🍺 Young Blood to open $2.5M brewery in DeForest

🚨 Sheriff Agrees to Reforms For Non-English Speakers

• The Dane County Sheriff’s Office will implement reforms that will make sure non-English speakers get the services they need. The changes include staff training, outreach initiatives, and monitoring, including standards on when deputies can use non-authorized interpreters to communicate with non-English speakers.
• The changes come after a civil rights inquiry into the department following an incident in which the sheriff’s office mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s death on a Dane County dairy farm in 2019, due to a language barrier. [Cap Times, ProPublica]

🍺 Young Blood To Open Brewery/Taproom in DeForest

• Young Blood Beer Co. will open a brewery and taproom next spring in DeForest that will eventually serve as the Madison beer company’s main hub.
• The brewery, which has a taproom on King Street and in the Northstreet multi-use building, will spend between $2.5 million and $3 million on the facility. All Young Blood beer is currently brewed at a production facility the company rents on Stoughton Road, which it will close once the DeForest facility is on line. [ 🔒WSJ]

🎧 How Can Madison Better Serve Residents With Disabilities?

• For the 2024-25 UW-Madison Go Big Read, many Madisonians are reading “Sitting Pretty,” Rebekah Taussig’s acclaimed memoir of her life as a young woman who uses a mobility aid.
• On the City Cast Madison podcast today, Bianca Martin talked to Martha Siravo of Wheels & Heels and Iron Man triathlete Autumn Neugent about what Madison is doing to be more inclusive to its residents with disabilities, and what the city can do better. [🎧City Cast Madison]

Capital City Theatre was looking for its own holiday show like “The Nutcracker” or “A Christmas Carol.” Something that everybody knows and associates with the holidays, and that they could stage every year and become an annual tradition in Madison.

What better than the classic 1946 movie that people watch year after year?

“It’s A Wonderful Life,” a new musical based on Frank Capra’s tearjerker starring Jimmy Stewart as a good man who learns how much his life has affected others, is now playing in the Mitby Theater and Madison College’s Truax Campus and runs through Sunday, Dec. 1.

Working off the film’s original screenplay (which is in the public domain), Andrew Abrams wrote the music and John Atkins wrote the lyrics and books. The musical has been a project literally 20 years in the making for the duo.

Abrams talked about the creation of the musical with Madison Minutes.

What is it about “It’s A Wonderful Life” that has become such an important part of the holidays for people 80 years later?

We want those stories, like “A Christmas Carol,” where a character goes through turmoil, like Scrooge or George Bailey, and comes out on the other side with kindness. We all want that, and crave that. Especially right now of all times.

How did you approach writing the music for the show?

People always ask me if I’ve contemporized the music at all. If you walked in and didn’t know, you’d think it was written in the early 1960s. It has a slightly forward-looking feel, but you know what decade you’re in as you watch the show. It roots you in the time of the movie, and I didn’t want to take the audience out of that.

Have you updated the original 1946 film for modern audiences?

We have a more diverse cast than in the film, trying to represent today’s world more than 1946 Hollywood. Another thing is the view of suicide. Suicide is such a major part of this movie, and it wasn’t until recently that people were talking openly about it.

Our director, Michael Cotey, gets up before rehearsals and gives these great speeches that make everybody cry. He talks about how if one or two people are affected by the musical to reconsider dark thoughts they’ve had, or seek help, we’ve done our job.

Meet Molly! The 15-year-old cat isn’t shy about enjoying attention, purring like a motorboat and making biscuits with her paws as she receives pets. She also likes being brushed and watching the world from a cozy spot in the window. She enjoys sitting in boxes and bins, and is looking for a new family to offer her a retirement home full of pets and affection.