow. The rich, golden light in Artemisia’s paintings embraces the subject matter – frequently women from biblical stories and mythology – caressing the naturalistic, rounded curves of their bodies, and reveling in the textures of luxurious folds of fabrics. That same light draws audiences into Forward Theater’s visually stunning world premiere production of Artemisia, performed in the Playhouse at Overture Center through April 30. The result of a compelling vision by Forward Artistic Director Jennifer Uphoff Gray, the production paints grand, gorgeous pictures of a woman who centered fully realized women in paintings for the first time.

Commissioned by Forward as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin festival, the new play by nationally known playwright Lauren Gunderson explores the life of one of the few successful women painters of the Renaissance. Like Gunderson’s other works highlighting the accomplishments of forgotten women from history, (The Revolutionists, Silent Sky, Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends her Life Tonight, Ada and the Engine, The Half-Life of Marie Curie) Artemisia focuses on the grit and perseverance necessary for a woman to succeed in a male-dominated profession, in an era when being intelligent, innovative, and naturally gifted were not enough. 

When the subject of climate change comes up these days, it feels overwhelming. The problem is too big. Our individual actions towards environmental conservation feel so small. The dire consequences of global warming have been predicted for decades, but we have ignored them. Now we have procrastinated so long on addressing the problem, it may be too late. If it’s unchecked, over the next century many, many species will die. The icebergs will continue to melt. The weather will become even more erratic and violent. Islands will be swallowed up by rising oceans. People will be forced from their homes. We could be approaching the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history.  

It’s no wonder that the main character in Renaissance Theaterworks’ world premiere production of Tidy is feeling anxious. Directed by Elizabeth Margolius, Kristin Idaszak’s poetic, funny, thought-provoking play about climate change, mass consumption, black holes, Marie Kondo, Philip Marlowe detective novels, gimlets, library books, government conspiracy theories, the last butterfly, secret messages, and how we compensate for a lack of love in our lives will run at the Theater at 255 South Water Street through April 16

The musical Chicago is back at Overture Center through March 26 as part of the Broadway Series, and for a show that debuted in 1975, it’s held up remarkably well. With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, the musical – set in the 1920s about two sensational women accused of terrible crimes of passion – contains several blockbuster songs that are worth the price of admission to see performed live. The characters are still intriguing, the choreography is still stunning, and public fascination with lascivious crimes is still very relevant. An indictment of sensational journalism that makes killers into rockstars and jury trials into circuses, Chicago still has enough “razzle dazzle” to keep us spellbound, more than fifty years after its debut and a century after the murder cases that inspired the show. 

Need some more reasons to grab your tickets for the remaining shows this weekend? Here are some fun facts about the musical tale of murder, mayhem, adultery, and greed that audiences keep coming back for.

From the Cabot stage in the Broadway Theatre Center, where Skylight Music Theatre’s current production of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off runs through April 2, let me invite you to London, where a very special ceremony is taking place . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Royal Albert Hall for the 1982 Olivier Awards, celebrating this season’s best live theater performances on stages all over England. Returning to the ceremony already in progress, I think it’s safe to say that Otstar Productions Ltd.’s Nothing On has stunned the audience here, sweeping nearly every awards category. The wacky British sex farce by Robin Housemonger has been keeping audiences in stitches, touring extensively throughout the UK before taking up residence at the Barbican for an extended, sold-out run. 

As the musicians for the Florentine Opera’s Così Fan Tutte: Remix took their seats onstage in Vogel Hall this weekend, there were some notable differences between this group and the typical orchestral accompaniment to Mozart’s work. Instead of traditional concert blacks, many of the players wore acid washed jeans and leather jackets. And after the clarinet, bass, and trumpet players were seated, a young musician strode in with his electric guitar. This would obviously be out of place for the work when it was first performed in Austria in 1790, but it fit right in with the production’s new setting – in the student union of a small, American, liberal arts college in the 1980s. Yes, you read that right. This mash-up is Mozart meets the Reagan era, with all its big hair, shoulder pads, rugby shirts, and bleach-splattered denim. 

So, why would the Florentine Opera commission a new version of a canonical work that is set two centuries after it was written, sung in English instead of Italian, and only 75-minutes long, instead of the traditional three-and-a-half hours? 

When we meet Hedwig, she is caught in the in-between again. Between shows. Between genders. Between countries and ideologies. Between relationships. And it’s wearing on her. 

Born as “Hansel” to an absent American GI father and a cold German mother, Hedwig grows up in partitioned East Berlin — “a slip of a girly boy” chafing at his communist surroundings and boxed in on every side. When his American lover Luther proposes marriage, offering him a chance to escape over the wall to begin a new life in the U.S., there’s just “one small piece of himself he must leave behind.” But a botched sex-change operation leaves Hedwig mutilated, anatomically neither a man nor a woman. And a year after their marriage, Luther leaves too.