Charming Comic Satisfaction at MCT’s Jeeves In Bloom

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre welcomes spring to the Cabot Stage at the Broadway Theatre Center with their current production of the wild and witty Jeeves In Bloom. Margaret Raether’s delightful adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories winks at British society with marvelous charm. Stories where the boyishly brash Bertie Wooster survives only by advice given through his impeccable butler Jeeves. MCT reprises these beloved characters from their 2010 production Jeeves Intervenes by taking them to the English countryside.

In Jeeves In Bloom, a lush English rose garden blooms on stage under Scenic Designer Steve Barnes’ talented vision, complete with a fountain, which provides an enchanting setting for any romantic action. The scenery alone breathes warmth into Milwaukee's cold spring and instantly invites the audience to be comfortable for this lighthearted theatrical comedy.

Matt Daniels returns as the astute sophisticated Jeeves, a picture of elegant worldliness. Set up as a foil for Chase Stoeger’s Bertie Wooster, the pair forms a skilled comedic team, Stoeger gives Bertie an added dose of youthful good looks and gestures. Add in the veteran Norman Moses as an egotistical French chef Anatole who doubles as Bertie’s Uncle Thomas, and one has an accomplished trio made for all Raether's action on stage. Debuting Matt Koester enters as Gussie, the scientific nerd knowing everything about lizards named newts, to accompany his school chum Bertie to his Aunt Dahlia’s country house.

Gussie sets much of the plot revolving around his inability to woo Madeline Basset, the object of his affection who was already visiting Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom. When Aunt Dahlia calls Bertie for assistance, Bertie insists Gussie travel with him to court Madeline. Strong woman characters define these performances, the expressive Marcella Kearns humorously cynical as Aunt Dahlia, a publisher of a women’s magazine that “has been turning the corner for two years, “ and desperately needs more funds from her husband to pay the printer for the next issue.

Karen Estrada completely inhabits her scenes as the lovesick Madeline, a lovley complement to the newt man, Gussie. Whether Estrada’s quoting poetry she’s written, feigning Juliet’s despair from Shakespeare’s great tragedy or dropping fantasy lines with aplomb, such as, “Every time a fairy sheds a tear, another star is born in the sky,” as the whimsical Madeline she wins the audience’s heart.

Director Tami Workentin knows Jeeves and company intimately, she fine tuned the last production two year ago, and adds a restrained touch to let the British shenanigans on stage unfold effortlessly instead of overplaying these comic moments. Which really only endears the characters to the audience and their misadventures, all great fun for a evening at MCT. 

Who in the audience could resist adoring the commanding Jeeves as he confidently dispenses his particular brand of common sense to the British upper crust they so desperately need? Come to enjoy and laugh, appreciate the comic antics, rose garden greenery and a marvelously accomplished cast that complements this feel good performance. Chamber Theatre and Jeeves would say, “He (or the company) aim to give satisfaction.”

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Jeeves in Bloom at the Cabot Theatre in the Broadway Theatre Center through April 28, with special programs and talkbacks planned throughout the performance. Season subscriptions are also available for 2013-2014 with the theme: "Our Neighbors and Friends: Behind Closed Doors." For information and tickets, please call: 414.291.7800 or click the link the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre to the left.    by P.S. Dunigan

RIDGE MASTERFULLY STANDS UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL

Playwright Glen Berger’s script conjures a multitude of questions in his play Underneath the Lintel that draws from historical legends and mythology. Written in 2001, the one character drama produced by Milwaukee Chamber Theatre relies considerably on the acting genius of James Ridge, a 16-year veteran imported from Spring Green’s American Players Theatre. His portrayal of a Dutch Librarian searching for a person who would return a traveler’s guide in deplorable condition 113 years overdue will visibly move the audience when he leaves the stage 90 plus minutes after they sit down.

Luckily for Chamber Theatre audiences, Ridge deftly handles the nuances to the this bereft Librarian’s persona, who since losing the love of his life spends all his time stamping books returned in the library’s night slot. Without sitting to rest for the entire performance and no intermission, Ridge mysteriously follows the clues he uncovers in the overdue book over centuries and continents through his knowledge of reference materials. As the audience eventually discovers, The Librarian then unknowingly follows the path of what is known as the Errant, Eternal or Wandering Jew.

