Month: May 2024

From our friends, at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre:

“Fifty seasons is a unique and special accomplishment for a performing arts organization of any size, and we’re thrilled and honored to be celebrating it,” says Artistic Director Brent Hazelton. “‘Past, Present, and Future’ feels like an apt theme for an anniversary season, and each of the plays in our 24/25 season focuses on characters examining what has come before to better understand their present in order to build a better tomorrow. We’re thrilled to kick off MCT’s next five decades as we celebrate the legacies of MCT’s founders Montgomery Davis and Ruth Schudson and the leadership of Michael Wright and Kirsten Finn that built MCT into the company that we know and love today.”

Over the past five seasons, MCT has continued its five-decade commitment to strengthening and developing Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s professional artist community while also reflecting the region’s rich cultural diversity at every level of the organization through productions of exceptional plays rooted in rich text from unique voices and perspectives.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT) Artistic Director Brent Hazelton and Managing Director Megwyn Sanders-Andrews, Ph.D., are excited to announce MCT’s 50th Anniversary 2024-2025 season. MCT celebrates this remarkable milestone with a season of reimagined timeless classics, crowd-pleasing favorites, a Milwaukee premiere, and must-see plays from two of America’s greatest living playwrights. The 2024-2025 subscription season—themed “Past, Present, and Future”­—is comprised of:

AN ILIAD  

by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare 

Directed by MCT Artistic Director Brent Hazelton 

Featuring Kellen “Klassik” Abston and N’Jameh Russell-Camara 

September 19 – October 6, 2024 

Milwaukee Youth Arts Center Goodman Mainstage Hall 

A Modern Take On A Timeless Classic | A lone Poet, exhausted from the front lines of history’s epic wars and aided only by a single Muse, steps onto an empty stage and weaves a tale filled with honor and hubris, fortitude and fallibility, and righteousness and blind rage. Intimate, urgent, and incisive, this modern retelling—adapted from Robert Fagles’ gold-standard translation and featuring a live score from Milwaukee’s own Klassik—hones Homer’s epic to a gleaming edge as captivating as it is timeless. 

CLYDE’S  
by Lynn Nottage 

Directed by Dimonte Henning 

Featuring Bryant Bentley, Lachrisa Grandberry, Justin Huen, N’Jameh Russell-Camara, and more to be announced 

November 8 – November 24, 2024 

Broadway Theatre Center Studio Theatre 

2022 Tony Award Nominee for Best Play 

Milwaukee Premiere | From the director of last season’s smash hit THE MOUNTAINTOP comes two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage’s new “flavor-bomb of a comedy” (Variety), that’s “a spicy feast for the senses” (Chicago Sun Times). In a diner kitchen that might be hell, limbo, or just a greasy spoon off the Pennsylvania turnpike, four formerly incarcerated cooks strive for redemption through their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich—all under the devilish gaze of their hard-driving boss. CLYDE’S combines uproarious humor, fulsome heart, and generous hospitality into a delicious theatrical meal that shows why Nottage is among America’s greatest living playwrights.  

A DOLL’S HOUSE 
by Henrik Ibsen, in a new version by Amy Herzog 

Directed by MCT Artistic Director Brent Hazelton 
Featuring Joshua Krause and more to be announced 

January 24 – February 9, 2025 
Broadway Theatre Center Studio Theatre 

2023 Tony Award Nominee for Best Revival 
2023 Drama Desk Award Winner for Best Adaptation 

Classic Masterpiece | For only the second time in 50 years, world-changing dramatist Henrik Ibsen appears in an MCT season! His most famous play, presented here in a compact, devastatingly contemporary, and celebrated new adaptation, shocked audiences and ushered in a new era of theater when it premiered in 1879. Culminating in what George Bernard Shaw described as “the door slam heard round the world,” today it continues to unsparingly examine the difference between being married and living in a true marriage. 

EVERY BRILLIANT THING  
by Duncan McMillan and Johnny Donahoe 

Featuring Elyse Edelman and more to be announced 

February 27 – March 16, 2025  

Milwaukee Youth Arts Center Goodman Mainstage Hall 

Warm-Hearted Favorite | 1: Ice cream. 2: Kung Fu movies. 3: Staying up past your bedtime to watch TV…and those are just the start of a list of every brilliant thing that makes life worth living created through this luminous mix of theater and stand-up. Described by The Guardian as “one of the funniest plays you’ll ever see about depression—and possibly one of the funniest plays you’ll ever see, full stop,” this well-loved coming-of-age story celebrates each of our capacities to delight in the little things and our resilience in going further than we think we can for those we love. 

TOPDOG/UNDERDOG  

by Suzan-Lori Parks 
Featuring Dimonte Henning and Chiké Johnson 

April 25 – May 11, 2025  

Broadway Theatre Center Studio Theatre 

2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama 

2023 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play 

Modern Classic | In this Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece by “the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today” (New York Times), brothers Lincoln and Booth struggle for the upper hand as they grapple with unresolved inheritances and how to play the cards they’ve been dealt. At once a rollicking portrait of sibling rivalry, a probing exploration of the complexity of family, and a resonant allegory of American identity, this can’t miss production will have you howling with laughter one moment and on the edge of your seat the next. 

MCT will perform CLYDE’S, A DOLL’S HOUSE, and TOPDOG/UNDERDOG in the Broadway Theatre Center’s familiar 95-seat Studio Theatre and will perform AN ILIAD and EVERY BRILLIANT THING in the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center’s (MYAC) Goodman Mainstage Hall, an inviting 152-seat in-the-round venue. Each production has been matched with its respective venue to take best advantage of their seating orientations in order to deliver thrillingly intimate experiences for audiences.

Single tickets will go on sale on August 1. For additional information about subscription packages, please visit www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org/24-25-season or call 414-276-8842.