By Dave Begel Contributing Writer Published Jan 19, 2015 at 10:30 AM

Stephen Wade should wear a tweed jacket with leather patches and carry a beat up briefcase and smoke a pipe and have dandruff dotting his shoulders.

Wade is the epitome of a college professor, complete with a wild head of white hair,  and he held a class lecture at the Stackner Cabaret at the Milwaukee Rep Sunday night as he opened "The Beautiful Music All Around Us."

Sitting through two hours of his show feels like nothing so much as the lecture all with a favorite professor in your sophomore year of college. Wade is an absolute fountain of knowledge about a special, and narrow, brand of music.

The problem with the show is that the fountain just keeps on pouring and pouring and never lets you have a chance to catch your breath. It’s almost like waterboarding for the brain.

Nobody would ever deny that Wade has a spectacular breadth and depth of knowledge of the folk music from the early part of the last century. He is wrapped in the banjo mythology of those days, the precursor to some of the early American blues and most of the early days of folk music of the '60s.

Wade is a researcher of immense accomplishment. He has dug and dug and dug, finding stories and following the twists and turns of those stories wherever the music led. Those stories are filled with people and places and events and musical instruments and more people and more places and more events and more musical instruments.

After the hour long first act of his show, which was accompanied by a wonderful slide show and great set design and lighting, I found myself virtually overwhelmed by the onslaught of stuff.

Because Wade’s show is filled with stuff. The endless parade of names is enough to keep you up at night. You think it was hard memorizing the state capitals when you were a kid? Try memorizing all the names and convoluted family ties that Wade drops into his show.

I don’t doubt the honesty and loving warmth of Wade’s show. He is truly and obviously a man who cares deeply about these stories. But he also has to be an entertainer. This is theater, after all.

And it’s as entertainment that this show falls short, and it does so for a variety of reasons.

First of all there is Wade himself. He is a skilled banjo and guitar player. But he is not much of a singer. When the story you are hearing is about songs, there is a demand that they be sung well. If these songs are so amazing, they deserve better singing.

I can only imagine the passions and depth of meaning of the original singers. None of that is present in this show. And there is a peripatetic quality to Wade where hesitant movement becomes a distraction rather than tools that help explain things.

The second problem with this show, as I mentioned, is that it is just too much knowledge being tossed onto our table.

Wade wrote a book about this. Three and a half pounds and 504 pages. It didn’t take long for him to begin telling us about the book and for awhile the show took on a booksellers convention air. It was almost as if he was saying "if you really like what you hear tonight wait until you see all the extra stuff in the book."

And I’m sure that a lot of people like what they heard Sunday night when the show opened. If you are a huge banjo fan this is really your cup of tea. If the early folk music rings your chimes then Stephen Wade is going to be  your guy.

But this is theater. It’s supposed to take us somewhere special.  It’s supposed to move us or challenge us or make us think about things in a new and exciting way.

The thing it isn’t supposed to do is make us wonder what time the exam starts.

"The Beautiful Music All Around Us" runs through March 15 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.

Dave Begel Contributing Writer

With a history in Milwaukee stretching back decades, Dave tries to bring a unique perspective to his writing, whether it's sports, politics, theater or any other issue.

He's seen Milwaukee grow, suffer pangs of growth, strive for success and has been involved in many efforts to both shape and re-shape the city. He's a happy man, now that he's quit playing golf, and enjoys music, his children and grandchildren and the myriad of sports in this state. He loves great food and hates bullies and people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

This whole Internet thing continues to baffle him, but he's willing to play the game as long as OnMilwaukee.com keeps lending him a helping hand. He is constantly amazed that just a few dedicated people can provide so much news and information to a hungry public.

Despite some opinions to the contrary, Dave likes most stuff. But he is a skeptic who constantly wonders about the world around him. So many questions, so few answers.