Post Script

There are very few musicals that lend themselves to socially distanced recordings, but the 2007 chamber musical Daddy Long Legs, by Paul Gordon and John Caird, seems perfectly at home with a split screen and very little else. The two-person romance, told exclusively through correspondence, is the first virtual offering from Madison’s Capital City Theatre. It succeeds as a concert version of an accidental love story due to the remarkable voices and expressive faces of the performers – Kailey Boyle and Kevin McAllister. A well balanced trio of keyboard, cello and guitar underscore the nearly sung-through piece, which has a rich score and smart lyrics.

“Women. Don’t. Give. Up.”

These words leapt out of Meghan Randolph’s opening narration in Music Theatre of Madison’s current production, Beyond the Ingenue: Trailblazers, which is available for viewing online through December.

It is a good reminder and call to action at a time when — as a result of the long quarantine, a particularly contentious election, record levels of general anxiety, and the holidays approaching — most of the women I know are . . . tired.

Long before COVID upended all our lives, I was very excited about 2020: It is the 100th anniversary of the passage of 19th Amendment, granting (white) American women the right to vote. This was supposed to be a year-long celebration of women’s suffrage, and the amazing accomplishments of the “fairer sex” over the past century. But as we all know, the news has focused on a myriad of current crises instead of taking stock of historical breakthroughs that illustrate how far women have come.

American Players Theatre has once again partnered with PBS Wisconsin to present a new series of “Out of the Woods” play readings, performed and recorded live. Like the first set of readings available earlier this summer, the plays heavily feature members of APT’s Core Company and actors who have graced their stage in seasons past. This trio of stories focuses on “classic” plays by playwrights who are Black, Indigenous or People of Color, in collaboration with BIPOC directors and artists on the project.

The play reading will be debut on the first three Fridays in November at 7:00 pm. These performances will be available through the end of the year. Watch the series, free of charge, here.

Large public gatherings have been banned in Wisconsin for months, making it nearly impossible to enjoy concerts, plays and music events in person. And in another blow to the performing arts, many health experts have concluded that being in a room where people are singing can dramatically increase the spread of the COVID-19 virus. What is an opera company to do, if sopranos can’t serenade, choirs can’t croon, and audiences can’t applaud in the same concert hall?

For Fresco Opera the answer was to turn traditional opera performance on its ear. The local group has already gained a reputation for unorthodox, reimagined versions of operas, performing in non-traditional spaces, and removing some of the stuffiness of the hallowed art form, making the medium more accessible.

In a fall theater season held hostage by a global pandemic — when most Milwaukee companies are frantically shuffling, rescheduling, and socially distancing their content, desperate to connect with audiences — it is inspiring to see locally produced theater continue, and continue to push boundaries.

Enter the constructivists, the young, scrappy, and hungry theater company led by Jamielyn Gray, that’s not just carrying on their subversive, in-your-face, socially conscious season of plays, they are exploring the brave new world of virtual performances with reckless abandon. That gutsy, go-for-it, don’t look away style is on full display in their current production, “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” by Sheila Callaghan. Both the live and recorded performances, which can be streamed through October 4 in exchange for a pay-what-you-can donation, will probably make you wince and squirm as you meet several self-loathing women who struggle with society’s expectations regarding their age, beauty, body size, and sexual allure. Their absurd antics and profound unhappiness, contrasted with the clueless swagger of the men in their lives, are designed to make you uncomfortable. And with the help of a solid cast, spot on sound design, smart use of provocative video montages, and blocking that effortlessly implies proximity, it is bound to succeed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came to Wisconsin in early March the performing arts were hit hard. Audiences could no longer gather in a theater, or even outdoors, to see a show. Some companies canceled their seasons. Others transitioned to Zoom readings and online performances. But the Wisconsin-based, traveling Shakespeare company Summit Players Theatre, which usually presents short adapted works in state parks, decided to change the focus of its programming, concentrating on arts education rather than play production.

Local contemporary company Kanopy Dance was halfway through its season of performances at Overture last spring when the arts center was forced to “take an intermission,” closing to the public through the end of 2020 due to COVID-19. Kanopy co-artistic director Lisa Thurrell remembers the moment in mid-March when all her plans suddenly changed. “We were planning our next season. We had already spent two glorious weeks in rehearsal for our upcoming concert. All the directors were meeting regularly, collaborating with the local improv group Are We Delicious?, getting ready for our Far Out Prophecies of Nostradamus show. Everyone was so full of ideas.”

Then, like every other performing arts organization, Kanopy shifted from making long-term plans to brainstorming short-term possibilities, as the ability to gather together in a shared space — either as artists or as audiences — became more remote.

When award winning playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was writing the script for “The Social Network,” a bio-pic about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook, he had a very specific moment in mind for an opening scene. After Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, he goes back to his dorm room at Harvard, gets drunk, and as an act of revenge he creates Facemash – a way to publicly rate and rage against women on campus. In Sorkin’s mind, the college kid who would change the face of world media got out a glass, put in some ice cubes, then poured vodka and orange juice on top to make a screwdriver.

But before filming started, the production team found out that on that fateful night Zuckerberg instead did what most college kids do – he grabbed a beer. Sorkin didn’t care and responded, “Drunk is drunk!” Besides, his way had more drama, more action, more rhythm and sound effects attached. In the final screen version, Zuckerberg drinks a beer. But when asked about the last minute change by an interviewer from The New Yorker, Sorkin said, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.”