Peggy Sue Dunigan - Page 4

Marquette University, Milwaukee and Al McQuire became synonymous during the coach's tenure with Men's Basketball during the 1970's. To celebrate the illustrious legacy,  Milwaukee Repertory Theater captivates the audience's enthusiasm and excitement in the Stackner Cabaret. After the university hired McGuire in 1964, the showman coach propelled the men's Basketball team to a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship. Now on stage to begin the 2017 winter season, McQuire's endearing story returns to the city and university that made him famous in their intimate, stellar one man production directed by Brent Hazelton and featuring multiple award-winning actor Anthony Crivello. 

A cozy, celebratory dinner party in a cosmopolitan New York penthouse ignites irreversible damage between friends in Ayad Ahktar's 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning play Disgraced now on stage at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's Quadracci Powerhouse. Eventually, each character in the no intermission production will somehow be disgraced-sometimes by their personal identity, religion or culture and determined through their own specific actions or reactions to another person. The Rep becomes the third theater company to mount Disgraced in a co-production with Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater and New Jersey's McCarter Theatre in what has become the most produced play in 2016. One only needs to attend to understand why this potent combination of contemporary dilemmas facing Americans personally and politically drew the country's theatrical attention.

While the snow fell outside the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, snow feel on stage in The Milwaukee Ballet's enchanting The Nutcracker. The irresistible holiday tradition continues under Artistic Director Michael Pink dazzling costumes, set designs, and magical lighting by David Grill. The MKE Ballet orchestra accompanies the production conducted by Pasquale Laurino, where exquisite harps and marimbas punctuate Pyotr Ilyiich Tchaikovsky's iconic score, along with the voices of the Milwaukee Children's Choir. Audiences thrill to one entire evening admiring dance and music in the name of this classical art.

Black Arts MKE presents their joyous and triumphant 2nd annual version of Langston Hughes' Black Nativity first produced in 1961. Numerous theaters throughout America remount the production every year to celebrate the holiday season with an all African American cast. At Wilson Theater in Vogel Hall, Malkia Stampley directs an all star cast of 18 members including charming children and professional actors accompanied by live musicians under the music direction of Antoine Reynolds, along with drummer Taurus Adams and bass player Afton Johnson, while they dance to  Marvette Knight's rousing choreography.

A late night, New York lobby, courtesy of Scenic Designer Stephen Hudson-Mairet, features one security guard and his captain supervisor who delve into current moral dilemmas during Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Lobby Hero. Director C. Michael Wright challenges his audience through witty humor and gender controversy from Kenneth Lonergan's play underscoring a women cop working in a man's world--and a male cop working the system and also trying to achieve heroic glory.

What could be a better holiday gift to Milwaukee than a World Premiere adaptation of Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol? On Friday night, Artistic Director Mark Clements opened his resplendent adaptation for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the gorgeous Pabst Theatre. In this innovative adaptation by Clements in collaboration with a stunning artistic team, the production renewed holiday magic in the company's 41st year for the city that Clements and The Rep call home.

Aspiring young performers from across the country challenge Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death (April. 2016) in a national festival this past fall. To do so, First Stage's Young Company, Milwaukee's pre-professional training program for young actors, recently traveled to the Utah Shakespeare Festival with Associate Artistic Director John Maclay and Teaching Artist Marcella Kearns to compete with literally 100's of schools and theaters from across the country on how Shakespeare inspires young audiences. While eleven members competed in the 2016 Young Company, two identical twins, Alex and Sydney Salter both participated in the festival competition and play the twin Dromios in the Company's upcoming Comedy of Errors, As First Stage celebrates 30 years, Young Company begins this 13th season. Maclay comments on the program when he says, '[Young Company] It's about challenging these fantastic young artists with difficult material and working to inspire an ethic of excellence.'

When Dickens wrote his timeless Christmas story about mid 19th century London audiences often push aside, especially at the holidays, he wanted his audiences to be transformed into seeing their world  in a new way. In 2016, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater produces their 41st incarnation of Charles Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol beginning on opening night, December 2. The historical Pabst Theater houses Dickens' story, first published in 1843, with a innovative adaptation conceived by Artistic Director Mark Clements and begins a journey with Ebenezer Scrooge into his past, present and future.

Written 30 plus years ago in 1985, the late Milwaukee playwright Larry Shue's award winning Foreigner first debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. After playing Broadway in the 80's, and reprised by numerous theaters across the country on an annual basis, Foreigner returns to the Quadracci Powerhous for the holiday season. Directed by the inimitable Laura Gordon who understands Shue's incomparable blend of humor, relevance and warm heartedness, could re-envision this scenario in a rural Georgia bed and breakfast inn. At the Georgia inn, a British Sergeant, Froggy, rescues his low spirited and shy friend Charlie for a weekend's stay Here Charlie meets the winsome inn owner, Betty, a conspiring reverend, David Marshall Lee, his fiance Catherine, her younger brother, Ellard, and a rapscallion homegrown Georgian, Owen. Throw in Catherine and Ellard's recent inheritance, and the invisible white empire on a starry night, and Shue created a hilarious farce, even when seen several times.

What defines a family--those people who love by sacrificing their own life for someone else? In a lavish production where Chris March's luscious costumes touch the senses, Skylight Music Theater stages the 1983 Broadway musical La Cage Aux Folles. Scenic Designer Liliana Duque Piñeiro complements March's fabulous costumes by hanging a serpentine curtain of reflective silver strips across the stage that sparkles when Lighting Designer Noele Stollmack illuminates the fluid curtain with a rainbow of colors throughout the production Originally written by Harvey Fierstein with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, this musical based on a French play by Jean Poirot, won multiple awards in its production year and also in several later revivals. 

