Culture Club

Welcome to the first installment of “Culture Club,” your weekly guide to the Milwaukee arts scene. To those who arrived here looking for the latest on Boy George, my apologies.

The idea here is simple: Every week, I’ll suggest some entertaining and enlightening ways to spend your weekly allotment of leisure time (“Looking Ahead”). I’ll also offer some thoughts on what I’ve seen and heard recently (“Looking Back”), with the hope that you’ll jump in with your own ideas. After all, tossing around ideas after a show or concert can be almost as good as the show itself, especially if there’s good beer involved.

Okay, no Guinness on tap here, but still – Don’t be shy.

You’ll get the hang of it. So for now, onward to….

Looking Ahead:

Whither Milwaukee: It sounds as much like a public policy conference as a music event, but Present Music’s “Art, Architecture and Music” is typical of the group’s always ambitious and interesting programming. The evening will feature projected images of various conceptions of “The New Milwaukee,” a fashion show, and a chat with Milwaukee Art Museum curator Joe Ketner. The music is all about visual art, including a tribute to women artists and several pieces played in different locations around the museum. All in all, it’s not your grandfather’s concert.

Night Moves. After a near three-year hiatus (brought on by labor and financial struggles), the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra is back with a new staff and a new venue: the Calvary Presbyterian Church on 9^th and Wisconsin. “A Little Night Music” features nocturnes (of course) by Dvorak, Mozart and Britten, and Aaron Copland’s lovely “Quiet City.” The MCO’s new music director, Richard Hynson (whom you may know from the Bel Canto Chorus), will conduct.

Them’s Fightin’ Words. Bunny Gumbo’s Combat Theater returns for its winter installment, in which several soon-to-be-bleary-eyed playwrights and actors create and mount short plays in the span of 24 hours. Part of the fun is in the struggle, but there are also lots of chances for great comedic and dramatic moments.

Norman Is That You? Folks at the Milwaukee Rep are glowing over the Wall Street Journal’s recent rave about their ambitious tackling of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, The Norman Conquests. The praise is deserved. Joe Hanreddy’s direction gets the comic tone just right, and the cast (mostly Rep company members) is spot on. Lee Ernst gives an object lesson in comic timing as the reserved neighbor, Tom. And Gerry Neugent lets everything hang loose in a great shaggy-dog performance as Norman. Each play stands alone, but you’re in for a real treat if you can see all three.

Looking Back:

In this installment – looking way back. With new directors of the MAM, MSO and Haggerty Museum all announced recently, there will be much to look forward to this year. So while we can still catch our breath, let’s take a quick look back at 2007. I still have a life, a family and a Mine Sweeper addiction, so I wasn’t able to see everything last year. But I saw a godly number of things around town, and here’s what stuck in my craw and tickled my fancy.

THEATER: It was a year of great duos and solos. You couldn’t beat the energy and drive of Chike Johnson and Wayne T. Carr in Renaissance Theater’s Topdog/Underdog, a production that showed Renaissance isn’t afraid of cutting-edge programming (a tradition it is continuing with the upcoming production of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig). In Renaissance’s Women in Black, Brian Gill and Jonathan Daly showed that great acting chops and a playful spirit could sell a rather moldy crowd pleaser of a script. Molly Rohde and Richard Halverson, in Chamber Theater’s Trying, brought great charm and chemistry to a simple but affecting story.

Solo-wise, it was great to see Carolynne Warren back at the Rep’s Stackner Cabaret in her hilarious Carolin’ Carolynne show. And Norman Moses found a lovely ache amidst the laughs in his portrait of a nebbishy son in Chamber Theater’s Talking Heads. Next Act’s An Interview with Paul Robeson was too crammed with

exposition and factoids to be really great drama, but Paul Mabon captured every ounce of Robeson’s obsessive genius in his soulful voice.

Other shows and performances of note: John Kishline beautifully captured the casual rhythm and nuance of Spalding Gray’s language in Milwaukee Dance Theatre’s Stories Left to Tell. Sanford Robbins directed two terrific shows for The Rep: the rich and quintessentially modern Voysey Inheritance, and the proudly old-fashioned Cyrano de Bergerac. And Laura Gordon showed why she’s one of the city’s best directors with a pitch-perfect version of Edward Albee’s Seascape. There was dazzling ensemble work in Milwaukee Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2. And I’m still hearing the thunder of White Christmas’s tap dancers in my head; I have Pam Kriger’s gleefully retro Skylight production to thank for that.

MUSIC: Classically speaking it was the year of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus and Present Music. Lee Erickson and his MSO singers tackled Beethoven’s daunting Missa Solemnis in the spring, and they did so without seeming to break a sweat (or crack a vocal chord). Rather than taking the rest of the year off, the group went on to revel in Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second. Erickson has been at the helm here almost as long as the legendary Margaret Hawkins, and I think he’s made his mark. Present Music, meanwhile, continued to prove that contemporary art music could be interesting, fun and accessible. It’s hard to imagine a more enjoyably eclectic event than PM’s Thanksgiving concert at St. John’s Cathedral.

In pop music (for lack of a better word), the addition of Turner Hall to the Pabst/Riverside ecosystem added yet another venue for touring music. Time was, Milwaukee was a skip-over spot for bands en route from Chicago to Minneapolis – most groups preferred to hit Madison instead. But local concert life has grown exponentially since Gary Witt took the helm at the Pabst, and we’re a better music city for it. Perhaps the bookers at Summerfest will catch the fever and stop relying on nostalgia acts. My favorite shows of the last year: Rufus Wainwright at the Pabst, which was filmed for a concert DVD by the legendary director Albert Maysles. The Wailers (Summerfest), with their charismatic new singer. And high-voltage performances by Latin groups El Gran Combo (at Summerfest) and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra (Alverno).

DANCE: The Milwaukee Ballet’s best came in their repertory concert last spring: Balanchine’s still fresh and often hilarious Agon, and Trey McIntyre’s helium-light Second Before the Ground. Hamlet was a disappointment, but offered a lesson in the limits of ballet’s ability to plumb character psychology in a clear and compelling way. In smaller venues, Elizabeth Johnson’s troupe, Your Mother Dances, offered the funniest event on any stage with the Nutcracker spoof, Nut/Cracked. And Luc Vanier (Johnson’s husband) offered the most ambitious piece of the season, e’s of Water, which turned UWM’s Kenilworth Hall into a diverse collection of aqua-centric reflections. I also loved Jane Pink and Simone Ferro’s collaboration at Danceworks, a sweetly nostalgiac blending of movement and images.

ART: Sometimes a look back yields interesting connections. I’m thinking a lot about how the MAM’s blockbuster shows, by Francis Bacon and Martin Ramirez, showed different takes on varieties of visual obsessions – Bacon with his popes and meat, and Ramirez with his trains and cowboys. In the smaller venues, the MAM’s Saul Leiter retrospective was a gorgeous look at intimate urban space. And the Haggerty Museum’s “Art and Conflicts in Central Asia” was an important look at art born of postmodern cultural clashes.

FILM: One of the most exciting events of the year was the premiere of Chris Smith’s The Pool at the Milwaukee International Film Festival. The film itself was a sweet and affecting piece of storytelling, filled with beautiful images of everyday Indian life. But the true highlight was seeing the city so excited by a local creation; the line around the Oriental Theater was blocks long and there was a palpable buzz in the air. Here’s hoping that there’s more of that buzz and interest – for all kinds of art – in the year to come.