Post Script

Let me be clear. I thought there was going to be an actual dog in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of “Chapatti,” by Christian O’Reilly. The scruffy pooch was featured in all the ads. He’s even on the cover of the program.

Poor Pippin. The second son of Charlemagne, all he wants is an extraordinary life that is completely fulfilling. And yet, no matter where he looks, his options fall short of perfect, self-actualization. And it’s not like he isn’t trying. Pippin looks for happiness in education, war, sex, politics, art, religion and even rural domesticity. But it’s never enough. Or is it?

Kids are back in school and area theater companies have headed back to the rehearsal hall. As usual, there are a lot of exciting events in store this fall for lovers of the performing arts in Madison. Mark your calendars for these productions in particular, as the leaves turn and the days get chillier.

In the early 1970s a group of documentary style theater-makers from Toronto journeyed to rural, southern Ontario to observe, interview, and live with local farmers. Their impressions of this bucolic life were used to create a play called the Farm Show, performed by the citified actors for the very audience it was modeled on.

Decades later, playwright Michael Healey took inspiration from this dramatic experiment to create a stunningly beautiful play called The Drawer Boy, onstage through September 29th on the Drury Stage at the Bartell. Strollers Theatre could not have chosen a more eloquent way to start their season than with this poignant play that explores our universal need for stories — the ones we’re given, the ones we create, and the ones we fabricate to replace a truth that’s just too difficult to live with.

Long before all four of the plant’s employees have entered the dingy, depressingly plain break room, we know what’s going to happen. It’s the same thing that happened at the GM plant in Janesville. The same thing that happened at Oscar Meyer here in Madison.

In Dominique Morisseau’s play Skeleton Crew, all of these workers are struggling to hang onto their jobs in Detroit’s flailing auto industry during the great recession of 2008. They’ve got their suspicions that bad news is on the horizon, but we know it for sure. Where factories once hummed with activity around the clock, soon many of the giant buildings will be silenced, filled only with ghosts. The workers, some of whom have been with the company for decades, will be casualties of declining markets, increased automation, and the ease of shipping jobs overseas.

Terror! Thrilling mystery! Weird menace! Strange adventures on other worlds! The universe of future centuries!

These are actual teasers from the covers of pulp fiction magazines, popular in the 1920s and ’30s. Sensational horror stories filled with zombies, aliens, crazed robots and mad scientists (and also cowboys) they were printed on cheap “wood pulp” paper and sold by the thousands for as little as a dime apiece. Now Milwaukee Opera Theatre is celebrating the genre — a predecessor to modern comic books — through their new musical, “Doc Danger and the Danger Squad,” playing through August 30 at the Broadway Theatre Center. This is MOT’s second commission for local composer Jason Powell; their previous collaboration occupied a similarly quirky niche in the opera world, a superhero adventure called "Fortuna the Time Bender vs. the Schoolgirls of Doom."

In her director’s notes Risa Brainin writes that the last time she directed Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” it felt painfully relevant—government officials were being exposed as hypocrites and frauds, much more corrupt and immoral than the people they were condemning. That was 11 years ago. In her latest production of the play, onstage at American Players Theatre through October 6, she draws the contemporary comparisons even more sharply.

When audiences first see the red gravel landscape of New South Wales, it is carefully raked into an elegant maze-like pattern — gentle curved lines and circles that are common elements of Aboriginal art. But then the there are the sounds of brutal lashes and chains. British soldiers come ashore with convicts in tow, and it does not take long for the original artistry of the land to be obliterated. Watching the ship unload its human cargo on her shores, a lone native woman describes the scene as “a dream which has lost its way.”

It’s no secret that Broadway has been looking to Hollywood for inspiration for new musicals for decades. Examples of the genre include SpongeBob SquarePants, Mean Girls, Pretty Woman, Legally Blonde, Billy Elliot, and the just-opened music and dance spectacular Moulin Rouge. Sometimes they translate to the stage beautifully (Waitress, An American In Paris) and sometimes they really don’t (High Fidelity, Urban Cowboy).

In the case of Little Miss Sunshine, composer and lyricist William Finn has made the most of the aggressively quirky, Oscar-winning family dramedy from 2016, and created a musical that is just as enchanting as the movie, if not moreso. In fact, since many of the characters in the story are experiencing huge crises, it’s the perfect vehicle for songs overstuffed with emotion. The show is so well-crafted, it’s puzzling that it didn’t find greater commercial success. Music Theatre of Madison’s excellent production of this gem, which runs through August 25th in the UW Play Circle at the Wisconsin Union, shows once again how adept Director/producer Meghan Randolph is at making odd little musicals shine. 

George Bernard Shaw is known for his talk-y, and often witty polemical plays that foreground arguments about political philosophy, morality, and the enormous gaps between rich and poor. Anton Chekhov is known for his plays about the decline of the Russian aristocracy, epically doomed romances, the intensely self-absorbed, and a general stasis that prevents even the most modest goals from being realized. So what would happen if Shaw borrowed liberally from Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and attempted to re-write the story “in the Russian manner, on English themes?”For a mash-up of these two aesthetics, see “Heartbreak House,” at American Players Theatre, playing in rotating rep Up the Hill through October 5.