This past weekend, record-breaking rainfall caused severe flooding across Greater Milwaukee, impacting many individuals and businesses—including Milwaukee Rep.
Our new 30,000-square-foot production facility in Wauwatosa suffered extensive damage, with floodwaters reaching up to four feet and forceful enough to blow out several loading dock doors. We estimate the damage at nearly $5 million. The facility housed essential tools for building sets and props, significant lighting and sound equipment, costume storage, and numerous other items.
Thankfully, the Associated Bank Theater Center—scheduled to open in just nine weeks—was unaffected by the flooding. Our teams have already identified potential locations for a temporary production shop so we can build sets for upcoming shows and launch the 2025/26 Season without delay.
Many of you have reached out after seeing news items to ask “how can I help.” Truly the best way to help Milwaukee Rep in this moment is to join us as an audience member in our upcoming season. Buying a ticket today helps us turn this challenging moment into a season of celebration for our whole community while directly supporting our artists and staff. Learn more about the 2025/26 Season here.
Thank you for your continued support.
With deep gratitude,
Chad Bauman Ellen & Joe Checota Executive Director
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.
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.
