The Marcus Performing Arts Center (MPAC) is the premier performing arts community gathering space in downtown Milwaukee.

Milwaukee Rep ignites positive change in the cultural, social, and economic vitality of its community by creating world-class theater experiences that entertain, provoke, and inspire meaningful dialogue among an audience representative of Milwaukee's rich diversity.

In the summer of 1959, several friends, inspired by the cultural vitality of New York and San Francisco, began to discuss the possibility of doing something in Milwaukee to combat what they deemed “a context of extreme cultural poverty.”
Two of these friends—Sprague Vonier, the program manager at WTMJ television and Clair Richardson, a wildly eccentric public relations man that had successfully alienated all his accounts—were determined to create a beatnik coffeehouse like those in San Francisco. They raised $2,000 for the initial capitalization of the space, intending a coffeehouse with beat poetry and maybe some music.
Not long after, at a fundraising event in Door County for Bel Canto Chorus, two church musicians, Jim Keeley and Ray Smith, sat down at the piano and performed an incredible, impromptu performance of Gilbert and Sullivan. And with that, the Skylight Theatre was born. Sixty years later, we are proud to celebrate our history and our national recognition as a renowned producer of bold music theatre.