Post Script

It turns out, even superheroes get the blues. That is what happened to Lourds Lane, the musical child prodigy-turned rock star who found that one day she couldn’t get out of bed, due to a series of debilitating personal losses. Unsurprisingly, the accomplished pianist and violinist rediscovered her power through music. She was inspired to get up and try again after listening to a song in her playlist that touched her. The twist is, the encouraging tune was a song that she, herself, had written. 

Discovering the ability to not only heal people through music, but to heal herself through her own creative pursuits, Lane was motivated to explore a whole new realm of composition and performance – musical theater. Her newfound mantra, “rise up and blast through,” basically sums up the tagline, origin story, theme, and the bulk of the plot of SuperYou, Lane’s power-ballad stuffed take on confidence and positivity, featuring a cast of social misfits, dysfunctional family members, and comic book heroines. 

In a college playwriting class, my instructor blithely told us that if we ever wrote a play with more than five characters and two sets, it would never make it to Broadway. Not only was this stunningly dumb advice (and easily disproved), it runs counter to the basic reason we love theater – because it starts as a blank page and a blank stage and transforms into a space where literally anything can happen. A celebration of the exuberance and absurdity of imagination, theater – especially opera – is a medium where magic is made. This is the truism that composers and librettists have known from the beginning; if you can dream it, dramatize it, and come up with a score to put under it, no story is too outlandish. 

Of course, some scenarios are more challenging to stage than others. . . and it’s those infrequently attempted fantasias that Milwaukee Opera Theatre has chosen to highlight in an evening of Impossible Operas. Running through May 28 in the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center, the production is a collaboration with Quasimondo, a company that specializes in creative movement and devised pieces. It also features an enormous catalog of handmade shadow puppets, designed and manipulated by Anja Notanja Sieger.

Moments before Sam Mueller’s play Laced begins, the audience knows that something terrible has happened. This piece about identity, community, safety, and healing for LGBTQ+ individuals takes place in the unsettling period just after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in June 2016, and just before the presidential election in November of that year. In Stage Q’s smart staging of the play, when spectators enter the Evjue Stage space at the Bartell Theatre and find their way to their seats, they walk across the set — a gay bar in Florida called Maggie’s Place. As they do, audiences are plunged into a crime scene. Chairs at the bar are overturned. Trash is strewn everywhere. And hate speech graffiti has been scrawled in red and black across tables and on woodwork. As a result, the audiences are immediately disoriented, similar to the three characters in Laced, as they enter and silently survey the damage to their workplace. 

William Shakespeare’s genius has fascinated and confounded scholars for centuries. How could one man – with little formal education – write so many of the Western canon’s greatest plays? How could the son of a glove maker invent hundreds of new words and write 154 sonnets that have made lovers swoon for generations? If you believe playwright Bill Cain, the Bard of Avon may have had some help with one of his later works. 

In his new play God’s Spies, Cain speculates that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was locked in a London boardinghouse with a prostitute and a Scottish lawyer. They are quarantined together during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1603. Working out elements of the story with his unlikely collaborators, Shakespeare is inspired and challenged by the people he shares a room with, who each offer the Bard new insights into the human condition. This creative take on the Lear origin story is receiving its world premiere at Next Act Theatre through May 21. Presented as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, it is also the final directing project for David Cecsarini as Next Act’s Artistic Director. 

Sam D. White’s new play, Hush the Waves, focuses on the plight of two unwed mothers who are weighing their choices – or despairing at their lack of choices – generations apart. The semi-autobiographical story, drawn from experiences in White’s own family, examines the pain, confusion, shame, and isolation that young women endured when bearing children out of wedlock in two distinct eras in the 20th century – 1948 and 1978. 

Although Mary (Casey Elizabeth Gilbert), the young mother-to-be we meet in the ’40s has limited options legally and within her own family, the other expecting teen Elizabeth (Mak Strohmeyer) is pondering motherhood after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade made abortion legal and gave women more power to control their own bodies. As is revealed in conversations between the teen and her mother (Carrie Sweet), in the ’70s open adoptions were also an option and single motherhood did not carry the social stigma that it did previously. This gives Elizabeth more options, but they each come with an emotional cost. 