Art, drama, literature and music retell these wanderer stories through the eyes of various cultures and Berger intertwines this history with his mix of quirky humor befitting a Dutch librarian trapped in his small town. Poignant moments reflecting questions that have haunted humanity drift through the dialogue that also reawakens curiosity in the audience.

Initially, Ridge’s quest appears ludicrous, and the audience needs to sit back and enjoy the preliminary storytelling. Before Berger and Ridge fully confront what “underneath the lintel” eventually means and the subsequent journey. For those unacquainted with this tale, transcendence waits, when the audience fully comprehends everything that can happen underneath the lintel.

Which perhaps begins when the Jewish nation first painted their lintels with blood so the angel of death would spare them from an Egyptian Pharaoh’s captivity and destructive curse. This became the Jewish Passover, a precursor to the wandering Jew legend, which supposedly occurred during Holy Week.

Ridge carries the audience and the weight of the wandering Jew’s journey by using numbered evidence to prove this person may actually exist. The only concern The Librarian faces could be if he proves this legend as true, then must God truly exist as well? Which opens a whole Pandora’s box of existential mysteries: Why is each person here? What is love? And what constitutes one person's existence in a short span on earth? 

These questions only subtly reflect the themes in Berger’s play, carried out on a lonely auditorium stage, where a chalkboard, humble desk, dilapidated suitcase and slide projector are effectively interchanged. Chamber Theatre’s compelling Underneath the Lintel may be appreciated on multiple levels. Even if only to marvel at Ridge's perfromance, again directed by C. Michael Wright, to attain this command of the stage. His ability to captivate the audience in this highly intellectual but humorous play reveals another one of drama’s reflection on “everyman," pertinent to each person sitting in the audience.

While Underneath the Lintel applies few answers to the questions the play poses, the script is well worth revisiting. In a flight of fancy at the final scene, the constantly in motion Librarian and an effervescent, masterful Ridge dance off the stage. When The Librarian believes life needs to be cherished when one discovers those moments to “revel in mirth and beauty.”

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Underneath the Lintel ias part of the "Exploring Jewish Voices" series n the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through March 17. The company also presents a staged reading of Plaza Hotel Ballroom by Alice Austen on Monday, March 4, 7:30 p.m in the Skylight Bar & Bistro. There annual Young Playwrights Festival happens the weekend of March 21-24. For further information and tickets, please call: 414. 291.7800 or click the link to the left.      by Peggy Sue Dunigan

CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS TO “COLLECTED STORIES” ON STAGE AT CHAMBER THEATRE

When family or friends tell a story, whether in confidence or jest, whose story does this become when the words enter the wider world? When words go forth through the lips, Facebook or twitter does this suddenly place the stories into public domain?

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre explores these interesting questions in their current production Collecting Stories. Pulitzer Prize winning writer Donald Marqulies based his award winning play on an actual legal case from 1993. When novelist David Leavitt drew “inspiration” and material from a British author’s autobiography. The writer, Stephen Spender, eventually won an out of court settlement where Leavitt’s original books were then destroyed.

Marqulies recreates this scenario with more at stake than “collected and recycled stories," or publishing rights.  In a period of time covering six years, acclaimed author Ruth Steiner accepts a student in her class, Lisa Morrison, to work as her personal assistant. Over this time, Steiner helps develop Morrison’s talent as a successful writer. The pair also assumes a surrogate mother/daughter relationship, so when Lisa appropriates several of Ruth’s most intimate stories, Ruth feels betrayed and bereaved.

American Players Theatre actor Sarah Day illuminates the cranky and quirky Steiner, a Jewish woman who lives partially in the past glory of Manhatten’s Greenwich Village during the neighborhood’s heyday in the first half of the 20^th century. She has built an artistically renowned career, yet longs for her youth and “more” from her lonely writing life.

As Morrison, Laura Frye carefully evolves into a writer who discovers her literary footing by worshipping Steiner, clinging to every word she utters. Ultimately mourning the loss of the main woman in her life after writing her new novel, Morrison claims she has only attempted to honor Steiner's personhood and help define her life from an alternate perspective.

