fall arts guide

What’s behind this special connection you have with Milwaukee? It was alcohol. I just have always had an affinity for the whole area. You guys just seem to get it. If it weren’t so f—ing cold, I probably would’ve moved to Chicago and spent more time there.  What are some of your favorite haunts in town? Bartolotta has great restaurants. And the bars I’ve just stumbled into, which are too many to mention. Water Street. I spend way too much time on Water Street. When you know it’s one of those streets that you might have been found dead on,…

He’s gone from stand-up comedian to a sitcom about life as a stand-up comedian to hosting a Web series featuring cars, coffee and interviews with, you guessed it, comedians. But Jerry Seinfeld still stands and delivers, too. These days, the 60-year-old is married and raising the couple’s three kids, which might sound like a sitcom pitch. But he says he’ll never do another one of those. Oct. 10. Riverside Theater. When the new year approaches, you expect two things: the ball dropping in New York, and Jim Gaffigan dropping into Milwaukee. Married to a Milwaukeean, he keeps celebrating the holidays…

1. What happens when a group known for making beautiful music adds a world-renowned violinist to its ranks? Does it make beautiful-er music? We can’t answer that without further mangling the Queen’s English, but we will be in the audience to see what happens when the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra welcomes violinist Frank Almond as its first artist-in-residence. Oct. 15. Schwan Concert Hall.  2. The city’s second-largest theater company – and yes, it’s a kids troupe – begins its 28th season with a world premiere of Eric Coble’s Sherlock Holmes: The Baker Street Irregulars. First Stage will re-create the streets…

Photo by Tom Bamberger.  Dancers have their signature apparel: tutus and toe shoes for ballet, top hat and tails for Broadway hoofers, T-shirts and Chuck Taylors for the postmodern crowd. But for Debra Loewen, artistic director of Wild Space Dance Company, the appropriate outfit might be a hard hat and steel-toed boots.  At least when she’s in the early stages of planning one of her company’s site-specific dance performances, which have been a fixture on the scene for more than 25 years. Through many of those events, Loewen has drawn on her deeply felt interest in Milwaukee as a “city…

1. Alverno Presents has formed a fruitful partnership with choreographer Molly Shanahan and her Mad Shak dance company. The group has been in residence at the school, and Shanahan has performed at the college with her company in 2009 and as a soloist in 2012. This year, Mad Shak is back with The Delicate Hour. To judge from Shanahan’s past work, it will be a fragile, beautiful thing. Oct. 24-25. Mitchell Hall.  2. Don’t be fooled by the iconic titles in the Milwaukee Ballet’s upcoming season. Many of these classics have been re-imagined by MB artistic director Michael Pink. Don…

Ambition seems to come naturally to Gretchen Mahkorn. As artistic director of the World’s Stage Theater Company, she has already produced more than twenty shows, including several adventurous plays that more mainstream companies wouldn’t touch. She studied Shakespearean acting one summer at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and in 2013, brought TWS’s production of Waiting … A Song Cycle to the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. It would be an impressive list of achievements for a midcareer producer-director-actor. But Mahkorn is just 21.  She is a Milwaukee native, a graduate of Pius XI High…

Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau.  The flamboyant entertainer with West Allis roots had a talent for tickling the ivories that was rivaled only by his expert showmanship. Play along with us. By Tim McCormick 1. True or False When Wladziu Valentino Liberace began his career, playing movie houses and saloons, he adopted the stage name “Walter Busterkeys.” 2. True or False Liberace, escorted to the ring by the Rockettes, worked the very first “WrestleMania” in 1985 as a guest timekeeper.  3. True or False Liberace’s Las Vegas mansion, which, according to the musician, included a $1.5 million…

1. Scanning last season for a theatrical tour de force, it was hard to overlook Jason Powell’s turn as Satan in Temptation’s Snare, the Danceworks/Present Music collaboration that modernized Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale. We’re not sure if he’ll wax poetic in Destiny, Deviltry and Dentistry. But working with fellow funnyman Doug Jarecki, there’s certain to be a touch of the absurd in this evening of short plays. Sept. 4-20. Alchemist Theatre. (PK) 2. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre shines in intimate, probing dramas. And artistic director C. Michael Wright has found a gripping one in Christian O’Reilly’s The Good Father, a little-known…