This week’s pickings are slim. Most companies are closing out their holiday shows, and others are taking a needed breather from the mad holiday rush. With 2009 peeking over the foreboding horizon, it’s time to look back on the past year. 
The biggest cultural story of the last year will certainly be a premonition of the coming year. Milwaukee Shakespeare, lead for the past five years by Artistic Director Paula Suozzi, suddenly closed its doors after the stock market crash forced the Argosy 
Foundation to pull its sizable contribution to the company. Although just one company of many, Milwaukee Shakespeare’s demise will have a huge impact on the Milwaukee theater scene. Its visually and conceptually inventive takes on Shakespeare gave audiences chance to think outside the box—an important force in a community that is pretty much wedded to traditional psychological realism on stage. It also gave many local actors one or two more shows to include in their roster of paid gigs, giving a couple of more reasons to make their home here. Without Milwaukee Shakes, Milwaukee’s theater scene will be a little bit blander and less hospitable for working artists. A lose-lose situation.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Most arts groups will face formidable challenges in the coming year. By this time next year, we may be lamenting more losses.
With tha
t in mind, let’s toast 2008’s Artist of the Year, who dealt with financial challenges while moving his organization ahead in exciting new directions. And also served some time in the director’s chair and did his theater proud. C. Michael Wright has spent his three years at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre well. He realigned the aesthetic mission of the theater to include more contemporary work; he added a play development program focusing on local and Midwest playwrights; and he helped erase the deficit he inherited when he became its artistic director in 2005. At the same time, he has directed some terrific productions, helping actors like Jonathan West and Laura Grey (Talley’s Folly), and Jacque Troy, Stephen Koehler and Jan Rogge (Rabbit Hole) find the nuances and substance of beautifully written characters.
That’s not the end of 2008’s list of great performances. Molly Rohde was dazzlingly eclectic, moving from the sweet and soulful (Olivia in Milwaukee Shakes’ Twelfth Night) to the broad and brassy (Skylight’s Ulla in The Producers). Acting-wise, the two most dazzling ensembles could be found in Next Act’s Faith Healer (directed by Edward Morgan) and the Milwaukee Rep’s Glengarry Glen Ross. And Laura Gordon continued to make her mark as a Milwaukee director with great shows, particularly her wonderfully soulful take on Edward Albee’s Seascape. Other performances of note: Ruth Schudson, deadpan and wonderfully human in Chamber Theatre’s Well. Nicholas Harazin stood out from the large ensemble in Renaissance Theatreworks’ The Persians. And The Rep gave us two dazzling solo performances: Deborah Staples in The Rep’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, and Michael Gotch in I Am My Own Wife.
In the dance scene, there were a lot of wonderful moments. I have to admit, though, that the best thing I saw was just out of town (at UW-Madison’s Union Theatre)
. Savion Glover’s Bare Soundz, an amazing show of unaccompanied tap dancing, was a rapid-fire evening of both pleasure and insight. Glover and his two dancers performed on miked and raised platforms, allowing their feet to create a full-sonic spectrum of percussion. Heel stomps hit you in the chest like a thundering drum, and delicate toe-work tickled the ear like a Philly Jo Jones cymbal riff. In fact, the ecstatic call-and-response riffing and bouts of free-wheeling improvisation drew a through-line from this very modern dance form to the ancient traditions of African drumming and dance
. 
Closer to home, there was plenty to excite and delight. Your Mother Dances came back with a bigger, bolder encore of David Parker’s Nut/Cracked, and may have started a new holiday tradition. Kelly Anderson’s solo in Danceworks’ Have A Seat program showed why she’s one the area’s most accomplished movers and sometimes shakers. Wild Space’s Map of Memories was one of Deborah Loewen’s finest works, with a particularly moving duet by Jade Jablonski and Katie Sopoci. And the Milwaukee Ballet’s performance of Nelly van Bommel’s “Gelem, Gelem” showed just how well fresh, innovative choreography sits on its fine dancers. In a more traditional vein, the ballet’s restaging of Anthony Tudor’s Offenbach in the Underworld was a comic gem.
In classical music, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was a glimpse of a bright future under new music director Edo de Waart. And Present Music’s programs continued to break barriers and make contemporary art music interesting to growing audiences. PMs Milwaukee Art Museum concert, in which musicians played chamber pieces in various museum galleries, was a bit chaotic to manage, but paid off by creating some dazzling juxtapositions of sight and sound.
In art, the big news was the growth of innovative new galleries. White Whale, The Portrait Society, Borg-Ward, The Armoury and Spackle joined The Green Gallery, P
aper Boat and other more established venues to provide a great network for artists and audiences interested in emerging, out-of-the-box work. With the release of Handmade Nation, her documentary film and book about the DIY art movement, Paper Boat’s Faythe Levine continued to gain national attention as an “Ambassador of Do-It-Yourself.” Among the big kids on the block, my favorite shows were the MAM’s Act/React, a tech-heavy, interactive show that had a surprising amount of heart and soul. And the Haggerty Museum’s retrospective of Stephen Shore’s photographs, an eye-opening testament to one of America’s great masters.
And it’s appropriate to also talk about the Milwaukee “film scene,” even in the absence of the Milwaukee International Film Festival. This year, Chris Smith’s star continued to rise 
with the theatrical release of The Pool, his beautiful drama that played at the MIFF in September of 2007. The film won several awards on the festival circuit, and it prompted the Museum of Modern Art to feature Smith in a career retrospective.
Even after the collapse of the MIFF, former Artistic Director Jonathan Jackson continued it mission with a new organization, Milwaukee Film, which sponsored several memorable screenings in the fall, including Song Sung Blue, Greg Kohs’ award-winning documentary about local music duo Thunder & Lightning; and The Milwaukee Show, an evening of locally-produced shorts.
And UWM’s Union Theatre kept Milwaukee tuned in to the increasing growth of the independent film scene. With major theater chains like Landmark and Marcus continued focus on big-studio Hollywood product, it was the Union Theatre that brought us several of the notable indie releases of 2008, including Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, Aleksander Sokurov’s Alexandra, and Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, Nina Davenport’s Operation Filmmaker, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, and the acclaimed Katrina documentary Trouble the Water. If you’re looking for movies that are likely to populate critics list at the end of 2009, check the Union Theatre Calendar first.
So that’s 2008 at a glance (a limited glance to be sure, since I’m not able to see everything in town). Here’s hoping for a safe, rewarding and solvent 2009.