These circumstances become pertinent dilemmas to be discussed. In an age where authors write autobiographies while “inventing” their lives and New York Times Newspaper reporters fictionalize facts for articles, how can a reader decipher the truth or what to believe and is this important for fiction?

Multiple websites and individuals claim sentences, paragraphs and stories from the internet without permission or acknowledging copyrights, freely appropriating information as people once downloaded music and movies from the world web. Where does “collecting information, stories and songs” begin and end?

The advice Steiner gives to Morrison appears highly relevant, great wisdom for those who write. However, if these two women really loved each other as the script portrays, something surely would have been mentioned before these final actions. While the Leavitt/Spender legal case involved two less invested individuals, Margulies’s captivating play leaves sparse redemption for two friends who supposedly respected each other as the play describes, perhaps to heighten the play’s concluding scenes.   

Decide the answers to these questions by investing in Day and Frye who recreate a stunning Steiner and Morrison under C. Michael Wright’s accomplished direction. The definition of "intellectual property" remains a continually disturbing dilemma, similar to telling stories to friends, in real sentences with words or written on Facebook. There can be consequences to these actions, and in a less face to face world, people become bolder in what they write on walls and then take away without any remorse. Perhaps everyone needs to be more sensitive of what can be put into public space as MCT’s Collected Stories so powerfully illustrates.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Collected Stories at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre through December 16. For further programming in coordination with the company’s “Exploring Jewish Voices” and the play's collaboration with Madison’s Forward Theater Company, the production moves to the Overture Center beginning January 16. For further information on programming or tickets, please call  414.291.7800 or click the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre link to the left.   by Peggy Sue Dunigan 

MCT'S BROKEN AND ENTERED SHATTERS TRIO OF LIVES IN SUBLIME PLAY

The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Broken and Entered will definitely shatter the audience’s expectations at the conclusion. Similar to the glass window broken in the very first scene, when the audience waits through the blackness of a completely dark theatre before the cast enters on stage. The complex, richly nuanced world premiere production written by Kurt McGinnis Brown was featured at a play reading for MCT in 2010, and comes fully produced for their current season this fall courtesy of the Montgomery Davis Play Development Series.

Brown places on stage two brothers figuratively and literally wrestling with their individual lives at the age of thirty something while grappling with the recent death of their mother. Only several years apart in age, Vern and Wally contemplate opposite visions in life seen through divergent lenses. Vern, a half delusional, semi distraught Jonathan Leslie Wainwright, tries to convince his attractive, optimistic brother Wally, the very likeable and sympathetic Andrew Edwin Voss, to rid their boyhood home of all its belongings. This task would clean up what they name “the stink” of their abusive father and supposedly give them a new lease, or actual house, in life.

The only problem to their plan could be the house they inherited stands in a now poor, somewhat corrupt neighborhood, unable to be sold at a premium or any fair price after their mother’s death. Without income or goals themselves, the two devise some unusual plans for refurbishing the house before trying to sell it: Breaking and entering upscale neighborhood properties to “borrow” new doormats and plush towels that substitute for their old ones.

That is, until Wally falls in love with someone he waited tables on at a fancy fundraiser, the beautiful, rich Jamilla. Wally suddenly realizes she lives in his own neighborhood, only a few blocks away. He’s smitten with Jamilla, as black as Wally is white, that actor Marti Gobel conceives with a sexual chill. She’s already devised her own plans for breaking into their old neighborhood where she was unwelcome as a child. Where she learned to disown her confusing emotions and harbor her distrust for white people.

MCT debut Director Susan Fete conjures ambiguity from this cast with deft skill, entering the character’s tenuous love-hate relationships so the play cracks with both elements of revenge and possible redemption. Discovering the multiple meanings to the term “broken and entered.” The approach presents a beguiling two-act evening.

The three cast members interact primarily in the dilapidated interior of the childhood home where past memories continually challenge the emotional borders and realities Jamilla, Vern and Wally set for themselves. A shifting space where the audience waits, unaware of what will happen. After the final window is broken within the last few minutes of the play, the audience leaves with spellbinding questions to contemporary issues of community, poverty, housing practices and racial tension, pondering all that has been shattered in these three lives.

