"Defying the Odds Far From Broadway"

by Michael Paulson 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[This article ran in the New York Times of 16 December 2025, Section C (“Arts”), reported from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Naples, Florida.  It’s posted on the paper’s wsebsite as “As Regional Theaters Struggle, Some Defy the Odds,“ 16 December.

[Previous entries in the “Regional Theater” series, as well as some posts that are just relevant to the regional theater in America:

•  “‘Bigger Than Broadway!’" by Richard Zoglin (12 September 2024)

•  “Art Will Out” (3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 August 2024)

•  "Wish You Were Here" by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (6 July 2024)

•  "‘If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?’: Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive” by Rob Weinert-Kendt (11 May 2024)

•  "‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’" (18 March 2024)

•  “‘Theater in rural Appalachian Virginia brings regional themes to the stage’" by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet (17 March 2023)

•  “A Crisis In America's Theaters” (13 September 2023)

•  “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” (3 October 2023)

•  “Regional Theater: History” (8 October 2023)

•  “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” (5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 30 November, 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023)

•  ‘‘‘In rural Oregon, regional theater sparks a creative revival’" by Jeffrey Brown (27 August 2018)

[In the article reposted below, there are several plays mentioned.  I’ll provide some background facts on the plays on the afterword to this post.]

Theaters in Naples, Fla., and Milwaukee are among a handful of regional companies that are thriving.

America’s regional theaters are facing difficult times: staging fewer shows, employing fewer workers, and running deficits more frequently than before the pandemic.

But not all of them are struggling. Some are booming.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Repertory Theater has finished the first phase of an $80 million renovation of its three-theater complex in an old power plant along the Milwaukee River. In Naples, Fla., Gulfshore Playhouse has just begun its second season in a new $80 million complex with a curved facade meant to evoke the nearby sand and sea.

Both theaters are now breaking their own records. Milwaukee Rep’s staging of “Come From Away,” the first show on the theater’s renovated main stage, has just ended its run as the highest-grossing production in the company’s 71-year history. And Gulfshore Playhouse’s current production, “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” is breaking every record for that company, with a nightly waiting list for people seeking seats.

Kristen Coury, the Playhouse’s chief executive and producing artistic director, described her programming mantra as “up and known.” Translation: When deciding which shows to produce, she selects ones that are upbeat and well-known.

“We’re at a moment now where there’s a lot of poke-you-in-the-eye theater, like, ‘I don’t care what you think — this is good for you, and I’m going to make you feel like a terrible person, and you better buy a ticket anyway,”’ Coury said.

“My first covenant is with the audience, and I care about what they think,” she added. “People don’t want to spend money on a show they don’t think they’re going to like.”

The Milwaukee theater’s leaders, though making different choices in all sorts of ways, make a similar point. “We actually like our people,” said Mark Clements, the artistic director in Milwaukee. “We’re not trying to be didactic and lecture people.”

For a struggling industry, these two theaters — and a handful of others — are models of success: They are producing a healthy menu of shows, drawing large audiences, running budget surpluses and raising money for capital projects. But they are definitely in the minority.

American theaters, after some initial signs of recovery postpandemic, have more recently taken a second dip, according to Jen Benoit-Bryan, the executive director of SMU DataArts, a national arts and culture research center at Southern Methodist University [Meadows School of the Arts, University Park, Texas].

The numbers are grim — from 2023 to 2024, theater attendance fell 19 percent and income fell 37 percent, according to SMU DataArts. “Everybody is hurting, but theaters are hurting at a different scale than other arts organizations,” she said.

Figuring out what thriving theaters have in common is complicated. They vary in location, size and degree of influence, and include companies like Pasadena Playhouse in California and the Guthrie Theater in [Minneapolis,] Minnesota.

A number of them (but not all) seem to share a few distinctive attributes: communities with less-competitive cultural landscapes, where the theaters have high visibility and civic standing; programming philosophies that prioritize what audiences might want to see over what artists believe audiences would benefit from seeing; and the lingering benefits of having minimized the duration of their Covid shutdowns, which helped audiences maintain the theatergoing habit.

At the start of the pandemic, Gulfshore laid off three-quarters of its staff, opting to safeguard its resources for reopening. “While we were doing that, other theaters were spending a truckload of money keeping people employed for a year who were doing nothing but sewing masks,” Coury said.

