Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years is a story told by a tour de force of fourteen ballads sung by Cathy and Jamie, and no spoilers here since this comes from the Rep’s website: it is a story of falling in and then out of love…with Jamie telling their story in chronological order while Cathy starts at the finish and brings us to the glorious start.
Asher Muldoon and Grace Bobber. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep.
Brown is known for a number of full scale musicals including Parade and Bridges of Madison County and is in full love ballad mode here giving Cathy and Jamie a full range of emotions.
Grace Bobber is an enthusiastic and enthralling Cathy and throws herself into the character. And Brown has given her a number signature songs to use to work through her excitement and her dejection. On the other side of the piano shall we say, is Jamie as played by Asher Muldoon. Jamie is a bit more laid back most of the time and Muldoon covers all of the nuance between lover, creative writer, and practical businessman. A far more reserved character than we see in Cathy. In what would appear to be a love affair of substance, Brown has written around the edges and after a while I started to wonder why this couple was together and the inevitable became the inevitable. I just never felt that there was a real connection between them.
Grace Bobber and Asher Muldoon. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep.
Now, although we have an elaborate story here there is nearly no conversation. The entire story is told through Brown’s poetry and music, which presents an interesting problem for the director. How do you move the action and actor who is deep in story telling mode out front and center while keeping the play moving. Well, both Bobber and Muldoon are accomplished pianists, and director Kelley Faulkner deftly moves one or the other behind the keyboard as the principal story teller moves out front. And all of this is helped by the simple yet elegant stage setting with a central piano backed by an arc of stelae with abstract patterns. And of course, Faulkner also sets the changes in tone and time with some simple and quick costume ‘changes’ and instrumentation changes as Cathy and Jamie move from piano to guitars…and the music is stitched together by the efforts of Scott Cook, just off stage left, playing a subdued but key cello.
And this was an audience favorite…a very spontaneous standing ovation capped the evening!
Asher Muldoon and Grace Bobber. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep.
The Last Five Years runs in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret from now until May 18, 2025. More information and tickets can be found here! And make an evening of it and make reservations for dinner as well. You won’t be sorry.
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.
It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was, as I made my way downtown during the biggest snow storm of the Milwaukee winter season (so far). And that probably threw me off my game a bit so I wasn’t really prepared for the intense story telling I was about to experience at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio Theater. And for the record, I Don’t Believe In Ghosts! You will get that reference as you are experiencing The Woman In Black.
photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep
What we do have here is a compelling story rich in language, a strong story line that twists and turns and keeps us guessing…and a handful of surprises…a couple you can anticipate in a ghost story and a handful that will come…as a surprise!
After a family holiday gathering that ended with a session of shared ghost stories, which solicitor Arthur Kipps feigns to participate in, he is compelled to tell a story of his own that has haunted him, if I am doing the math right, for some 30 years. He has documented his story in a tome of significant proportions and enlists the aid of an actor to help him present it to an audience of friends and family.
photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep
Kipps begins by quietly reading his story from his journal and has us leaning in to hear as for a solicitor, he is particularly quiet in his speech and manner. This brings protests from The Actor and after several sessions and attempts at livening up the presentation, The Actor proposes a new course.
Instead of reading the story, the two principals will act out the key scenes with this added twist, the actor will play the young Kipps and Kipps will play all of the other characters in the story. This works amazingly well and now ‘we’ are wholly enmeshed in a play within a play.
This is an incredible bit of story telling on both the part of playwright Stephen Mallatratt and director Robin Herford. They both carefully nurture the precise language in the text and smoothly draw out the fright required of a good ghost story. Herford keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout as the story is told…and then wrenches us out of our seats on occasion.
photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Rep
There are two actors on stage…but three actors playing the roles in rep. David Acton plays Arthur Kipps, Mark Hawkins plays The Actor, and Ben Porter has turns as both. I am confident that I saw Acton and Hawkins the evening I attended. But the action and story telling was incredible and the actor interactions felt true to the story and made the suspension of disbelief automatic and unavoidable.
The set is the stage of a small and somewhat moth eaten theater and despite only two actors there is a fair amount of choreography necessary as they purpose and repurpose a few stage props and set pieces to their needs and change their outer costuming to suit each character change from a spare little coat rack at stage right. And there is a bit of theater humor here as The Actor employs a ‘new’ technical innovation to provide background sound effects to their play…which then reaches into our theater and experience just moments later. I won’t say more because it is part of the ‘surprises’.
This is a play that I would like to experience again, if I can fit it into my schedule, before it ends its run. It continues at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stiemke Studio through March 23, 2025.
