Post Script

American Players Theatre is reveling in silliness this season, first with its fresh, light take on the slightest of Shakespeare's comedies — The Merry Wives of Windsor — and now with The Liar, a newly updated version of a 400-year-old French comedy that looks like a technicolor candy store, sounds like a Dr. Seuss book, and plays like a raucous delight. The relatively small cast of The Liar is packed with the next generation of APT all-stars, who are on point and on fire, racing from one fantastic misunderstanding to the next at breakneck speed. Directed with panache by Keira Fromm, the production runs through Sept. 29 at the Hill Theatre. 

For more than 20 years, Madison Opera has been performing an astounding feat. In addition to presenting a season of fully staged operas at Overture Center, the company also produces Opera in the Park, a free outdoor summer concert for upwards of 10,000 people. For the spectators it is a fantastic opportunity to picnic on the grass under the stars and enjoy being serenaded by rising stars from the opera world, accompanied by a full orchestra. For the staff at the Madison Opera it is a herculean task. 

“I age a year during that week, due to all the stress,” says Kathryn Smith, general director of Madison Opera. “But when it works and we’ve made that many people happy, everyone believes it’s worthwhile. And it’s part of our reason for being — we’re here to entertain our community.” 

Just before the biggest boxing match of Jay “The Sport” Jackson’s life, his manager Max spells out the stakes. “You’re going to go in there. You’re going to knock him out in three. Your name’s gonna get written in history, and not in Black history Jay, not in white history either Jay. In something better. In sports history.” That is the dream of the main character in Marco Ramirez’s play The Royale — to transcend race and earn the title of world champion heavyweight boxer, not just the best Black athlete to step into the ring. 

Under the deft direction of Tyrone Phillips, a taut, moving, emotion- and action-packed production of The Royale opened on June 24 in the indoor Touchstone at American Players Theatre will run through September 27. But this stunning piece is about much more than boxing. The poetic, layered play based on real events explores the personal cost of fighting against systemic racism and the reality of race-related violence in turn-of-the-20th century America. 

In the pre-show speech for Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, the rotund rogue Falstaff (David Daniel) tells the audience in American Players Theatre’s outdoor Hill Theatre to silence their cell phones and meet him after the show (with cash in hand) if they want to take any photos. Then he officially introduces the play as The Adventures of Falstaff. Such is the bravado and ego of one of classical theater’s most notable larger-than-life characters — a man of great appetites, bombast and self-serving schemes. Falstaff is just one of the captivating characters we meet in this delightful, season-opening production directed by Terri McMahon, which runs through Oct. 8. 

Removed from any literal time and place, this production’s Windsor is an exuberantly colored, fantastical world, watched over by the statue of a bright pink stag. The driving beats of contemporary music introduce hijinks in nearly every scene, thanks to energetic sound design and compositions by Sartje Pickett. Those riffs frequently accompany Brian Cowing’s playful choreography — including an opening dance taught by the cheekily-named teacher “Artura Murray.” Whimsical scenic design by Scott Penner captures a modern, irreverent-hipster vibe, juxtaposing bold navy classical shapes with a metallic gold column and an enormous pink boombox that doubles as a bar. And Susan Tsu’s costumes run the maximalist gamut from voluminous, corseted dresses in bright floral satin and brocade frippery, to layers of quirky street fashion, accessorized with top hats. In this dimension of extremes, love and loyalty are tested, petty differences are forgiven, buffoonery is exposed, and real treachery doesn’t stand a chance. 

Instead of telling the story of the 1899 newsboys strike this summer, Capital City Theatre will be celebrating the golden age of musical theater and the career of Kate Baldwin — a Broadway leading lady with Wisconsin roots. The concert will be performed one night only, on June 24 in the Capitol Theater at Overture Center. 

