By ROY BERKO Describe the Night, which is now on stage at Ensemble Theatre, is Cleveland Heights native Rajiv Joseph’s 2018 Obie Award winner for Best New American Play. Joseph was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Bengal Tiger at Baghdad Zoo, which starred the late Robin Williams in […]
By ANNE SIEGEL MILWAUKEE, WI – With the mid-term political elections just weeks away, one of Milwaukee’s newer theater companies uses that timing to open The Totalitarians, a 2015 political satire written by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb. The play is simultaneously horrific and hilarious as it dissects the daily activities surrounding a political campaign gone amok. […]
By ROY BERKO The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, now on stage in the Senney Theater in the Beck Center complex, is a play by Simon Stephens which is based on British writer Mark Haddon’s book of the same name, which, in turn was based on the 1892 short story ‘The Adventure […]
By ANNE SIEGEL MILWAUKEE, WI. – Race-based violence – especially against young Black men – is not unknown in this Midwest city, although most of the conflicts seen on the local TV news seem confined to certain parts of the inner city. When George Floyd died in 2020, Milwaukee was at the forefront of social […]
By ANNE SIEGEL CHICAGO – It’s no secret that the recent opening of The Devil Wears Prada is a mere precursor to its 2023 Broadway run. Although no dates, theater or cast has been announced for the New York run, it’s a given that this new musical version of the hit 2006 film that starred […]
By ROY BERKO In the fall of 1957, I had a mind-blowing experience. I saw the newly opened Broadway production of West Side Story. At the time, all I knew about the show was that it was based on Romeo and Juliet and it had opened to positive reviews two days before. I left the show with […]
By ROY BERKO Theater history books refer to The Black Crook, which opened in 1866 in New York, as the first musical. However, according to Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, the conceivers of Something Rotten!, now on stage at Beck Center for the Arts, that honor should go to Omelette. Never heard of Omelette? Unless you’ve seen the hysterically funny […]
By ROY BERKO Mathew Lopez, the author of The Legend of Georgia McBride – now on stage in the Studio Theatre at Beck Center – also wrote The Inheritance, which, in 2018 was the most honored American play in a generation, sweeping the “Best Play” Olivier Award in London and the Drama Desk and Tony Awards in […]
By ANNE SIEGEL (MILWAUKEE, WI.) – The most surprising thing about Get Happy: Angela Ingersoll Sings Judy Garland is that the Milwaukee Repertory Theater has taken so long to bring this show to town. The Rep has the perfect venue for this show: the intimate Stackner Cabaret, with its nightclub-style atmosphere that has audiences sitting […]
By ANNE SIEGEL MILWAUKEE, WI – Although it’s not “official,” playwright Bill Cain and Milwaukee’s Next Act Theatre seem to be having a love affair or, at least, a mutual admiration society. Next Act already has presented three of Cain’s plays in recent years: Equivocation (2018), How to Write a New Book for the Bible […]