An impressive Wisconsin playwright, Brown produces this latest sensitive and suspenseful play developed after he received awards from competitions around the country for his previous work. He puts before the audience wounded individuals, often observed in life and misunderstood, that the audience will connect to. With Vern, the son who wants to escape his disturbing upbringing and father. Or Wally, a man who deeply desires a future and love, and then last, Jamilla, the lost little girl grown into a woman who connives to attain her own brand of reconciliation for past losses.

Be completely engrossed in MCT’s intriguing performance, especially for the final scenes, which could turn the audience’s hearts on end and centers on the compelling cast. Applaud this sublime performance at the Broadway Theatre Center for MCT’s world premiere production, Broken and Entered.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Kurt McGinnis Brown's Broken and Entered at the Broadway Theatre Center through October 14. For a MCT ViewPoints presentation attend on Wednesday, October 3 beginning at 6:30 p.m. when playwright Kurt McGinnis Brown discusses his play. For further information or tickets, please call: 414.291.7800 or click the link to the left.          by Peggy Sue Dunigan

A SPLENDID CAST OPENS CHAMBER THEATRE’S ONE THOUSAND CLOWNS

A splendid cast currently occupies the Cabot Theatre for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s 2012-2013 season opening selection One Thousand Clowns. Written by the award winning Herb Gardner, the play inaugurates the company’s “Exploring Jewish Voices” series in collaboration with the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and the Jewish Community Center.

Set in the year 1962, Gardner’s play speaks from the heart of New York Jewish culture that celebrates delicatessens and pastrami sandwiches. However, Gardner’s very sophisticated humor reaches far beyond merely a passion for pastrami, whether one loves delicatessen’s or not. A culinary preference the main character Murray Burns uses to asses an individual’s personal worth.

Jonathan West debuts as a MCT director in a primarily delicatessen loving cast that deliciously keeps the comic timing on a fast course. Murray Burns, the delightfully irreverent Tom Klubertanz, embraces the philosophy of an imaginative man, more intent on experiencing life than working in life. He reluctantly becomes the unintended guardian of his 12-year-old nephew Nick Burns. A character professionally played by Thomas Kindler from First Stage Children’s Theater Academy in this far beyond his years accomplished role as Nick.

Nick landed on Murray's doorstep when he was only six because Murray's sister dropped him there "temporarily" after her several divorces, although she never married Nick’s father. While spending the next six years with his uncle, the grown boy genius attracts the attention of the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare through his exclusive school where Murray's unorthodox parenting skills come into question which sets the scenes for the play's action. Many scenes then set in Murray’s one room apartment with a rumpled, rummage sale décor that includes a female statuette with a blinking light chest, courtesy of Scenic Designer Brandon Kirkham.

Acting for the NYC Bureau of Child Welfare, Matt Daniels as Albert Amundson and Beth Mulkerron as Dr. Sandra Markowitz present the intellectual, rational side of life, which prefers studying hard to success. They inquisitively interview Murray and Nick to the suitability of Murray’s home life while they curiously examine their own motivations and romantic inclinations that climax at the welfare interview. The play somehow slyly ponders what parenting style could better motivate a child during these formative years? 

Gardner then adds Murray’s brother Arnold to the mix, the affable Patrick Lawlor, who contrasts the eccentric and exuberant Murray playing a sibling proud that he works diligently to support his own home. When Murray desperately needs a job to appease the Bureau of Child Welfare at a court hearing, Albert reinstates Murray’s old job of writing for Leo "Chuckles the Chipmunk" Herman, an actor on a children's show that advertises for potato chips bearing the animal’s name. Stephan Roselin deftly steps into the slightly derelict Herman's shoes.

Within the span of two acts over two plus hours, Gardner delivers a rare rebel for the 1960’s: A single man substituting for a parent played by a creative character like Murray. Someone infinitely worried as much about conforming and losing his own identity in the world as he is about losing the nephew he loves. A wacky but warmhearted father/son relationship often ignored in the 60's as it might be in 2012. This poignant play also depicts brothers, who although polar opposites in personality, deeply care for each other. A chance encounter with demonstrations of unlikely and intimate male bonding portrayed on stage without sentimentality or violence only realistic sincerity and struggle. 

