Peggy Sue Dunigan - Page 9

The romance of letter writing centers Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's (MCT) Midwest premiere of Dear Elizabeth. Playwright Sarah Ruhl's character study of Pulitzer Prize winners Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell carries the two writers through their 30 plus year friendship, the ups and downs in producing award winning poetry while maintaining personal relationships.

The glitter and shimmer of show business underscores the 'American Dream' at Milwaukee Rep this October. The mulit-award winning  Broadway production Dreamgirls, floods the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater with showstopping light, song and an equally award-winning cast to dazzle Milwaukee audiences.

n a new season celebrating creative women, Skylight Music Opera opens with an elegant tribute to composer Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. Jill Anna Ponasik, Artistic Director of Milwaukee Opera Theatre, weaves the libretto by Luigi Illica and Amanda Holden's English translastion into a visually stunning and stellar version of the Italian opera which first premiered in Rome, 1900, and appears this fall on stage in the Milwaukee's Cabot Theatre.

Stage Door Theatre Company discovers a 'fine way to treat a Steinway,' Words the illustrious and prolific composer Irving Berlin wrote in his song 'I Love a Piano.' Third Avenue Playhouse presents a musical revue concieved by James Valcq based on Berlin's early career using this as the title, and the evening celebrates everything about the piano the composer treasured.  

A mellow eveing of memories opens The Rep's Stackner Cabaret for their 2016-2017 seaso. Back Home Again: On the Road with John Denver recalls the live and reminiscing of former band member and fellow musician Dan Wheetman. A man who travelled on tour with the acoustic country and folk music singer John Denver for eight years through the 1970s-80's, when John Denver took the songwriting world by storm.

When writer Dan Goggin imagined and produced his line of greeting cards featruing sassy nuns, few people would have predicted their instant success or the award-winning, full-length musical after the fact titled Nunsense. When the show's premiered on Broadway in 1985, the Nunsense phenomena continued with numerous revivals and sequels, and includes being adapted for the television screen. Fish Creek's Penninsula Players Theatre (PPT) reprises the rolicking musical from their 1987 season with a spectacular cast that shines another light on these angelic Little Sisters from Hoboken.

Nineteen years have passed since Fish Creek's Northern Sky Theater (NST and formerly AFT) premiered Lumberjacks in Love. As part of the company's 25 anniversary season, this box office hit returns for the fall season at the Door Community Auditorium. And after almost two decades, these burly Hayward, Wisconsin boys celebrate this ode to romance in the deep woods where Kathleen Rock's beautiful stage design adds an ethereal three-dimesnional backdrop to the indoor setting.

A tiny village named Killucan set in contemporary Ireland ignites family fueds and past ghosts in an irrepressible production titled Outside Mullingar at Peninsula Players Theatre. John Patrick Shanley's 2014 play flames the deep fires of hearth and heath burning in his four Irish characters: Tony Reilly, and his son, Anthony, and then their next door neighbors, Aoife Muldoon, and her daughter, Rosemary.

The connection between man/woman and beast, especially a domesticated beast, can be complicated. Ask a dog or cat owner to describe their relationship and the pets often acquire human qualities, they are usually loved beyond what anyone might expect, and profoundly impact the lives of their owners .Stage Door Theatre Company expounds on that devotion in their recent comedy Sylvia at Sturgeon Bay's Third Avenue Playhouse.

Othello—The name speaks to one of William Shakespeare's most acclaimed tragedies first produced in 1603, and has seen thousands of reincarnations, perhaps hundreds of thousands in the past four centuries. How does American Players Theatre (APT) at their Up the Hill venue renew the drama's intense spirit? On an August summer evening, APT stages under John Langs direction, Andrew Boyce's scenic design and Matthew J. Le Febvre's striking costume design a very intimate and evocaive “Tragedy of the Moor of Venice.” 

In the intimate American Players Theatre's (APT) Touchstone Amphitheater, Edward Albee's 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning play Seascape premiered on Saturday afternoon---perhaps with greater resonance in this century than when originally produced.. Director Laura Gordon returns to the drams after directing Milwaukee Rep's 2007 production in the Stiemke Studio along with APT company member Cristina Panfilio. Panfilio agian performed the role of Sarah, the coming up from the ocean floor lizard wife of Leslie. This stellar duo continues to define Albee's play with sensitivity and endearing wit, along with fellow actors Sarah Day, Jonathan Smoots and LeShawn Banks. 

