Far from Broadway, Wisconsin has emerged as a top theatrical destination for critics, actors, and audiences.
For the price of one orchestra seat at a hit New York musical, you can catch half a dozen great shows statewide, from seasonal repertory companies in villages such as Spring Green and Fish Creek to major theatrical houses in Milwaukee and Madison.
Wisconsin’s strong ties to the arts have seen a host of renowned actors appear on its stages. Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy, Gena Rowlands, and Mark Rylance have all trod the Wisconsin boards, while a teenage Gene Wilder broke into acting by performing highlights from Death of a Salesman at Wisconsin women’s clubs.
Willem Dafoe, who was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, was expelled from high school and then dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in order to join Milwaukee’s edgy Theatre X. And Jane Kaczmarek, best known for Malcolm in the Middle, decided to pursue acting at Greendale High School after being inspired by a 1970s production of Our Town starring Judith Light at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. “In Wisconsin, there is a collective spirit of energy and enthusiasm,” she says. “No one is in it for the money.... Theater is truly a labor of love.”
Jeffrey Tambor, who won a Golden Globe for his role in Transparent, recalled his early acting years at the Milwaukee Rep with fondness. “Beginning my career in 1971 as a young Wisconsin actor made me believe in the power of theater,” Tambor says. “People bought tickets for the whole season without knowing what plays were going to be performed.” He adds, “Even blizzards and subzero weather couldn’t stop them from making it to our shows.”
A major reason for theater’s prominence is the state’s extensive support of the arts, which has helped fund companies as diverse as Renaissance Theaterworks, founded and run by women; MKE Black Theatre, committed to cultivating Milwaukee’s Black community; Madison’s StageQ, which promotes queer representation; and the Florentine Opera, Milwaukee’s oldest professional performing-arts organization, established in 1933.
The state attracts big names, with adaptations of hit shows by playwrights such as Jeffrey Hatcher (whose play Compleat Female Stage Beauty became the 2004 film Stage Beauty, starring Claire Danes) and Ayad Akhtar (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for Disgraced). Homegrown fare like Run Bambi Run, a rock musical about a Milwaukee-born police officer turned Playboy Bunny who is convicted of murder, was a huge hit, with a book by the Oscar-winning Wisconsin native Eric Simonson, and with a score by Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano (who acted in Wisconsin theater productions as a child). The latest state initiative is the World Premiere Wisconsin festival, which began last year by showcasing nearly 50 new musicals, plays, and staged readings at theaters statewide.
In 2017, the drama critic Terry Teachout called Spring Green’s American Players Theatre (A.P.T.) “the great open secret of American regional theater” in The Wall Street Journal. “Surprisingly few people outside Wisconsin know of APT’s existence,” he wrote, “yet it is America’s finest classical theater festival.”
The character actor Richard Riehle, who also launched his career there, has a theory as to theater’s perennial appeal in Wisconsin. “I think a big part of the Wisconsin theater story is bad weather five to seven months a year. This makes people want to gather in groups around the warmth and light of a fire to share stories. In the summer months, they look to combine the delight of enjoying their limited time outdoors with the joy of performing [what they] discovered while Persephone was stuck in Hades.”
This fall, promising examples of Wisconsin’s drama scene include the world premiere of Heidi Armbruster’s Murder Girl, at the Forward Theater Company, in Madison; the new musical adaptation of Craig Lucas’s play Prelude to a Kiss, at the Milwaukee Rep; and an adaptation of Kristoffer Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, at Next Act Theatre, in Milwaukee.
Prelude to a Kiss will be on at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, in Milwaukee, from September 10 to October 10. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity will be on at Next Act Theatre, in Milwaukee, from September 11 to October 6. Murder Girl will be on at the Overture Center for the Arts, in Madison, from November 7 to November 24
Roger Rapoport is the author of Searching for Patty Hearst
