Skylight celebrates 50 years of music

THE REVIEWS are in!

After 50 years and thousands of performances, Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera Theatre has a well-earned reputation today as one of the country’s best producers of a full spectrum of music theatre.

“Our 50th Anniversary has been such a wonderful celebration of the Skylight’s history,” notes Managing Director Amy S. Jensen. “The outpouring of support from our patrons and donors this season has been truly heartwarming and makes us all the more excited about the Skylight’s next 50 years.”

The Skylight concludes this golden anniversary year with productions that illustrate its diverse repertoire: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro played to rave reviews in February, A Day in Hollywood/A Night In the Ukraine opens this month and Rent ends the year in May.

It’s unlikely that those ambitious productions were envisioned in 1959 when Clair Richardson, known as “an eccentric public relations man who had alienated all of his accounts,” and television executive Sprague Vonier set out to combat what they saw as “a context of extreme cultural poverty.”

Known first as the Skylight Theatre, the initial production was An Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan in the sky-lighted attic of a European-style coffee house on Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square. In 1962, the stage moved to a former tire-recapping garage at 813 N. Jefferson St. where it remained for 31 years.

Richardson and Colin Cabot, scion of an affluent and distinguished East Coast family, led the Skylight until Richardson’s death in 1980 and Cabot’s return to New England in 1989. Renovations and improvements to the original home brought seating capacity to 251 and the Skylight began renting the theatre to other groups, including the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.

Before leaving Milwaukee, Cabot led an ambitious capital campaign that testified to the popularity of the Skylight and resulted in a $6-million renovation of a building at 158 N. Broadway in the Historic Third Ward. There, in January 1993, the first production was staged in the appropriately named Cabot Theatre.

The Broadway Theatre Center today has two very active stages: the 358-seat Cabot Theatre, a replication of a European opera house, and the 99-seat Studio Theatre, a versatile black box stage.

On the second level are the Skylight Bar, a cabaret-style space which seats up to 100, and the Dorothea C. Mayer Salon, a European style salon overlooking Catalano Square and seating up to 60 at tables.
While Skylight frequently holds special events in the Bar and Salon, other groups consider the spaces excellent for meetings and receptions.

First-time visitors to the Cabot Theatre always are surprised to find the unique and, of necessity, economical way wallpaper is used to create a faux wooden interior. The ceiling over the theatre, depicting Milwaukee scenes along with the nine Greek muses, also is an optical illusion – a flat surface that appears to be a dome.

Like the Skylight’s original home, the Broadway Theatre Center is the home of other performing companies. The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks perform there and the Bel Canto Chorus, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir and Present Music have offices in the Center, but perform elsewhere.

While the facility is unique and noteworthy, the productions in the Broadway Theatre Center are the real draw. The 50th anniversary season began in 2009 with Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and will conclude with a reprise of the Skylight’s first production, An Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan, in the Studio Theatre. Special events are planned this summer and the 51st season will be announced later this month.

For additional information on the Skylight, including tickets for the remainder of the season, visit www.skylightopera.com.

Season closes with RENT, Gilbert & Sullivan

THREE PRODUCTIONS remain in the 50th anniversary season of the Skylight Opera Theatre:

Nominated for five Tony Awards, A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine
March 12 - April 4 is a double feature of two hilarious one-act musicals. A Day in Hollywood takes the audience to the lobby of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in the 1930s where ushers sing a musical tribute to stars and productions of that magical era. A Night in the Ukraine is the funniest musical the Marx Brothers never wrote, sweeping the audience away to Russia for a madcap musical featuring all the usual Marx Brothers suspects and loosely based on Chekhov’s one-act play, The Bear.

RENT, a rock opera which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book in 1996, concludes the Cabot Theatre season May 21-June 20. As it does in all of its productions, the Skylight will use local and regional talent for the production, which integrates dance, pop, rock ‘n roll, R&B and salsa music.

An Evening with Gilbert & Sullivan, a reprise of the Skylight’s first production 50 years ago, will be staged in the Studio Theatre May 28-June 20, under the direction of Milwaukee’s Dale Gutzman.