Jeffrey Ellis - Page 43

Just in time to lift your spirits in the wake of a bruising presidential election season, Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre - the iconic theatrical venue, which for 50 years has delighted Nashville audiences on the chow-and-bow circuit - provides ample laughs and plenty of guffaws (along with a bountiful buffet) with their latest version of Red, White and Tuna, which transports audiences to the third smallest town in Texas for yet another down-home, Independence Day-flavored adventure.

Music Valley Event Center continues its recently launched 'After Dark' series of shows with Jeff Goode's The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, starring eight actors as Santa's reindeer dishing about "the real Kris Kringle." The Eight runs November 26-December 17.

Dickson's Gaslight Dinner Theatre closes out its 16th Anniversary Season - and celebrates the holiday season - with Kim Beagle Graham's A Totally Awesome Christmas Carol, opening Friday.

Dave McGinnis directs Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, opening this Friday night at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater, as ACT 1 continues its 2016-17 season.

The Dixie Swim Club - the Jones-Hope-Wooten comedy about five Southern women who meet on their college's swim team and hold a beachfront reunion every year thereafter - opens this week at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts, in a new production helmed by George W. Manus Jr.

Jonathan Larson's tick…tick…BOOM! closes out 2016 for Nashville's Street Theatre Company, running November 18-December 4 at Holy Trinity Church on Charlotte Pike, starring Christina Candilora, Geoff Davin and Christ Thomas.

Which brings us to today's edition of High School Drama, introducing you to one of the show's leading men: Jonathan Hankins. Here's your opportunity to get to know more about the talented HFA senior prior to opening night (You've made your reservations, right? Curtain's at 7 p.m. Don't be late!)…

The Dramatists Guild of America will offer its first event in Nashville this Saturday, November 5, at Actors Bridge Studio at Darkhorse Chapel. Free to all Nashville artists interested in new works for the stage and taking place at the Darkhorse Chapel at 4610 Charlotte Ave, the event starts at noon and is open to Dramatists Guild members and non-members alike.

There is perhaps no theme more deeply resonant in Disney's Beauty and the Beast than its treatment of the redemptive power of love to change any trouble soul - and thanks to Mike Fernandez's cinematic take on the musical theater classic and the superb leading performances of Bekah Purifoy and Scott Patrick Wilson, the new revival now onstage at Lipscomb University's Collins Alumni Auditorium has much to engage and intrigue audiences.

Who knew that a whimsical, magical play - Philip Dawkins' evocatively written Failure: A Love Story, now onstage at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater in a thoroughly engaging production from Actors Bridge Ensemble in its 20th Anniversary Season - would speak so eloquently to that sense of pervasive loss brought on by the inevitable passage of time? Certainly, not I.

t's that universal truth - or perhaps just an urban legend - that connects people who share their lives on a deeper level and which very well may have been the genesis for Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man, the off-Broadway hit that's now touring the United States, wending its way to Nashville for a three-show stand at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, November 4 and 5.

Have you decided on your Halloween costume yet? You better get to work since it's only four days until the big night is upon us and you won't want to caught with your pants down, so to speak. May we respectfully suggest a trip to your local, neighborhood theater? Not only will you be entertained, transformed and transported - we're willing to be on this happening - but you'll also probably get some great costume ideas in the process! And there is the added bonus that the theater company might be in the business of renting out costumes which would make your efforts even easier than you first thought…

2015 First Night Honoree Paula Flautt directs the Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman classic comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner, as Christ Presbyterian Academy's high school theatre stages the show about a critic and raconteur who becomes a surprising houseguest for a small-town Ohio family.

Today, Megan Scott, one of 2015 First Night Star Award winner Brenda Dent Gregory's talented student sat Murfreesboro's Siegel High School, continues our new season of High School Drama, the latest in a long list of younger actors to be introduced via Broadway World Nashville in the coming year…

VUTheatre, in partnership with the Vanderbilt University Holocaust Lecture Series, presents the emotional drama, A Shayna Maidel, opening November 4 at Neely Auditorium on the Nashville campus.  

Patrick Kramer's commanding performance as Frederick Frankenstein (that's 'FRONKENsteen' for the uninitiated) in the Center for the Arts' production of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein is reason enough to buy a ticket (if you're lucky enough to score one - shows are playing to capacity crowds in Murfreesboro, so make your reservations yesterday), but director Renee Robinson and musical director Stephen Burnette very adroitly surround him with such strong support that the entire ensemble of Transylvanian thespians is worth the price of admission.

Here are our suggestions - our choices, as it were - for the shows to catch, the people to see, before Monday morning rolls around. Again. When work beckons, we promise you'll have so much more interesting water cooler chatter to share that you'll be the envy of everyone at the office:

As the leaves begin to turn and the temperatures start to drop and we see autumn all about us, it signals the frantic period of 2016 when local high schools are busily prepping their fall productions. Nashville's Hume-Fogg Academic High School is one such place, where students - under the direction of 2014 First Night Honoree Daron Bruce and his artistic collaborator Lisa Forbiss - are deep into rehearsals for the first of this academic year's presentations: Big Fish, starring Lindsey George, Jonathan Hankins and Nashville theater legacy Michael Dunaway.

It's hard to believe that Jonathan Larson's epic rock musical masterpiece, Rent, debuted on Broadway, making headlines around the world, winning the Pulitzer Prize and bringing a whole new generation of audiences to the theater 20 years ago. Larson who died just prior to the show's 1996 off-Broadway opening didn't live to see the acclaim with which his musical - based upon Puccini's La Boheme - was greeted, but if we believe in such things, we may rest assured that since his untimely demise he has watched over Rent's evolution, which includes the 20th Anniversary production now touring the country in an astounding revival which reaffirms its place among the very best of American musical theater.

How does one go about describing Blair Allison? She's funny, irrepressible, charming, talented and kooky…beautiful, personable and clever - just to name a few of the Murfreesboro native's most obvious attributes. She's also determined and ambitious, focused and committed and a graduate of Belmont University's widely respected theater program, headed by 2010 First Night Honoree Paul Gatrell.