Post Script

Long before Harry Potter captivated millions of young readers around the world with his hero’s quest and epic, magical battles between good and evil, there was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the story about Middle Earth that started it all: The Hobbit. Published in 1937, the tale of Bilbo Baggins has never gone out of print – in fact it gets more popular with age. The Hobbit is so adept at capturing imaginations in generation after generation that it has inspired live-action movies, radio plays, animated features and even an opera. And in 2019, British actor and playwright Greg Banks adapted The Hobbit particularly for young audiences, condensing the story, reworking the characters for a small cast to perform, and collaborating with Thomas Johnson to include music. The resulting 100-minute show, produced by First Stage, is onstage now at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center and continues through March 5.

In the words of every front man for a big hair metal band, “Are you ready to rock?” 

Because rock you will, at Forward Theater’s current celebration of wailing guitars, face-melting power ballads, epic fandom, stage antics that slay, and audiences that go wild. With a greatest hits tour of music by Joan Jett, Bon Jovi, Guns ’N Roses and even REO Speedwagon, you will be swept up in smoking hot riffs up and down the neck of Gibson Les Pauls. . . or any other instrument you can imagine. 

In Chelsea Marcantel’s Airness, the guitars are imaginary, but the musicianship, passion, and performances are real. This enormously entertaining story focuses on five quirky veterans on the competitive air guitar circuit and one newbie, whose perceptions about the sport are initially as misguided as her motives for learning how to “shred.” Fortunately the veteran true believers put her on the right path to achieve “airness” – the ultimate blending of music, moves, and stage magic that transcend the original head-banging performance and approach “serious pretend” nirvana. Directed with contagious energy and ingenuity by Molly Rhode, this festival of rock music and geek culture runs through February 12 in The Playhouse at Overture Center. 

As the lights come up on Renaissance Theaterworks’ transcendant production of Cost of Living, a middle-aged, blue collar guy from Jersey is sitting in a hipster bar in the swanky Williamsburg neighborhood, nursing a seltzer and lime with a look of bemused disbelief on his face. It’s bad enough that he feels painfully out of place. Now Eddie (Bryant Bentley) has been stood up by a woman who’s been texting him, who might not even be real. He makes self-deprecating small talk and forces himself to laugh as he shakes the icecubes in his glass, trying to stave off a gloom that has almost swallowed him whole in the past three months. 

Eddie is one of the four extraordinary characters in Martyna Majok’s play who is weighing his need for human connection and intimacy with “the cost of living” – the price of his own vulnerability and the exhaustion that comes after things have been too hard for too long. 

The huge glass atrium at Overture Center was illuminated by red lights on Tuesday night, welcoming audiences to hell – and to the most exciting offering in this year’s Broadway series, the touring production of Hadestown. The off-beat musical began as a small performance experiment by folksinger and songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and later morphed into a concept album in 2010. Over the next decade, Hadestown grew into a critically acclaimed Broadway hit that garnered eight Tony Awards in 2019 and has been touring nationally for several years. 

Based on the raucous applause from the packed house in Overture Hall as the cast took the stage on opening night, Madison audiences have been looking forward to this unique production for a long time – and they were not disappointed. Featuring a diverse cast with extraordinary voices, bold, stylized choreography, outsized and inventive lighting effects, and expert musicianship from the onstage band, the performance earned its standing ovation and then some. Hadestown continues its run at Overture Center through January 29. 

Thomas Wolfe wrote the truism “you can’t go home again,” anowledging what every college freshman understands after the first winter break; once you leave your family and venture out into the world on your own, they will never look the same to you again. Any idealized fantasies you might have about sleeping in your childhood bedroom or enjoying some home cooking, sitting around the dining room table in the warm embrace of your parents and siblings, will be shattered by a messy, sharp-edged reality, and maybe by the realization that your family members have all changed, just like you have. Some may have even moved on without you. 

This cognitive dissonance has never been displayed in a more crippling, painful way than in Taylor Mac’s play Hir (pronounced “here”), presented by Strollers Theatre on the Drury Stage of the Bartell Theatre through February 4. Directed with a deadpan tone by Julia Houck, Hir is a kitchen sink drama turned on its head and thrust into a maelstrom of questions about gender, power, responsibility, and the myth of the American dream. 

There is an entire genre of plays that begin with a cordial gathering of two or three couples who first exchange pleasantries, then enjoy a few cocktails, and then begin to tell truths that are not just hard to hear, they are harmful. With the gloves off and the booze flowing, the party devolves from a polite social event to a no-holds-barred cage match, each comment an accusation, each statement more savage and cutting than the last. With lives and lies laid bare, the partygoers limp home, disillusioned and often damaged beyond repair. 

Edward Albee’s award-winning play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may not have been the first of this kind, but it is definitely the best. The 50 year-old drama of family dysfunction is erudite, shocking, relentless, and occasionally very funny. Over the course of an alcohol- and vitriol-infused night, it pits two couples against one another to examine the spaces between love and hate, pain and pleasure, expectation and disappointment, and ultimately reality and illusion. 

2022 was the year that everything was supposed to go back to normal, and in many places it did — but not for the performing arts. Not yet. Theaters were the first to close when COVID hit the country and they were the last to reopen. And while we’re not wearing masks in our everyday lives much anymore and vaccines are easily available, COVID is still having an enormous effect on theater companies, whose casts submit to mandatory testing while artistic directors and box office staffs hold their breath to see if the full cast can perform in their scheduled shows. And the shadow of the pandemic looms large over subscribers and ticket buyers, who have been reluctant to make long-term plans by subscribing, and hesitant to share a theater space with hundreds of audience members, even if they are masked. This lack of confidence from former theater-goers has been reinforced by last-minute cancellations of big ticket Broadway shows and smaller shows closer to home due to cast illnesses. 

This December I chatted with the leaders of area arts organizations about what was on their companies’ wishlists. I asked, “If an anonymous donor gave you $10,000, with the stipulation that you have to spend it all immediately (no investing in endowments, etc.) what would you use the money for?” These were their practical and fantastical responses.

There are some holiday traditions that are perfect just the way they are: decorating sugar cookie  snowmen with too much frosting and sprinkles. Watching little kids dressed in velvet and satin perform the annual Sunday school nativity pageant. Sipping a mug of hot cocoa as you try to untangle fifteen slightly different strands of lights for the tree. But sometimes, shaking up a well worn tradition is just what the holidays need. 

This is definitely the case with Children’s Theater of Madison’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, playing in the Capitol Theater at Overture Center through December 23. Written by Charlotte T. Martin, directed and choreographed by Brian Cowing, this version punches up the music, dancing, and magic in the well known story of Scrooge and the array of ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve. It also adds some new characters, expands or alters backstories and skips over much of the “prologue” to get to the action of the story sooner. A complete departure visually from CTM’s recent iterations, this production celebrates light, the love and connections of family, and the potential we all have to be more generous and caring towards others. 

There is one beautiful scene in Next Act’s current production of Sean Grennan’s The Tin Woman, playing through December 18. It is the final moment of the play, illustrating an emotional connection between a young woman who receives a heart transplant, and the grieving family of the 30-something man whose sudden death made him a donor. It is almost wordless, and packed with a multitude of emotions that range from curiosity to discovery, pain to elation, and cynicism to wonder. Through facial expressions, tears, physical touch, and sharp intakes of breath that catch in the throat, the entire cast absolutely soars in this singular, beautiful moment. But the two-act play that leads up to this point of revelation is a series of predictable scenes between character types that try too hard to be funny, and don’t try hard enough to be engaging or original.