Experience the journey of a young girl’s strength and determination in a theatrical adaptation of a modern literary classic.
MILWAUKEE — First Stage — one of the nation’s leading theaters for young people and families — invites audiences to witness the world premiere of ESPERANZA RISING, a poetic tale of a young girl’s triumph over adversity based on the popular book by Pam Muñoz Ryan.
Set in the turbulent 1930s, two young storytellers, with the help of an ensemble of actors, take the stage and begin to weave the tale of Esperanza — a wealthy Mexican girl whose privileged existence is shattered when tragedy strikes, and she and her mother must flee to California. Forced to work in a migrant labor camp, Esperanza must learn to rise above her difficult circumstances and discover what she’s truly made of.
“Our Todd Wehr season concludes with an exhilarating world premiere from our First Stage’s Amplify Reading Series,” said Jeff Frank, First Stage artistic director. “Playwright-in-residence Alvaro Saar Rios has crafted a nimble version of the story with two storytellers welcoming us into the world of the modern classic novel by Pam Muñoz Ryan magically lifted by the music of composer Dinorah Marquez. The importance of hope and the power of family resonate deeply as the storytellers guide us through Esperanza’s loss of her home and her journey to make a new life.”
ESPERANZA RISING runs May 2 through 18, 2025, at the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Todd Wehr Theater. Tickets are available now on FirstStage.org.
The show runs approximately 75 minutes, including a brief intermission. Recommended for families with young people ages 7-17 and theater lovers of all ages. This production’s Pay What You Choose Performance is on Friday, May 9 at 7:00 p.m., the Sensory Friendly Performance is on Saturday, May 17 at 3:30 p.m., and the Sign Language Interpreted Performance is on Sunday, May 18 at 3:30 p.m.
As you start to settle into your seat in the Todd Wehr Theater, you realize that you are now in a new and exciting undersea environment. First you take in the organic stage shapes that define a reef and other underwater environments and then you notice the waving blue lights that depict sunlight streaming through the surface waves and you are transported. So before our musical actually begins, Scenic Designer Kristin Ellert and Lighting Designer Jason Fassl, have put us in the right frame of mind to enjoy Finding Nemo.
There is a large ensemble here and as always there is a core of adult actors that play the major adult roles and then two casts of young people who perform at alternate performances. So if you are looking to see a certain performer, please check the performance schedule. There are links below.
Cast in Disney & Pixar’s FINDING NEMO TYA. First Stage, 2025. Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
The version of Finding Nemo is an adaptation of the famous Disney + Pixar movie so most of the audience is going to be familiar with the story, but maybe not the storytelling! I mean, how do you depict the action of an animated movie, live on stage! Well, with a lot of very enthusiastic and dramatic actors…and a whole ocean of puppets!
Two of the three main characters are played by adults, Jake Horstmeier as Marlin, Nemo’s Dad, and Karen Estrada as Dory, a friend that Marlin meet’s along the way in his search for Nemo. Estrada plays off Dory’s bit of forgetfulness and brings out the happy and determination in the character. And when Marlin starts to give up hope or strays away from the task at hand, she is able to help him focus and stay on track. Horstmeier is a clearly determined and loving father here but shows us the occasional frailty in Marlin as his determination flags a bit from time to time. Horstmeier and Estrada clearly enjoy their characters and just as clearly enjoy working together.
Lainey Techtmann (center) and cast in Disney & Pixar’s FINDING NEMO TYA. First Stage, 2025. Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
But of course the actual star of the show is Nemo! And here is where the split in casts takes command. In the Orange Cast, Lainey Techtmann plays Nemo and in the Blue Cast the role belongs to Simone Gong-Murray. When I attended for the Sunday matinee, Techtmann was on stage and absolutely nailed the role. I was pleased to see her on stage again, having enjoyed her depictions of Tiny Tim in the Rep’s A Christmas Carol.
Now there are a lot of other characters here…and every member of the ensemble played multiple roles. And this is where the puppets come in!
Mara Iligaray (center) and cast in Disney & Pixar’s FINDING NEMO TYA. First Stage, 2025. Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
Rather than elaborate costumes and intense and time consuming costume changes, each actor carried a stunning puppet for each role. Sunfish, starfish, barracuda, sharks, octopi, seahorses, sea turtles, and a tall tall shore bird were all represented by puppets, as well as Nemo, Dory, and Marlin. Most of these puppets were carried on the shoulder of the actor who supported them on a stick near the tail and a mechanism at the head that provided support and the action to make the mouth move. And the bodies are articulated so the actor can make movements with the puppet that resemble swimming. So besides singing, dancing, and speaking their roles, the actors had to remember to swim their puppets and move their mouths to simulate their speech as they told the story. Simply amazing!
And I have no idea who Puppet Designer Jesse Mooney-Bullock managed to produce such a unique array of puppets and teach everyone in their use. I enjoyed this aspect of the production very much. And also special thanks to Directors Jeff Frank and Michael Dean Morgan for making all of this work. Just moving around all of these characters much less making it all work with such precision and grace is amazing.
And I was not the only one amazed. At the end of every performance, the cast assembles on stage and takes a few questions from the audience. Two questions about the puppets came from youngsters in the audience. One wanted to know how hard was it to learn to work with the puppets. And a cast member assured them that it took a lot of work but after a while it got easier but it took a lot of practice. And the second question was why they used puppets instead of costumes, and another cast member stated that it easier to switch to a different puppet for a role change than doing a costume change and moving with the puppet was easier to do.
