Jay Baker News

Join Milwaukee Repertory Theater as they celebrate "A Night at the Cabaret" at the annual Curtain Call Ball on Saturday, May 12, 2018 at 5:30pm at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater Patty & Jay Baker Theater Complex (108 E. Wells St).  Co-chaired by Laura and Adam Peck and Mara and Craig Swan, the 2018 Curtain Call Ball will feature dinner, dancing, live and silent auction, and a world-class theatrical experience Rep audiences have come to expect.

Gulfshore Playhouse, Naples' premier professional regional theatre, has announced Steve Akin as chair of its Next Stage capital campaign.

Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab today announced the appointment of Gregory Mosher as a new Professor and the first Jay and Patty Baker Chair of Theatre, beginning this semester. As part of the growth of this department, Mosher has Alec Baldwin as a guest lecturer today, Wednesday, September 27th. There will be other special guests brought in to meet students throughout the year.

The legendary story of Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847, arrives as artful, contemporary adaption by Polly Teale in Milwaukee Repertory Theater's season ending production at the Quadracci Powerhouse. Director KJ Sanchez follows Teale's lead and delves deeper into the psychology between Jane and Mr. Rochester's uninhibited, possible mad wife Bertha. The two characters, through actors, Margaret Ivey (Jane) and Rin Allen (Bertha) shadow each other throughout the production. In this adaptation, Bertha appears to mirror Jane's repressed Victorian feelings that literally ignite their lives and  English homestead, Thornfield. 

Actor Frank Ferrante begins on Milwaukee's Stackner Cabaret's stage by walking over to a small table, sitting down, and then placing the iconic thick black mustache and eyebrows defining the indomitable comedian Groucho Marx. In the The Milwaukee Repertory Theater's superb production An Evening With Groucho written by Ferrante and directed by Dreya Weber, the transformation from actor to classic comic spirt engages the audience in a collusion of laughter and humor for all audiences.

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater's multi-award winning play Grounded, grounds a pregnant woman fighter pilot while also grounding the audiences in the intimate Stiemke Studio's compelling and complex production. George Brant's contemporary 2013 play demonstrates how drones have transformed both fighter pilots and the 'games of global war' because in the 21st century, drones hover over the skies of foreign countries similar to space ships in a violent video game. Either movement controlled by one person in a solitary cubicle or sitting in front of a tiny screen. Instead of B-15 bombers that fly into the blue manned by pilots, men and women, presently sit in front of huge screens sequestered in silence waiting and watching for any movement so drones may attack from across the world in the name of 'reducing the loss of human life.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it ain't music." spoke jazz singer Billie Holiday. No singer duplicated Billie Holiday's inimitable voice or immortalized jazz singing and standards quite like this legendary diva.. While Holiday herself idolized Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Lady Day" as she was nicknamed, captured the audience's imagination while breaking their hearts when speaking of her tragic childhood. Unfortunately, the singer's personal demons in love and life were also legendary In a tribute to Holiday's career, Milwaukee Rep's opening Stackner Cabaret Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill features the award-winning Alexis J. Roston portraying the star in her declining years after release from a year's imprisonment on drug related charges, which plagued the star her entire life.

Milwaukee Rep closes a successful season in sublime style staging a production of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play Fences on the Quadracci Powerhouse stage. Lou Bellamy, who worked extensively with the acclaimed African-American playwright at St. Paul, Minnesota's Penumbra Theatre Company, directed the spellbinding Rep performance. On a stunning, realistic set courtesy of Vicki Smith, the Pittsburgh brownstone with a comfortable wood porch, “lays in the lap of the audience on the thrust stage” according to the Rep In Depth, and places Wilson's flawed characters directly near the seats of the theatergoers, Seats where Wilson's portrait of humanity, seen through the African American experience, exposes compassion and struggle.   

Women of the World unite for Milwaukee Rep's poetic, powerful world premiere titled Sirens of Song featuring the musical history through a women's perspective sung through familiar melodies of the 20th century. While the music begins in December 1901 with the Daughters of Freedom, the Stackner Cabaret provides the ultimate setting for Scenic Designer Scott Davis' abandoned clothing shop filled with manikins dressed in period costumes-all surrounded by a grand, gilt broken picture frame where these three actors make their Rep debuts. A revue written by Kevin Ramsey and his niece Pearl Ramsey, the two collaborators weave world events through a century worth of popular music. Woo a women's heart at Milwaukee Rep's poetic, powerful world premiere titled Sirens of Song featuring  history tuned to a women's perspective and sung through familiar melodies of the 20th century. While the music begins in December 1901 with the 'Daughters of Freedom', the Stackner Cabaret provides the ultimate setting for Scenic Designer Scott Davis' abandoned clothing shop filled with manikins dressed in period costumes-all surrounded by a grand, gilt fragmented picture frame where these three actresses open their Rep debuts. A  world premiere revue written by Kevin Ramsey and his niece Pearl Ramsey, the two collaborators weave world events through a century worth of popular music.

Perhaps only someone looking from the the outside can see more clearly than those living on the inside of the United States. This principle operates with brillant clarity when Milwaukee Reperatory Theater presents the World Premiere American Song by acclaimed Ausstralian author and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. The Rep commissioned the play almost four years  iago in 2012 and then opened on the Quadraccie Powerhouse stage this past weekend. Set in the America's heartland, a supposedly rural Wisconsin town, American Players Theatre actor James DeVIta gives an incomprable portrayal of a parent in agony, a father in midlife named Andy.

An economic term defines and unravels the life of an American investment banker held captive by Pakistanis in Milwaukee Rep's current production The Invisible Hand. At the intimate Stiemke Studio, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, educated and raised in a Milwaukee suburb, travels to near future Pakistan in his play where financial markets crash and burn in the first of four Akhtar productions to be staged at The Rep over the nest several years.

Milwaukee Rep's Stackner Cabaret hosts a sultry, sensational evening featuring a brief biographical musical revue of blues star Bessie Smith. Their masterful production, The Devil's Music: The Life and Times of Bessie Smith, a Drama Desk nominated musical by Angela Parro, embraces the essence of the Empress of the Blues through the magnificent voice of Zonya Love, and Bessie's piano man, Pickle, who flashes his fingers on those ivories as DeMone, an actor making his Milwaukee Rep debut.