Milwaukee Rep, on the other hand, retained 95 percent of its staff, believing it would allow them to restart more quickly. The theater was worried about a talent drain, which many of its peer institutions experienced during the pandemic; it also arrived at the pandemic with sizable cash reserves, giving it options.

“We took a very different path than the rest of the field,” said Chad Bauman, the theater’s executive director. “We were doing performances when almost nobody else in the entire country was doing them.”

Milwaukee Rep, founded in 1954, is one of the nation’s oldest professional regional theaters. Gulfshore Playhouse, founded in 2004, is one of the newest — it was just admitted to the League of Resident Theaters [LORT], a national association of 81 leading regional theaters, in 2022. Both theaters have big dreams — they hope to attract pre-Broadway productions, which bring revenue and attention to regional theaters, but are hard to book, because expectations of audience, staff and facilities are high.

The two communities are quite different. Milwaukee is a sizable, historically blue-collar, overwhelmingly Democratic city, while Naples is small, packed with affluent retirees, and heavily Republican.

A commonality: The two areas have a lot of captains of industry. “We have the highest per capita amount of former C.E.O.s,” Coury said of Naples. She added that 90 percent of her fund-raising is from individuals, rather than corporations or foundations, and the biggest donors are Jay and Patty Baker, who gave $20 million. (He is the former president of Kohl’s.)

Milwaukee still has a robust corporate community, and the Rep has done better than many of its peers at attracting corporate contributions — the biggest donor to its renovation project is the largest Wisconsin-based bank, Associated Bank, which gave $10 million, and for which the theater center is now named. (By coincidence, the Bakers previously lived in Milwaukee and supported Milwaukee Rep.)

Both theaters’ capital projects faced significant damage from big storms. In Naples, Hurricane Ian knocked down several walls of the new Gulfshore Playhouse while it was under construction in 2022; in Milwaukee, intense flooding in August caused $7 million in damage to a production facility where the theater had been storing sets and costumes (including for its mainstay production of “A Christmas Carol”) while building its new home.

Gulfshore, which produces seven shows a season, has been growing fast; since the pandemic its annual budget has risen to $14.5 million from $3.6 million, and it now has 83 full-time employees. Its new main stage theater is nearly twice the size of the one in its former home — 368 seats now, compared to 200.

The theater opened its first season in its new home with “Anything Goes” and closed with “Sweet Charity.” It’s debatable if “Sweet Charity” is actually upbeat, because it ends unhappily for the protagonist, but both shows are indisputably classics, with songs that have become standards and big dance numbers. In between, Coury programmed two crowd-pleasing plays, the suspense drama “Dial M for Murder” and the farce “Noises Off.”

At the same time, in the new building’s 125-seat black box theater, Gulfshore staged three plays with sobering themes but a track record of success: “Every Brilliant Thing,” which deals with depression and suicide (and will have a Broadway production this season); “The Lehman Trilogy,” about the rise and fall of a financial empire; and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” about Billie Holiday as she is grappling with addiction.

“My first question is always, ‘Is it good?”’ Coury said. “Not, ‘Do you feel like it will teach a good lesson?’ and not ‘Which agenda is attached to it?’ Just ‘Is it a good play?”’

Milwaukee Rep, with a $17 million annual budget and 125 employees, is a larger and more established company. It is producing 12 shows this season, including “The Lehman Trilogy” and “The Piano Lesson” [1987] (a Pulitzer Prize winner [1990] by August Wilson [1945-2005]) as well as two Agatha Christie-related shows, and expects to do 13 next year. It also does lots of new work, and, unlike many of its peers, has a 14,000-person subscriber base that has remained remarkably loyal.

[Milwaukee Rep has scheduled an Agatha Christie Festival for the 2025-26 season. It will consist of Mrs. Christie (2019; 14 April-10 May 2026), a play by Heidi Armbruster [b. 1976] that explores the real-life 11-day disappearance of Christie (1890-1976) in 1926 through the eyes of a modern-day superfan; and And Then There Were None (1943; 26 May-28 June 2026), a production of Christie’s own stage adaptation of her best-selling 1939 mystery novel. (Both the book and various adaptations are sometimes presented under the title Ten Little Indians.)]

