The third annual Play in a Day hit the Tenth Street Theatre this past weekend. A joint project between DIY theater groups Insurgent Theatre and Alamo Basement, Play in a Day comes from the rather absurd notion of making an entire play in 24 hours complete with sets and costuming. The hope here is to blur the line between performance and process. To a certain extent the final show is merely a rehearsal for a more balanced show that will never be completed. Ideally, things feel rough and incomplete.

In 1952, scriptwriter George Axelrod scored a major success with The Seven Year Itch, a Broadway comedy about a married man whose fantasy life gets a little out of control when he meets a beautiful young woman. Decades later, Jeremy Desmon updated the story in a compelling exploration of extramarital fantasy with The Girl in the Frame.

Obesity and self-image are very serious issues in this country that rarely get directly addressed in contemporary drama. While Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig does very little to rectify this, these issues come to the center of a story so rarely that it ends up being very provocative. Renaissance Theaterworks ends its current season with the romantic drama, now through May 18.

It’s that “perfect period” in the mid-20th Century circa 1959: Eisenhower was president, Ed Sullivan was introducing a nice young man by the name of Elvis Presley to millions of viewers glued to the new medium of television, and kids, for the most part, still listened to their superiors—parents included (the ’60s are just around the corner). Perfect timing for 12-year-old Rudy Pazinski to question his catechism teachings—and life in general—at the hands, literally, of the militaristic Sister Clarissa.

Revivals of the King Arthur legend can usually be rated in terms of historical accuracy or the imagination with which they push the legend further into fantasy. Broadway Across America’s Spamalot, which ended its brief stint at the Marcus Center on May 4, gleefully defies either category. In fact, its main purpose is to offer a musical take on another version of the King Arthur story: the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Although it departs from the film at times, especially in its upbeat finale . . .

William Finn’s New Brain is an interesting adventure into the contemporary American musical. It’s a somewhat feverish collection of songs loosely centered around a thinly veiled autobiographical plot about a composer who is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Windfall Theatre closes its season with a production of the musical now through May 17.

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.