A play featuring little more than two characters in a single room could easily lose an audience’s attention, even if the two characters are based on Jason and Medea and the room is in Purgatory. Despite the inherent...

The last full month of winter opens with a pair of local productions that explore the strange convolutions of human passion and the lengths to which people will go to pursue happiness. On Feb. 5, Waukesha Civic Theatre opens its production of Beth Henley’s 1980 dramatic comedy, Crimes of the Heart. It’s the story of...

In the years since it opened, the intimate stage of the Off-Broadway Theatre has served as countless locations. Now through the end of February, it transforms into a sort of afterlife in Next Act Theatre’s production of Ariel Dorfman’s Purgatorio. It’s a place the playwright envisions as “A white room. Austere. No decorations.” Staying true to the script...

Milwaukee’s top-notch children’s theater, First Stage, recently opened a world premiere production of The Thief Lord. The show, based on the best-selling novel by Cornelia Funke, continues through Feb. 14. The book is ripe for a stage version, as it contains magic, mystery, adventure...

Ah, midlife: There’s the forgetting of the car keys, repeating one’s self, trips to the doctor, repeating one’s self, adult children back living at home, repeating one’s self… And then there’s Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical, which pokes fun at the onset of middle age and all its accompanying challenges. Within an hour and 50 minutes of musical vignettes, Sunset Playhouse covers all the recognizable signs...

Cornelia Funke’s novel The Thief Lord is hardly the type of book one would expect to be adapted for children’s theater. Indeed, the story of two brothers who run away to Venice, Italy, and join a band of juvenile thieves breaks from the popular impression of children’s theater as the stuff of wholesome, harmless fairy tales...

On a Friday night in the deep of winter, the residents of the remote, fictional town in Almost, Maine let their love stories unfold, revealing how feelings of affection and attachment can swing from easy and uncomplicated to painful and confounding, and how wildly unpredictable the consequences of their actions can be...

As impressive as big stages are, the emotion of live theater thrives on a smaller stage. For that reason, smaller theater companies would better serve a production like Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter. After all, a script featuring sex, nudity and the emotional turbulence of human intimacy would be tricky for a big theater company for a variety of reasons...

Small, intimate musical theater at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stackner Cabaret can be fun, but the cabaret format is also ideal for one-person biographical retrospectives. The Stackner Cabaret opens 2010 with a tribute to legendary singer and actress Pearl Bailey. Washington, D.C.-based singer Roz White plays Bailey in a show she created and co-wrote with Thomas...

Playwright Steven Dietz sets one of his newest works, Yankee Tavern, in a dilapidated New York bar five years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. When his father died of a questionable suicide, a young international studies grad student named Adam (Brian Vaughn) inherited the titular tavern, and now serves a clientele that seems...