http://www.expressmilwaukee.com/blogs-1-1-1-10.html There's an old hospital space on the east side. My wife was bon there. The building has recently been purchased by UWM. I’ve been to the medical complex there to visit friends on a number of different occasions for a number of different reasons. And now Youngblood Theatre is using the building’s cafeteria for a staging of a play set in a hospital. Sort of. Weird. Will Eno’s Flu Season is one of those plays. A man and a wo]]> 99% of life is the fine print—all those little details. (This past evening, I was waiting fro my wife to get back from acupuncture and my baby daughter had scraped her chin--she caused herself real pain for one of the first times ever. She cried so much and why is it that the little plush wee ninja is so much better at making her happy than I am? And precisely how am I going to tackle things tomorrow? And what about this script that I sen]]>     Back in 1991, John Kishline wrote a piece for the late Theatre X that explores thecost of success. Now operating with fellow theatre X alum Deborah Clifton and the semi-ubiquitous  Ed Morgan under the guise of the new Theatre MXT, Kishline brought Success to India in a special project with the Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Festival & U.S. State Department. The updated production of the play comes to Next Act Theatre’s new ]]> As a side project entirely his own, Wauekesha Civic Theatre Managing Artistic Director John Cramer is looking to stage a production of the classic musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Cramer’s Alley Cat Enterprises is trying to raise funds for the production via Kickstarter. The production can be staged if $10,000 is pledged by March 4th. Cramer states that production budget breaks down like this: 1/3 royalties, 1/3 venue costs ]]> The Artistic Director of the long-lived Boulevard Theatre is offering a couple of acting classes starting this weekend. The classes are being offered the UWM’s School of Continuing Education. Basics of Acting is a look into the basic elements that compose an acting performance. Actors who have worked with Bucher in actual productions have commented on how insightful Mark Bucher is and . . . having seen him perform on a couple of different]]> A live full-cast stage feature consists of a great number of smaller moments all delicately interconnected. When it goes wrong, there are any number of reasons why it did. When it doesn’t there are just as many reasons why it worked. Occasionally there is a genuine moment that hits that reaffirms the entire reason for going tot the theatre in the first place. Such a moment happened “opening night” Friday at the Milwaukee Rep&r]]> Bookstores. Remember them? Okay, so they aren'™t exactly extinct yet, but there certainly are one heck of a lot less of them now than there used to be . . . at least of the brick and mortar kind, anyway. And while like . . . 90% of my reading is in RTF format on an ancient, little Palm Tungsten, I do remember enjoying many, many hours at bookstores--”the smaller the better. One such bookstore was the Harry W. Schwartz bookstore on Downer, whi]]> My first reaction was…stage fighting lessons in a bar: what could possibly go wrong there? Seriously, though . . . stage fighting is something that requires complete precision and sobriety to make it come across effectively. But it also requires just a little bit more than that . . .  I’d noticed over the years that professional equity actors have never managed to give the full-out stage fighting performances I’d seen i]]> I do sincerely hope that I am not the last person to have found out that there'™s sort of a hipster optometrist's place in Wauwatosa. I suppose it makes sense . . . I mean . . . they're looking for anything offbeat to turn trendy with their asymmetrical haircuts and what have you . . . (I probably sound very, very old but a hipster spelling bee? Really?) In any case, the hipster optometrist's in question is in Wauwatosa and it'™s hosting an e]]>   Racine’s Over Our Head Players is looking for a cast for Art. Contemporary French playwright Yasmina Reza’s Art is a four-character drama, but as one of the characters is an inanimate blank, white canvas with a few white lines on it and no dialogue, they’ll probably have a prop stand-in for that one. The drama concerns three men. One of them purchased the painting for a ridiculous sum of money. The other two argue ]]> Katori Hall’s Hoodoo Love sprung out of an assignment at Columbia University. The assignment was to write about a pair of people fighting over an object. She wrote about a couple of people fighting over a mojo bag in Memphis in the 1930s. The story revolves around Toulou—a woman who fled the cotton fields of Mississippi to pursue a dream of being a blues singer . . . this at a time when Robert Johnson was still alive—the dawn ]]> Of all of Neil Haven’s work, the hotel comedy Stuck is probably the most . . . mature, I guess. The comic playwright behind the ever-popular Who Killed Santa? develops a fun little premise as a retro hotel plays host to an agoraphobic elevator operator who never leave the elevator but to shower and use the women’s room.    Having seen a couple of different productions of the show, I don’t remember that much about the]]> It's notoriously difficult to get a movie made on any level and that includes even tiny independent features. For every one film that gets put into production there are at least 4.6 trillion others lying around unread. (This is a rough estimate.) Next week one such script is being picked-up and read . . . aloud. Matthew Konkel'™s The Freaks of Ordinary Time sounds promising enough. (I like the title, anyway . . . ) The premise involves a Wisco]]> Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time has been a favorite of many precocious kids growing up. My wife was one of them . . . very excited about the new First Stage adaptation of the book that opened this past weekend. I saw it as an opportunity to hook-up with my wife a bit more, seeing a part of her childhood make it to the stage of the Todd Wehr Theatre. I was a bit of a stranger to A Wrinkle In TIme. . .  but the science f]]> Last night I saw Soulstice Theatre’s Tick, Tick...BOOM! I hadn’t really prepared myself for what I was going to see, but it was very, very familiar…it was an early ‘90’s slacker drama. Jordan Gwiazdowski, Amber Smith, Josh Perkins and company put together a really good show under the direction of Jillian Smith . . .a full review of the show runs in the next issue of the Shepherd-Express. The drama felt very, v]]> John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is kind of a concise, little drama. With just a few characters in just a few different scenes, Shanley renders some remarkable and remarkably topical drama. Part of the beauty of a piece that explores some really important cultural ground is the fact that it actually requires very, very little to produce. There have been three or four different productions of the play in the past few years including a producti]]> I’m not a huge fan of the musical Rent . . . but when you’ve seen like . . . four or five different productions of a musical, you end up getting opinions about it. A little while back, I had the opportunity to do a phone interview with Anthony Rapp—the man who originated the role of Mark Cohen in that musical. Nice guy. He was in my hometown of Appleton at the time. (The touring production of RENT he was in at the time was the]]> A roving comedy from Ireland has recently announced a couple of US performances including one in Chicago and another here in Milwaukee. Irish radio presenter Tommy Maren plays a priest in a small town in Ireland in the 1960’s in his comedy The Real McCoy. It’s a big family ensemble comedy with plenty of moving parts. Eileen Slevin plays a woman who has been without her husband for over 40 years after a mysterious disappearance. The]]>     Somewhere in the mix of everything that opened last week, I ended up missing another opening from one of the longest-running community theatre traditions in the state of Wisconsin. The Bay Players continue to perform in their latest incarnation at the Whitefish Bay High School Auditorium. Their latest is a spoof of Hitchcock by the writing team of Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore. Wrong Window reads a bit like a more frenzied ]]> <p><!--StartFragment--></p> <p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia-Bold;\"><strong><img src=\"http://www.carteblanchestudios.com/new%20play%20logo.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"150\" height=\"173\" /></strong></span></p> <p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia-Bold;\"]]>