With a grand Alexander Calder like mobile hanging over the Cabot Stage when the audience enters the theater, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT) opens their 2015-2016 season with the modern French farce Boeing, Boeing. Marc Camoletti's 1960 play won a 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival in New York and throughly delighted the Cabot Theatre audiences at the Broadway Theatre Center on opening weekend.

Milwaukee's TheateRED begins their 2015-2016 season titled 'We All Have Blood On Our Hands,' with a World Premiere written by one of the city's acclaimed actors and directors, Angela Iannone. Iannone constructs a play, The Seed of Banquo, based on the historical facts of American theater great Edwin Booth, and yes, also the brother of the infamous John Wilkes Booth. Edwin Booth opened a theater with his namesake in 1888, and then directed, designed and starred in the plays he choose to produce. In Iannone's The Seeds of Banquo, his historical and personal stage design, prompt book and blocking were used to recreate Booth's original production, including the stage back drop, while she intermingles Booth's personal life to the point where lines in Shakespeare's Macbeth might easily be quoted by the individual Booth regarding his own relections.

During June, July, August and often through warm Octobers, summer theater abounds across the country. In Door County's Fish Creek, Wisconsin, Penninsula Players Theatre (PPT) has enchanted summer audiences for more than 80 years on the shores of Green Bay where the sunsets surprise each show night. Even when a close to an 80 miles per hour wind storm arrived one August afternoon and blackend the lights and power for an entire peninsula, the show went on. PPT plugged in the generators and lit candles to illuminate the tables and walkways so the classic farce Lend Me A Tenor played to an audience of approxiimately 300 people. The dedication to excellent performance extends far beyond what might be expected by the residents and tourists.

Noel Coward's popular play Private Lives currently on stage at American Players Theatre might be ripped from modern entertainment headlines. These scenes of two recently divorced spouses reconnecting for a romantic tryst could be versions of Duchess Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew living unmarried under one roof (after their long ago divorce) and wishing for royal approval to remarry. Or perchance reminiscent of Gyweneth Paltrow and Coldplay's Chris Martin separating and naming their split a "conscious uncoupling," Coward's 1930 production appears more believable decades later, continually relevant for contemporary audiences.

The year is 1987 on an April Saturday at Truvy Jones' beauty salon in a rural parish of Louisiana. Shelby Eatenton will marry Jackson Latercherie surrounded by nine bridesmaids in her favorite color pink instead of the peaches and cream colors her mother M'Lynn Eatenton prefers. With this as the opening scene, Robert Harling's iconic Steel Magnolias ticklesthe funny bones and heartstrings in a way similar to how Shelby joyfully touches her world with pink at Truvy's. Owner Truvy succintly says what she appreciates every Saturday morning in her salon, "Laughter through tears is my very favorite emotion."

While most people recognize the infamous name of President Lincoln's assasin John Wilkes Booth, who might be familiar with his brother's name, Edwin Booth? Acclaimed and award-winning Milwaukee actor Angela Iannone collaborates with Theatre RED and brings Edwin Booth out from his brother's tarnished reputation. Her World Premiere play incorporates further details regarding Booth's life in The Seeds of Banquo, and opens this August as the fourth selection in her Edwin Booth Cycle of Plays.

Ever wondered what was going to happen when the phone ring wakes someone from a drowsy sleep? While technology may have changed since the 1950's, the premise and fear of the unknown ring-ring and who might be calling remains equally fascinating. After sipping a drink under the stars before the performance at Peninsula Players Theatre (PPT) and silencing those cell phones, eagerly enjoy their thriller on stage this July written by Britain's Frederick Knott, his iconic Dial M for Murder.

A few hours after their first production on a Saturday night, Door Shakespeare changes costumes, peotic canons and presents Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at 8:30 p.m.  Under the velvet moonlght of a Bailey's Harbor sky that naturally resembles the darkness  that dominates much of the Bard's iconic story,  the tragic  play unfolds. A riveting Romeo and Juliet theatergoers will remember when the sun sets the following evening regardless of what they have ever known or seen of this production before.