“Obviously, theaters are struggling, and Milwaukee has bucked that trend,” said Ayad Akhtar [b. 1970], a [2013] Pulitzer-winning playwright (for “Disgraced” [2012]) who grew up in a Milwaukee suburb and serves on the Rep’s board. “There’s multigenerational industrial family support, and programming an artistic experience that is worthy of being thought about and at the same time can sell a lot of tickets.”

Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a play about artificial intelligence that debuted on Broadway last season, will reopen the Rep’s black box theater, with up to 220 seats, early next year.

The redone theater complex features some distinctive amenities — the main stage, with up to 670 seats, has different tiers, and the nicest seats (proving quite popular) are leather, with cup-holders and premium pricing. And the theater’s leadership can wine and dine donors in a backstage V.I.P. suite, with a window overlooking preshow warm-ups.

The theater’s leadership is proud of its status as an outlier, noting that not only is it defying downward trends on attendance and giving, but that it is also thriving in a state that has among the lowest levels of public arts funding in the nation.

The theater puts its three goals — to entertain, provoke and inspire — on banners.

“Where some have gotten into trouble is that they’ve over-rotated in one of these directions,” said Bauman, the executive director. “The secret sauce to programming is that if you’re an audience member, we have a really great, diverse mix of programming, and we never over-rotate in any one of those sides.”

[I found the practices of both the theaters about which Michael Paulson reports troubling, however successful they’ve been financially.  The "mantra" Paulson cites for Gulfshore, "up and known," sounds like the preference at an Off-Off-Broadway company where I interned as literary advisor for a graduate class in dramaturgy, the StageArts Theater Company. 

[I described that company in some posts on ROT, and their own criteria for plays they liked was "beautifully crafted plays that speak to the best in us."  They also said, "We believe that the qualities most absent on plays of the last few decades are a positive view of human beings and a respect for dramatic structure."  I said that this meant the "well-made play," with the added criterion of what I called "a happy ending" (I was being moderately sarcastic).

[The main difference with these companies is that StageArts produced new plays (because they thought that would attract reviewers, producers, and donors).  When I convinced the artistic directors to consider older plays and revivals, though I tried to steer them to less-well known scripts, they still applied their standard criteria—the well-made play with "positive" conclusions.

[What the two troupes in the Times article are producing are largely audience-pleasers with little depth.  When they say they're catering to their audiences by producing plays they'll like—what they're doing is pandering, mostly to the lowest common denominator of their potential audience.  Most of the plays mentioned in the piece strike me as theatrical pabulum.  (It doesn't surprise me that Milwaukee Rep is a little more dramatically interesting than Gulfshore.  Milwaukee is a legit theater town; I saw some interesting pieces when I was there.  Naples strikes me as a middle-brow retirement community.)

[No dramaturg or literary manager is mentioned in the article, much less interviewed.  I'm sure Milwaukee Rep has one on staff, though Gulfshore may not.  One of the dramaturg's second-tier responsibilities is to try to expand the taste of the theater's community a little each season.  At the two houses profiled, no one seems interested in trying that.  That's just sad.]

[The information on the plays Paulson names in his report is compiled here for readers who want to know a bit about them.  Milwaukee Rep presented Come from Away, which had its professional première in 2015 at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, as a co-production with the Seattle Repertory Theatre.  It’s based on the true account of the town of Gander on the island of Newfoundland in Canada during the week following the 11 September 2001 attacks, when 38 planes, with nearly 6,700 passengers, were diverted unexpectedly to Gander International Airport in the town of about 11,000 because the airspace over the U.S. was closed.  The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed.

[The show was conceived by Michael Rubinoff, a Toronto lawyer, theater producer, and associate dean of visual and performing arts at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.  He turned to Canadian husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein.  The play’s title, Come from Away, is a traditional Newfoundland term for anyone—tourists, migrants from other parts of Canada, business travelers—who was not born on the island.

[The play transferred to Broadway, opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on 12 March 2017 and running until 2 October 2022, after playing 25 previews and 1,669 regular performances.  It was nominated for seven Tonys in 2017, winning for Best Direction of a Musical for Christopher Ashley, as well as Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Book of a Musical, and Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for Jenn Colella.

[Irving Berlin’s White Christmas was staged at the Gulfshore Playhouse from 14 November to 21 December 2025.  It’s a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film White Christmas with a book by David Ives and Paul Blake, and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.  The musical premièred in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2000 and then toured the U.S. in 2004 and the United Kingdom in 2007. 

