Countless love affairs have been cut short by death, but when it happens to someone famous, the tragedy is bound to capture the public’s imagination. In his successful drama Shadowlands, William Nicholson details the doomed romance between author C.S. Lewis and poet Joy Davidman. Acacia Theatre, operating from the campus of Concordia University, presents its production of the play this week.

Despite offering a critique of what he called the “claptrap morality” of Victorian society, Wilkie Collins’ novels never failed to weave a thoroughly good yarn. The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Collins 1866 novel Armadale remains true to this spirit. It navigates its way around the novel’s convoluted plot and boldly lifts up the starched petticoats of English upper-crust to reveal sexual intrigue, suicide, deception, murder, medical malpractice and opium addiction teeming beneath the veneer of propriety—in short all the things which Collins longed to further illuminate—and presents them in the form of a highly entertaining and rather saucy play.

The UWM Department of Theatre closes its season with a production of Bertolt Brecht’s classic mid-century drama The Caucasian Chalk Circle. An ambitious project helmed by Raeleen McMillion, senior lecturer at UWM’s Theatre Department and Renaissance Theaterworks co-founder, this production of Brecht’s epic features a cast of over 50 actors in full costume inspired by the classical Chinese roots of the story.

When American composer William Finn was diagnosed with a brain tumor, his career was taking off. His musical Falsettos had met with success on Broadway. The tumor nearly killed him. However, when he returned from the hospital, he found that he could not sit down at the piano without writing a good song. The near-death experience had jarred a sense of life into him that carried through the keyboard.

The Chamber Theatre brings its usual finesse and careful adherence to the spirit of the text in their thoughtful new production of Talley’s Folly, Lanford Wilson’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning play and recipient of the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award .The play is the second in Wilson’s “Talley Trilogy,” all successfully produced. With such distinguished credentials, audiences may feel an uneasy sense of disappointment at the dialogue’s initial lack of focus, a requirement so important in a two-character play.

For its latest production Spiral Theatre has moved to its third location so far this season. And while the performance space at Bucketworks’ new location has all the emotional warmth of a warehouse or an aircraft hangar, it has much better acoustics than their old performance space in the old Mandel building. Spiral Theatre brings an endearing degree of warmth to the new space with it’s production of the 1994 Charles Busch comedy You Should Be So Lucky.

Kind of like going to the wedding of your second cousin once removed (or is it twice-removed?), Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding is good, dysfunctional family fun. It ran through April 20 at the Turner Hall Ball. The scenario goes something like this: You’re seated at a table with a bunch of people you don’t know but with whom you interact cordially, and before you know it the show begins. As wedding “guests,” the audience has a role to play, too.

Playwright Neil LaBute first came to the attention of national audiences with 1993’s In the Company of Men, a successful play about a pair of misogynists looking to ruin the life of an innocent girl. Less than 10 years later, he turned the tables by telling the story of a female art student who makes a living work-of-art out

Last week, Bay View’s Boulevard Theatre opened local playwright Chad M. Rossi’s comedy Eureka! Just a little further south, Alchemist Theatre and Insurgent Theatre open a pair of one-act dramas in a double feature that promises to be considerably darker than Eureka! Alchemist Theatre’s 31 is the story of a detective who finds himself consumed by the hunt for a serial murderer.

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire depicts the wanton dismantling of an elaborately woven ideal and the erection of a hard-boiled, pressing reality in its place. Blanche DuBois, a faded and delusional Southern belle, represents a dying gentility. Her voracious brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, represents the archetypal male—the obnoxious leader of a beer-swilling pack, the prize cock who woos, marries and impregnates Blanche’s sister, Stella. He secures his future through the fruit of his loins while ensuring that Blanche remains eternally incarcerated within her tragic illusions.