One of two musicals to open last week, Windfall Theatre's season closing production of A New Brain is easily the more risky fo the two. A musical theatre piece about a songwriter with a brain tumor isn't exatly well-trodden territory, especally if it cou

Judging from commercial success and ongoing support from establishedl iterary critics, British Author/theologian C.S. Lewis is destined to be one of hundred or so best reemmbered novelists of the 20th century. Having met with considerable success itself,

The summer has arrived. Last weekend, a Hollywood film opened on a ridiculous number of screens, garnering some $100 million in a three days--which is really impressive given the current economy. Far from Hollywood, another element of summer surfaces this

The regular theatre season has almost come to an end. This week, the Tenth Street Theatre plays host to one of the final openings of the season as In Tandem Theatre opens its production of The Girl In The Frame. It’s an offbeat musical comedy by Jer

Theatre companies don’t sit down to plan out their schedules with each other. This is pretty obvious from the way the schedules sometimes work out. Next month, for instance, there are almost no shows opening in the greater Milwaukee area. Then in Ju

And so the cast has been announced for my next one-act . . . a half-hour, two-person short being staged in July by Insurgent Theatre as a companion piece to Peter J. Woods’ Systems. Suffice it to say, the cast of two men is going to be an interestin

There was an Associated Press piece in the Encore section of the daily yesterday by Sean O’Driscoll about the New York ban on actors smoking onstage. Evidently it’s okay to smoke onstage in New York if it’s not tobacco, which is kind of

In addition to the upcoming Combat Theatre show that Bunny Gumbo is opening and closing this weekend, there’s an independently produced show running this weekend only at the Off-Broadway Theatre. June 5-8 Deborah Clifton (longtime member of t

The first evening of this summer’s Bunny Gumbo Combat Theatre generally felt a bit more reserved than it did last year. Combat theatre goes something like this: playwrights draw subjects and locations out of a hat. 24 hours later, there’s a fu

Some of the acting was really quite impressive in the independent debut production of Small Pieces Fly To Heaven. The stories of multiple women involved in the Iraq war is particularly interesting where it speaks through the perspective of women in the US