Disney + Pixar’s Finding Nemo, Theatre For Young Audiences Version, continues at the Marcus Performing Arts Center at the Todd Wehr Theater through April 6, 2025. Additional information and tickets can be found here.
Run time is about 75 minutes with a brief intermission and Finding Nemo is recommended for ages 5 and older!
In his Rep in Depth presentation on opening night, Matt Daniels explained the genesis of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Always the ready adapter of a good story, Shakespeare had plenty of potential sources and Daniels lists the myriad of poems, novellas, dramas, legends, etc that preceded the play that he wrote…the most famous and most popular play on stages to this day…and onto the contemporary version, West Side Story. And then a touch on the shift to Appalachia for this adaptation and the dialects there being the closest contemporary dialects to those of Elizabethan England. Intriguing. He even brings up the ‘parallel’ of the Hatfields and McCoys vs. Capulets and Montagues. More on the Appalachia thing later. And finally, since we all know the story, why do we all continue to seek out presentations of Romeo and Juliet. As Daniels said, spoiler alert, they all die. But we still find hope in the story?
The cast of Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater
Director Laura Braza adapted this version of Romeo and Juliet and sets us in Appalachia and brings into the staging, some bluegrass or early country music. This is the third Shakespeare play in recent memory where the Rep has included contemporary music as a supporting motif….Braza’s Much Ado About Nothing and Daryl Cloran’s As You Like It. Braza has such a clear sense of the story and is such a solid story teller, I don’t think she needed this bit of stage play. And she hews so near the original text and working with the spare stage, this is clearly what Shakespeare would be doing in 2025. But being able to dress the characters in modern dress and working with contemporary accents eliminates distractions and the audience is bound to the story through the text and the action.
The cast of Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater
Romeo and Juliet requires a rather large ensemble and Braza was fortunate to bring together a cast of very skilled and very popular local actors. Nate Burger who is most often seen on the stages of American Players Theatre plays both Benvolio and Friar Laurence. His Friar Laurence is a bit mischievous in his support of young love and then devious in his plan to thwart authority and finally clearly powerless when actually facing that same authority. Matt Daniels is Lord Capulet and comes across as very much in control and controlling until the ‘death’ of his daughter Juliet…when he loses it and the acting here may be just a little over the top for me. You may have noticed Daniels as Ebenezer Scrooge in Mark Clements’ A Christmas Carol the past few seasons. Laura Rook, also a mainstay at American Players, is Lady Capulet, a clearly loving wife and mother and maybe just a bit of doting mother…but she can be just as stern and demanding as required by the text here.
Dimonte Henning is a graduate of UWM and the Rep’s Emerging Professional Residency and most recently directed Clyde’s for the Milwaukee Chamber Theater. Henning too plays a number of roles but he gives us a very gentlemanly Lord Montague. And Alex Keiper who was June Carter in the Rep’s Ring of Fire and also appeared in Titanic, is an incredible nurse to Juliet. She clearly loves the girl and abets her in her flirtation and marriage to Romeo but too folds in the face of the Capulet’s plans for the girl.
But the high drama at the pivot point in the play is the street fight between the Capulet crew and the Montague family. And here Davis Wood, a current Rep EPR, is Tybalt while Mathew C. Yee, a writer and actor from Chicago, is Mercutio. They give us all of the animus and hatred necessary to bring the fight to its deadly fruition.
Pictured: Kenneth Hamilton, Alex Keiper, Piper Jean Bailey and Nate Burger. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
But the make or break roles in Romeo and Juliet is casting the right Romeo and the right Juliet…actors who can work off of each other and build a stage chemistry that lets us believe in the story. Braza has done that here.
Kenneth Hamilton is our Romeo, another returning actor from Braza’s Much Ado. Hamilton is the complete Romeo here: full of swagger, a hormonal young male, easily swayed in love, and little thought beyond himself. Hamilton easily portrays a teenager in love, well for the moment. All in to the point of ignoring his own safety, both in the garden under Juliet’s window and later as Friar Laurence tries to whisk him away in the face of his exile. But he also swiftly portrays the hot blooded street fighter who slays Tybalt which brings his world crashing down and the brash lover who returns home to face death on the news that Juliet has died. Hamilton’s interactions with our Juliet play true.
Pictured: Piper Jean Bailey. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
What light through yonder window breaks? Well it is Juliet and Braza has found a jewel for her Juliet in Piper Jean Bailey. A recent graduate of Northwestern University, this is Bailey’s Milwaukee Rep debut and first professional role. Bailey easily moves from the naive 14 year old that we first meet with her parents and quickly develops into a crush-worthy and crushing on Romeo teen during the Capulet’s party scene. But Bailey really brings the drama in the balcony scene and attendant soliloquies, she has a solid command of the Shakespearean text and story. And she is just the right amount of playful with Romeo and her nurse particularly through the planning of their wedding. She certainly knows how to play an excitable 14 year old and then cleanly morph into a young adult as the tragedy comes to a head. She was clearly the fan favorite as she received the loudest and warmest round of applause during the standing ovation. I will be shocked if we don’t see her again and again on the Rep stages in the future.
Pictured: Piper Jean Bailey and Kenneth Hamilton. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
Romeo and Juliet runs through March 30, 2025. And while the Rep’s home is being remodeled, it is being presented in Vogel Hall of the Marcus Performing Arts Center. The entrance to Vogel Hall is on the riverwalk side of the MPAC just off of State Street. Additional information and tickets can be found here.