This season Milwaukee Repertory Theater's Stackner Cabaret warms the holidays with the Great American Songbook: A tribute to the incomparable composer Irving Berlin in the musical revue I Love A Piano. When an old forlorn piano with one broken note magically reveals the instrument's history during the performance, Berlin's lyrics and melodies that defined the country's multiple generations play on. In this mesmerizing production filled with more than 50 Berlin songs, the cabaret regales America's 1910's to post World War II eras that stirs memories in the audience's heart and soul.

In an on-stage adventure that will thrill any secret buccaneer, Theater RED world premieres Bonny Anne Bonny in collaboration with the Department of Theatre at Milwaukee's Wisconsin Lutheran College's (WLC). Set in the WLC Performing Arts Center's Raabe Theatre, WLC students along with Director Christopher Elst steer Liz Shipe's swashbuckling tale into one very enthralling version of 18th century Irish pirate Anne Bonny's life. Theater RED's world premiere production takes the audience's breath away when the cast ascends swaying ladders, swings on ropes across the stage and flashes their sword play while these men and women 'pirates' cast about for a new ship to find plundered treasures.

Three women--all seduced into marriage and relieved of their lives and fortunes--beautifully retell their rather unfortunate stories in Renaissance Theaterworks (RTW) The Drowning Girls on stage in the Studio Theatre. A play written by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomilnson and Daniela Vlaskalic, the play relates the true story of George Joseph Smith, a man who married three vulnerable maids during England's early 20th century and then immediately drowned them in their own bathtubs.

In a world premiere commissioned by First Stage and Oregon Children's Theatre, R.L. Stein's famous 'Goosebumps' series comes to stage life in Milwaukee at the Todd Wehr Theater. First Stage Associate Artistic Director John Maclay and the award winning Danny Abosch wrote the original book, lyrics and music to Goosebumps The Musical: Phantom of the Auditorium from one of more than his 62 books Stein wrote between 1992-1997. Stein's youthful horror fiction, often believed to be the second best selling children's series of all time, was created as he says so 'Children could use their own wit and imagination to escape the scary circumstances.'

This fall, Boulevard Theatre raises the curtain once again (metaphorically speaking, yes!) at Plymouth Church with a nostalgic, noteworthy collaboration between Boulevard and Plymouth Chorale along with inspiration from Milwaukee Opera Theatre.  Artistic Director Mark Bucher produces an original production in the church sanctuary creating the charming and kitschy Where the Streetcar Bends the Corner, Down by the Zoo!

What other regional or national theater company can be credited with producing 61 total world premieres? Professional children's theater company First Stage began a legacy 30 years ago, and continues in their new season under the theme 'Theater You Never Outgrow.' Artistic Director Jeff Frank believes the company creates the strongest theater, at home, in Milwaukee, which eventually reverberates around the country. Now authors and producers nationally recognize First Stage and knock on the company's door, approaching them with opportunities, so the company can envision new legacies in Theater for Young Audiences.

Two men enclosed in a boxing ring--one black and one white-vie for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship and a transformative match that might knock out race relations for decades to come. Milwaukee Repertory Theaer imports Marco Ramiriez's The Royale to the Stiemke Studio in sophisticated style starring David St. Louis playing the African American boxing champion Jay 'the Sport' Jackson. Jay Jackson represents the actual heavyweight champion Jack Johnson who defeated the previous World Heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries, a white man, on July 4, 2010 to win freedom for the black boxer. In the stunning Rep production, Ramirez's script loosely retells the story that changed the course of boxing history where Jackson became the first African American Heavyweight Champion in an era when the Klu Klux Klan lynched black men for merely the color of their skin.

For the 2016-2017 no 'shrinking violet' opening of the Cabot Theatre Stage, Skylight Music Theatre presents the 1997 award-winning musical, Violet. Set in the mid 1960's, the Broadway Theatre Center production relates to a young woman's journey when her father accidentally disfigured her face and left a traumatic facial scar amid the burgeoning civil rights movement and beginnings of the Vietnam war. When Violet travels from North Carolina to Oklahoma carrying her dream and hope that a faith healer will remove the scar, the young Southern woman encounters various people on her Greyhound bus ride to remind the audience life's miracles arise in multiple forms when the heart opens the eyes and mind and removes the mundane from the material world.

Everyone eventually wishes for an impossible dream to be fulfilled-In a musical where that song, 'The Impossible Dream,' continues to inspire an audience, Milwaukee Repertory stellar Man of La Mancha opened the final weeks of September and proved why the musical won five 1966 Tony Awards. The first production in the Quadracci Powerhouse season, the iconic musical written by Dale Wasserman combined with brilliant music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion transforms Cervantes groundbreaking novel into a two hour, no intermission musical set in the dungeons of the 16th century Spanish Inquisition. Cervantes and his servant Sancho Panza must prove their worth to their prison mates. To do so, the pair performs the poet's 'Man of La Mancha' in the Spanish dungeon, where all the prisoners participate as actors, which eventually awakens the impossible dream inside those attending in the audience

Misfits: The 2016-2017 theme for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's season. A little known Tennessee Williams play, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur provides Williams' misfits, four 'women of a certain age,' a stage for exposing their misfortunes in St. Louis, the 1930's. In a place 'just a street car ride away from a cooling Sunday afternoon picnic' at Lake Creve Coeur, Missouri, the misfits uncover what their lives might be in the future. A stage where their adventures appear courtesy of the up and coming Director Leda Hoffman who transforms Kay Allmand, Kelly Doherty, Molly Rhode and Karen Estrada on a set where 'roses explode like a bombshell of clashing colors' designed by Courtney O'Neill. In fact, the entire production becomes a tour de force for women in the theater, on stage and behind the scenes.