[The stage musical played a limited engagement on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre from 23 November 2008 through 4 January 2009, for 53 performances and 12 previews.  It returned for another limited run from 22 November 2009 to 3 January 2010.  It was nominated for two Tonys in 2009 and six Drama Desk Awards, but won none; the return engagement wasn’t nominated.  Irving Berlin’s White Christmas played in London’s West End in 2014 and 2019, in Australia in 2009, elsewhere in England in December 2023 and January 2024, and toured the U.S. several times between 2007 and 2019.

[The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s 50th-anniversary production of A Christmas Carol will run from 25 November to 24 December 2025.  It’s an adaptation by the Rep’s own artistic director, Mark Clements, who also directed the production.  The music for Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s current adaptation of A Christmas Carol was written and arranged by John Tanner, a Milwaukee Rep Associate Artist.

[Anything Goes (1934) at the Gulfshore Playhouse ran from 1 to 24 November 2025.  The classic musical has music and lyrics by Cole Porter and a new book, based on the adapted from the 1987 Broadway revival, by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman.  (The original book was by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, revised by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.)

[The Broadway début was at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on 21 November 1934, with Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney.  It ran for 420 performances, becoming the fourth longest-running musical of the 1930s when it closed on 16 November 1935.  It became a popular standard, including three Broadway revivals and at least one Off-Broadway staging, mostly for its Cole Porter score.]

[Sweet Charity (1965), based on 1957 Italian film Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti Di Cabiria) by Federico Fellini, will close out the Gulfshore 2025-26 season from 10 April to 4 May 2026.  Directed and choreographed for Broadway by Bob Fosse, who conceived the stage version, starring his wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, as a dancer-for-hire at a Times Square dance hall.  (Her name was Charity Hope Valentine!)

[The musical had music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and a book by Neil Simon.  After a tryout at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia starting on 6 December 1965, the priduction moved to Detroit for a month, and then premièred on Broadway at the Palace Theatre on 29 January 1966, and closed on 15 July 1967, for 608 performances and 10 previews.  The production was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning for Fosse’s choreography.

[The play was revived on Broadway in 1986 and 2005, and Off-Broadway in 2016, picking up more awards each time.  Its West End première was in October 1967, starring Juliet Prowse and running for 476 performances.  It returned to London in 2009 and 2016, and played in Australia in 1967 and 2014, and toured the country in 2015.

[Dial M for Murder will be mounted by Gulfshore on 16 January-6 February 2026 in a double adaptation: first Alfred Hitchcock for his 1954 screenplay from Frederick Knott original 1952 play; then from Hitch to Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2022 version for the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California.  Hatcher made some changes, not the least of which is to switch out the unfaithful wife’s male lover (that would be Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings in the flick) for a woman—a change Gulfshore maintains.

[The Hatcher adaptation of the movie has never played Broadway, but Knott’s original play, called Dial “M” for Murder, was at the Plymouth and then Booth Theatre from 29 October 1952 to 27 February 1954.

[Gulfshore will present Michael Fayn’s 1982 farce, Noises Off, on 27 February-20 March 2026.  Derived from a one-act play called Exits Frayn wrote, which was performed in 1977, the backstage comedy was inspired when the playwright was in the wings in 1970, watching a performance of The Two of Us, a farce that he had written.  He decided the play was funnier from backstage than it was from out front and he was moved to write a play “from behind.”

[That play became Noises Off, which premièred in London in 1982.  It transferred to the Savoy Theatre in the West End, where it ran until 1987.  On 11 December 1983, a production opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (now the Lena Horne), where it ran for 553 performances (11 December 1983-6 April 1985).  It was nominated for four 1984 Tony Awards including Best Play, but won none; and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards, winning for Director of a Play for Michael Blakemore and Outstanding Ensemble.

[Noises Off has become a staple of both professional theatre companies and community theatres on both sides of the Atlantic.  Since Frayn has rewritten the play many times over the years—the last revision was in 2000—there are many differences between the 1982 and 2000 scripts.  I couldn’t verify which version of the text Gulfshore is using, though I imagine it would be the latest revision, or some combination, perhaps, making sure that the latest updated references have been incorporated.

[Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing is a 2013 solo, immersive play written with Jonny Donahoe.  It’s a life-affirming exploration of mental health, depression, and resilience told through the lens of a narrator’s lifelong list of everything that makes life worth living.  Gulfshore staged it from 14 November to 15 December 2025.

[After selling out at three consecutive Edinburgh Festivals, Every Brilliant Thing is touring worldwide.  It ran at New York City’s Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village from 14 December 2014 to 29 March 2015.  The West End production of Every Brilliant Thing, featuring Daniel Radcliffe, is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre in March 2026 for a two-month run.

[Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy (2013), adapted by Ben Power, will be produced at Gulfshore from 30 January to 2 March 2026.  The three-act play was originally written in Italian, but premièred in Saint-Étienne, France, in a French translation.  It’s been translated into two dozen languages and is one of the most produced plays in America.

[The play tells the story of the Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who arrives in America and founds the firm that becomes the Lehman Brothers. It eventually collapses in 2008 and brings the global economy down.  Three actors play the Lehman brothers and their descendants.  The Lehman Trilogy was produced in the U.K. at the National Theatre in 2018 under the direction of Sam Mendes.  That production transferred to the United States at the Park Avenue Armory, in New York City, from 22 March 2019 to 20 April 2019. 

[The production’s scheduled return to the U.S. was delayed by COVID, but the play did open on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on 14 October 2021 and ran until 2 January 2022, for 82 performances and 21 previews.  It won 2022 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Simon Russell Beale), Best Direction of a Play (Sam Mendes), Best Scenic Design of a Play (Es Devlin), and Best Lighting Design of a Play (Jon Clark).

[The Lehman Trilogy has been criticized for playing down the role of the Lehman family in slavery and for the crude, caricatured way in which it portrays their Jewishness.

[Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a 1986 play with music by Lanie Robertson about Billie Holiday, premièred in Atlanta, Georgia, directed by Woodie King, Jr., and was then produced Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 1986.  When the production closed in 1987, it had run 281 performances and won the 1987 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Book (Robertson).

[The play was staged in theaters around the country, then opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Uptown) on 13 April 2014 and closed on 5 October.  It won the 2014 Tony Awards for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Audra McDonald) and Best Sound Design of a Play (Steve Canyon Kennedy); McDonald also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play.

[Gulfshore will produce Lady Day from 20 March through 27 April 2026, which already includes an extension.

[Milwaukee Rep will mount their production of The Lehman Trilogy from 13 January to 8 February 2026.  The cast includes the Washington, D.C.-based actor Edward Gero.

[1987’s The Piano Lesson by August Wilson is the fourth in his Pittsburgh Cycle, set in 1936.  (It was the fifth to be composed.)  It received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and will run at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater from 24 February to 22 March 2026.

[The first production of The Piano Lesson opened on 26 November 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and closed on 19 December.  The show played at several important regional theaters, then, on 16 April 1990, it opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where it ran until 27 January 1991, a total of 8 previews and 328 regular performances.  It was nominated for five Tonys in 1990, including Best Play, but won none; it received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play.

[The Piano Lesson was revived on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from 13 October 2022 to 29 January 2023.  The production was nominated for the 2023 Best Revival of a Play Tony but didn’t win; it did win, however, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.  An acclaimed Off-Broadway revival opened at the Theatre Row home of the Signature Theatre on 18 November 2012 and, after many extensions, closed on 20 January 2013.  It received four 2013 Lucille Lortel Awards, including the Outstanding Revival Award, plus two Obies and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play Revival.

[Ayad Akhtar’s 2012 one-act play Disgraced was his first stage play.  It premièred at the American Theater Company, Chicago, in 2012, and then was produced at Lincoln Center in New York City at the Claire Tow Theater in the fall of 2012, where it was extended several times.  It went to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, opening on 23 October 2014, receiving a nomination for the Best Play Tony for 2013 and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Disgraced ran for 27 previews and 149 regular performances, closing on 1 March 2015.

[Akhtar’s McNeal ran from 30 September to 24 November 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, its Broadway house.  It will play the Milwaukee Rep from 10 February to 22 March 2026.  The play follows Jacob McNeal, a brilliant novelist obsessed with his own legacy and fascinated by artificial intelligence.  Set in the "not-too-distant future," the production explores the price of greatness and raises questions about art, truth, and originality. The Milwaukee Rep production features high-tech elements, including projections and special effects.]