Milwaukee's Times Cinema will reopen April 8 with a new programming format, two years after closing for the pandemic
Chris Foran
The Times Cinema, the neighborhood movie theater at 5906 W. Vliet St., will reopen April 8 with a new programming format — a mix of second-run and classic movies.
Lee Barczak, who with his wife Jane Schilz owns Neighborhood Theatre Group, which owns the Times, said March 10 that they've selected some programming themes but are still working with studios to find out which titles will be available.
On March 30, the theater said it will reopen April 8 with a selection of classic Alfred Hitchcock thrillers; titles listed include "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "The Birds" and "Shadow of a Doubt."
The Times has been primarily a first-run movie theater for much of the past two decades.
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Its reopening will come more than two years after the Times and the other Neighborhood Theatre Group venues — the Rosebud Cinema and Avalon Theater — closed on March 17, 2020, in response to the citywide shutdown for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Avalon, the restored movie palace at 2473 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. in Bay View, reopened in September 2020. The Rosebud, 6823 W. North Ave. in Wauwatosa, is expected to reopen in June, Barczak said. In a June 2021 interview, Barczak said he hoped to reopen the Times and Rosebud that summer, but he acknowledged at the time that hiring staff was a challenge. (That also was before the delta variant sent COVID cases soaring again, putting renewed pressure on movie theater attendance.)
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The Times' April 8 reopening will amount to a "soft opening," he said, to prepare the Times and its staff for the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival later that month. The film festival announced this week that the Times was one of three theaters (the Oriental and the Avalon being the other) that will be hosting in-person screenings during the 2022 event, which runs April 21 to May 5.
In theater-speak, a venue showing a mix of second-run and classic movies is called a repertory theater, something Milwaukee's movie market has not had for a long time. The Times itself, under previous ownerships, dabbled with a version of it; the Oriental mixed newer art-house films with classics in a repertory format from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s.
Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.