Post Script

Three years ago Milwaukee Opera Theatre and the early music vocal ensemble Aperi Animam collaborated on a stunning evening of traditional and new work at Calvary Presbyterian Church called Utterance. This weekend the two organizations joined forces again in the storied downtown church for visually modern, musically baroque production of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo. Penned in 1607 for a court performance for the annual Mantua Carnival, it is a profoundly beautiful piece and one of the earliest operas that is still regularly produced. Per MOT’s methodology, this production was an interesting synthesis of performance styles and storytelling, making a centuries-old opera immediately intriguing to a modern audience. An English translation of the lyrics by Danny Brylow and Joseph Krohlow, paired with projected lyrics, also opened the story up to be instantly accessible. L’Orfeo was supported by exceptional musicianship, from complicated ensemble vocals, to instruments so old and obscure that they looked like a Renaissance museum tableau.

After two seasons of virtual programming, Madison’s LunART Festival is back, hosting eight in-person events across six area venues to support, inspire, promote and celebrate women in the arts. This year’s diverse programming, scheduled for May 31 - June 5, will showcase more than 50 artists performing in many different media, including world premiere chamber concerts, public lectures and community panels, a jazz concert, and an evening of comedy. It also features the world premiere play/spoken word piece titled Threads.

Renaissance Theaterworks finishes its 2021-2022 season with Rose, a compelling one-woman show examining the life of famed matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Directed by Elizabeth Margolius and featuring award-winning Chicago actor Linda Reiter, Rose looks at the early life, influences, and expectations of an extraordinary woman from one of America’s most celebrated families. Boston Irish Catholic, she was the daughter, wife, and mother of famous politicians; a woman who lived from the Gilded Age to the computer age (1890-1995), suffering much more than her share of tragedies on a very public stage.

There is nothing small about Skylight Music Theatre’s season finale production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, written and composed by former Styx star Dennis DeYoung and directed by Skylight’s Artistic Director Michael Unger. In fact every bit of it is enormous, from the huge set and the monstrosity of the villains, to the outsized emotion that fuels the non-stop power-ballads. The oft-told tale of the deformed bell-ringer who lives in the famed Paris cathedral and falls in love with Esmerelda, a Roma dancing girl, has been both simplified and magnified here, in a musical that is as ambitious as Les Miserables and sounds like a cross between Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar and a big-hair stadium concert of the 1980s.

The real magic of live theater is that its stories create empathy in the minds and hearts of audience members. If there has ever been a show that illustrates what it is like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, it’s Children’s Theater of Madison’s Freaky Friday, on stage in the Starlight Theater at MYArts — CTM’s new youth arts center home. Directed by Anna Skidis Vargas and choreographed by Brian Cowing, this musical version of the classic story of a mother and daughter who magically switch bodies for a few days plays through May 22.

In 1993 I saw Kenneth Branagh play the moody Dane in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet at the Barbican. It was one of the most breathtaking pieces of theater I have ever seen and after the curtain came down I declared, as I walked out into the London drizzle, that I would never see the play again: I had seen it done perfectly, no other productions could hold a candle to it, and I could move on.

In Bill Cain’s play The Last White Man, running at Next Act Theatre through May 8, the character Xandri (Demetria Thomas) has a similar idea. A Black, female director, she wants to produce Hamlet one last time – create a truly perfect version of Shakespeare’s greatest work – so that we can all move on and focus on new stories and new voices.

But over the course of the play, we discover one reason why Hamlet is produced so often, four centuries after it was written: the title role is an irresistible challenge for white male actors. One of them refers to it as the “Everest” of performance. And so, The Last White Man illustrates the power – and challenge – of the play by focusing on three different men assigned to play the part, how they understand it, how they approach it, and how the experience of playing the complex role changes them.

An explosion of social media overwhelmed the American public leading up to the 2016 election between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram became information battlefields that anyone could lob statements into, no matter how slanderous or ludicrous. Difficult discussions devolved into all-caps screaming matches that left each side more committed to their own views, more hostile to the other’s, and more entrenched in a culture war that is still raging.

But it turns out that the embers of internal U.S. dissent and resentment were transformed into infernos by legions of Russian trolls: professional internet posters inserting millions of extremist, provocative, and incendiary messages into already crowded news streams, simply to sow chaos among the electorate. With enough discord, hatred and fake news swirling around the states, the Russians thought they could install their choice of U.S. president. And they did.

This truism is not just painfully relatable to everyone who has survived high school, it is the basis for an entire genre in entertainment, including three musicals that are as popular as a blonde cheerleader right now: The Prom, Mean Girls, and Heathers: The Musical. And while you can catch the other two on tour, it’s worth trying to bribe a stagehand for a ticket to the spectacular (sold-out) production of Heathers: The Musical, which is packing the UW-Madison Department of Theater and Drama’s Mitchell Theatre, through April 24.

This dark, irreverent, wildly funny, violent, and often profane hit musical was the brainchild of Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, the creators of stage adaptations of Legally Blonde and Reefer Madness respectively. Based on the 1989 box office flop of the same name, Heathers: The Musical is a tuneful indictment of high school bullies, a celebration of ’80s hair, fashion, and entitlement, and a perverse revenge fantasy all rolled into one. While the movie was written to mock the now classic, feel-good youth culture films of John Hughes (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles,) the musical actually does include a message of acceptance and tolerance for teens caught in the “Thunderdome” of high school. But this is no after school special. It’s an affirmation of real friendships and empathy buried six feet under black comedy, blood, and shell casings.

In great storytelling, the medium matters. And even if opportunistic producers believe that one story can be successfully translated from a novel, to a musical, to a cartoon, to a video game, to an action figure and back again, there are definitely formats that are better at communicating the narrative and allowing the characters and their arcs to truly shine. Then there are versions that obscure the message and dilute the plot. For example, I believe that Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, and Pretty Woman should be films, not Broadway shows. Dear Evan Hanson should be seen on stage, not on Netflix. Spiderman should absolutely stay away from the footlights, and the founding father Alexander Hamilton who you meet on the pages of Ron Chernow’s book will never be as exciting as its rap-battling, hip hop counterpart in the blockbuster musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

And in that same vein, perhaps Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun should not be a musical.

What if Cinderella’s fairy godmother showed up on the night of the ball, and instead of turning her rags into a gorgeous gown and her pumpkin into a coach, she turned the whole kingdom against Cinderella, then dropped her charge off at the wrong dance, and finally tried to take tons of credit for saving the day? Not exactly the magical answer to a downtrodden girl’s dreams. Instead, like more modern Disney heroines, Cinderella would simply have to be a self-rescuing princess, redeeming her well meaning but clueless fairy godmother along the way. If the Broadway musical The Prom was a fairytale, that’s how the story would go.

Playing through March 27 at Overture Center, The Prom is set in modern-day Indiana and the magical godmothers are actors — a group of narcissistic has-beens direct from the simultaneous opening and closing night of their disastrous flop, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt. Discouraged and disgraced thespians who crave nothing but praise and an adoring audience, they decide that they need a massive public relations boost, in order to wipe the public’s memories of the horrific review they received from the New York Times theater critic.