This outstanding six-member cast feeds the evening with uncanny humor, a not to be missed summer treat that offers a buffet of talent. Including a touching ukulele duet of  “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and a surprise finale that Milwaukee audiences will treasure. This August, be a lover of delicatessens and laughter that feasts on life affirming affection at Chamber Theatre’s entertaining One Thousand Clowns.   

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents One Thousand Clowns in the Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through August 26, with several special programs planned in collaboration with the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and the Jewish Community Center. For further information and tickets call: 414.291.7800 or click the link to the left.                                                                                                     by Peggy Sue Dunigan

MCT's "Crimes of the Heart": A Guilty Pleasure                                                August 13, 2011

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT) opens their season by transforming "one very bad day" on the Cabot Stage into one thoroughly entertaining evening. This one chaotic day at the Broadway Theatre Center in the 1981 Pulitzer Prize production Crimes of the Heart presents the three McGrath sisters from Hazlehurst, Mississippi who attempt to make sense of their rural Southern dysfunction. 

Playwright Beth Henley’s tragic comedy focuses on Lenny McGrath (Laura Gray) who laments when celebrating her 30^th birthday (which everyone forgot) that she’s unloved and unmarried. Meg (Georgina McKee), the beautiful and wild sister, returns from California where she pursued a singing career, although she often endured more psychiatric episodes than paying singing gigs. At the age of 24, youngest sister Babe Botrelle (Laura Frye) recently shot her abusive husband because she claimed, “She just didn’t like his looks.”

There’s much more to these Southern hearts that humorously unravels on stage throughout the three acts. Even with two intermissions, the production moves with seamless pacing while these emotional events unfold with reliable plausibility. All because the audience learns that the girls’ father deserted them, their mother hung herself along with a yellow cat and the socially elitist grandparents raised the trio, so no one questions each sister’s everyday insanity. Simultaneously, the Southern flavored culture speaks with tenderness to what Meg calls, “The human need to talk about our lives.” 

The 'talking about their lives' satirically comes through the dialogue whether complaining about lines in their aging faces or arguing over childhood trivialities including how many bells were on their Christmas skirts. These sisters tell each other what most people only think. Set in Scenic Designer’s Rick Rassmusen’s expansive kitchen that exudes hospitality, the audience immediately feels invited on stage from the first scenes with an impressive sketch by Chick Boyle (Karen Estrada) pulling on skimpy pantyhose. Drawing ample chuckles from men and women, every female could relate to this frequent necessity as one audience member remarked, “She should have received a standing ovation for doing that.” 

Director Mary MacDonald Kerr leads these misguided antics and souls though traumatic emotional territory with self assured finesse. Gray, McKee, and Frye uncover the fine line between these ambivalent moments, especially portrayed by Frye’s Babe when she inhabits her childlike illusions in an effort to prevent the consequences to her adult gun-toting crime. The entire performance resonates with the foibles to being a family threesome: the betrayal of confidences, the constant competitiveness experienced during love or life and the continual sibling rivalry regarding which sister Grandaddy loved more. (Even as Grandaddy lies in coma at the hospital, the girls gladly aware of their eventual freedom from his eccentricities.)

How do these sisters survive their trials and tribulations? This is the secret revealed after Babe unsuccessfully tries to follow in her mother's footsteps, tripped up by a thin rope and cheap light fixture. Henley’s and the production’s great secret, so timelessly dramatized in the final scenes: Suffering together proves to be the bond that ultimately brings sanity to these misfortunes. Accomplished when sitting at the kitchen table blowing out candles for wishes on Lenny’s one-day late birthday cake and learning to laugh at each other. More than merely a chick night out, MCT’s delightful guilty pleasure Crimes of the Heart delivers a poignant high. That on stage or off, laughing and loving in those rare moments of togetherness provide the perfect antidote for all those very bad days. Then as Babe claims, “One’s not so all alone.” 

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Crimes of the Heart at the Broadway Theatre Center through August 28. Henley’ s 1981 Pulitzer Prize winning play was the first won by a women after 21 years. For information or tickets call: 414.291.7800 or www.milwaukeechambertheatre.com, www.chamber-theatre.com