The story of Peter Pan – the boy who never grew up – has enchanted generations, ever since it was penned by J.M. Barrie in 1904. In the intervening years, audiences have enjoyed plays, novels, silent movies, cartoons, Broadway shows, and Hollywood blockbusters that reimagine Peter and the Darling children flying to Neverland, the Lost Boys battling the evil Captain Hook, and Peter saving Tinkerbell, with the help of children clapping. Now, as the last production of the 2022-2023 season, Children’s Theater of Madison is bringing Peter’s antics to life in the musical Peter Pan, performed in the Capitol Theatre in Overture Center through April 30. The final directing project of outgoing artistic director Roseann Sheridan, the 1954 show is perfectly framed in the historic venue; a simple story with a little bit of magic and a (mostly) happy ending.

This spring Milwaukee theaters have been looking inward to find comedy, drama, and extreme dysfunction. In March, Skylight Music Theatre presented Noises Off – a meta-intense examination of the perils of regional touring productions, focusing on a group of overly dramatic actors rehearsing and performing a play. Now the Constructivists have opened I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, by Halley Feiffer. It’s a meta-cubed two-hander focusing on a young actor (Rebekah Farr) and her famous playwright father (James Pickering) who are waiting anxiously for a review to be published of her performance in The Seagull, a Chekhov play about an author and his leading lady receiving bad reviews after performing a new play. 

And for one more layer of meta-ness, the semi-autobiographical piece I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard was written by an actress and playwright who happens to have a famous playwright for a father. 

And for a final, exhausting layer of meta-tasticness, there were several critics on hand in the audience on opening night, laughing uncomfortably during the first scene, where the characters curse the small minds, broken ambitions, and miserable, sick, petty lives of theater critics, whose opinions, they assert, are generally worthless. 

There is an enchanting, captivating quality to the light in the work of 17th century Italian painter Artemisia Gentilieschi, who is known for her masterful use of highlights and shadow. The rich, golden light in Artemisia’s paintings embraces the subject matter – frequently women from biblical stories and mythology – caressing the naturalistic, rounded curves of their bodies, and reveling in the textures of luxurious folds of fabrics. That same light draws audiences into Forward Theater’s visually stunning world premiere production of Artemisia, performed in the Playhouse at Overture Center through April 30. The result of a compelling vision by Forward Artistic Director Jennifer Uphoff Gray, the production paints grand, gorgeous pictures of a woman who centered fully realized women in paintings for the first time.

Commissioned by Forward as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin festival, the new play by nationally known playwright Lauren Gunderson explores the life of one of the few successful women painters of the Renaissance. Like Gunderson’s other works highlighting the accomplishments of forgotten women from history, (The Revolutionists, Silent Sky, Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends her Life Tonight, Ada and the Engine, The Half-Life of Marie Curie) Artemisia focuses on the grit and perseverance necessary for a woman to succeed in a male-dominated profession, in an era when being intelligent, innovative, and naturally gifted were not enough. 

When the subject of climate change comes up these days, it feels overwhelming. The problem is too big. Our individual actions towards environmental conservation feel so small. The dire consequences of global warming have been predicted for decades, but we have ignored them. Now we have procrastinated so long on addressing the problem, it may be too late. If it’s unchecked, over the next century many, many species will die. The icebergs will continue to melt. The weather will become even more erratic and violent. Islands will be swallowed up by rising oceans. People will be forced from their homes. We could be approaching the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history.  

It’s no wonder that the main character in Renaissance Theaterworks’ world premiere production of Tidy is feeling anxious. Directed by Elizabeth Margolius, Kristin Idaszak’s poetic, funny, thought-provoking play about climate change, mass consumption, black holes, Marie Kondo, Philip Marlowe detective novels, gimlets, library books, government conspiracy theories, the last butterfly, secret messages, and how we compensate for a lack of love in our lives will run at the Theater at 255 South Water Street through April 16

The musical Chicago is back at Overture Center through March 26 as part of the Broadway Series, and for a show that debuted in 1975, it’s held up remarkably well. With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, the musical – set in the 1920s about two sensational women accused of terrible crimes of passion – contains several blockbuster songs that are worth the price of admission to see performed live. The characters are still intriguing, the choreography is still stunning, and public fascination with lascivious crimes is still very relevant. An indictment of sensational journalism that makes killers into rockstars and jury trials into circuses, Chicago still has enough “razzle dazzle” to keep us spellbound, more than fifty years after its debut and a century after the murder cases that inspired the show. 

Need some more reasons to grab your tickets for the remaining shows this weekend? Here are some fun facts about the musical tale of murder, mayhem, adultery, and greed that audiences keep coming back for.