magazine

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…

Neil Degrasse Tyson, courtesy of David Gamble 1. If there’s such a thing as a rock star astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson is it. After putting a wrap on FOX’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” he now takes his explanatory show on the road. Dec. 11. Riverside Theater.  Slavne, Ukraine, from You Are Here, courtesy of NASA 2. Another spaceman visits when Col. Chris Hadfield, a former resident of the International Space Station, brings copies of You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes, which features impressive images (below) from his travels. Nov. 13. Boswell Book Company.  3. Self-taught photographer Leanne Parshelle caught…

1. After a French company caught wind of local artist Niki Johnson’s Eggs Benedict, which featured a portrait of Emeritus Pope Benedict woven from 17,000 condoms, the company bequeathed 1.2 million prophylactics that were nearing expiration. She gladly accepted and has spent the past year organizing Preservatif, which features work spun from latex by local and national artists and opens World AIDS Day. Dec 1-6. Pritzlaff Building. (DB) 2. One of the most unpredictable and lively annual exhibitions is the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists. Via the largesse of deceased artist Mary Nohl, seven artists…