“When we had to cancel Newsies, we knew that we wanted to put something in its place that was artistically unique and could utilize our amazing orchestra,” Capital City artistic director Andrew Abrams says. “I immediately thought of Kate. I’m a huge fan of all that she does. I even told my voice students in New York City to go see her in Big Fish as a master class on how to sing effortlessly.” 

Baldwin was equally excited to get a call from a theater in her former home state. “It’s a thrill to be able to come back to Wisconsin to perform,” she tells Isthmus in a recent phone interview. “And I have lots of friends and family coming to see the show.” 

A friend of mine asked me recently what I look for in a great evening of theater. I waxed poetic in my response, insisting that “I want to be wowed. To be astonished. To be emotionally moved, surprised, and dazzled by stagecraft. I want to be in awe of performances and be reminded why I believe that theater is the single greatest form of communication on the planet.” I finished this lofty statement by admitting that it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, the waiting is totally worth it.

I did not expect the first national tour of The SpongeBob Musical to fit into the “knock my socks off and remind me of all the reasons I love theater” category. But it does.

There is nothing like enjoying a play, musical or concert outdoors on a warm Wisconsin summer night. If you’re lucky, the moon and stars will come out on cue, and you’ll be joined in the audience by lightning bugs and a chorus of crickets. The crowd’s applause will be augmented by the sound of rustling leaves in nearby trees and whippoorwills calling, while the faint smell of citronella candles and campfires wafts through the air. While your first thought might be of American Players Theatre, there are a surprising number of other outdoor stages to consider, too.

It turns out, even superheroes get the blues. That is what happened to Lourds Lane, the musical child prodigy-turned rock star who found that one day she couldn’t get out of bed, due to a series of debilitating personal losses. Unsurprisingly, the accomplished pianist and violinist rediscovered her power through music. She was inspired to get up and try again after listening to a song in her playlist that touched her. The twist is, the encouraging tune was a song that she, herself, had written. 

Discovering the ability to not only heal people through music, but to heal herself through her own creative pursuits, Lane was motivated to explore a whole new realm of composition and performance – musical theater. Her newfound mantra, “rise up and blast through,” basically sums up the tagline, origin story, theme, and the bulk of the plot of SuperYou, Lane’s power-ballad stuffed take on confidence and positivity, featuring a cast of social misfits, dysfunctional family members, and comic book heroines. 

In a college playwriting class, my instructor blithely told us that if we ever wrote a play with more than five characters and two sets, it would never make it to Broadway. Not only was this stunningly dumb advice (and easily disproved), it runs counter to the basic reason we love theater – because it starts as a blank page and a blank stage and transforms into a space where literally anything can happen. A celebration of the exuberance and absurdity of imagination, theater – especially opera – is a medium where magic is made. This is the truism that composers and librettists have known from the beginning; if you can dream it, dramatize it, and come up with a score to put under it, no story is too outlandish. 

Of course, some scenarios are more challenging to stage than others. . . and it’s those infrequently attempted fantasias that Milwaukee Opera Theatre has chosen to highlight in an evening of Impossible Operas. Running through May 28 in the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center, the production is a collaboration with Quasimondo, a company that specializes in creative movement and devised pieces. It also features an enormous catalog of handmade shadow puppets, designed and manipulated by Anja Notanja Sieger.

Moments before Sam Mueller’s play Laced begins, the audience knows that something terrible has happened. This piece about identity, community, safety, and healing for LGBTQ+ individuals takes place in the unsettling period just after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in June 2016, and just before the presidential election in November of that year. In Stage Q’s smart staging of the play, when spectators enter the Evjue Stage space at the Bartell Theatre and find their way to their seats, they walk across the set — a gay bar in Florida called Maggie’s Place. As they do, audiences are plunged into a crime scene. Chairs at the bar are overturned. Trash is strewn everywhere. And hate speech graffiti has been scrawled in red and black across tables and on woodwork. As a result, the audiences are immediately disoriented, similar to the three characters in Laced, as they enter and silently survey the damage to their workplace.