Jeffrey Ellis - Page 47

Tony Award-winning Broadway star LaChanze (If/Then, The Color Purple) will join the national tour of IF/THEN when it plays a limited one-week engagement at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall June 7-12. LaChanze's addition to the touring cast reunites her with Jackie Burns and Anthony Rapp, who along with LaChanze, starred in the original Broadway production of IF/THEN.

Theaters and production companies throughout Middle Tennessee are looking for directors, crew members and cast members for several upcoming productions, including Young Frankenstein at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts and Peter and the Starcatcher at Dickson's Renaissance Players.

Charles Busch's Psycho Beach Party - described by director Bradley Moore as "a campy, over-the-top comedy that blends the beach setting of Gidget with the insanity of a John Waters' movie" - is next up for Music City Theatre Company, playing Darkhorse Theater June 2-12.

Middle Tennessee's growing high school theater scene was in the spotlight over the weekend as Lipscomb University's Department of Theatre - under the direction of dance professor Kari Smith and dean of the College of Entertainment and the Arts Mike Fernandez - hosted the third annual Nashville High School Musical Theatre Awards.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

As exhilaratingly in-your-face as only the very best of contemporary theater can deliver, Green Day's American Idiot - now onstage in a startlingly emphatic and exuberant production at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre - exemplifies just how far the company itself has come since its beginnings as a community theater. Now, serving as a training ground for some of the very best of musical theater stars-to-come, The Roxy has more than come into its own, continuing to push the envelope, to challenge audiences to expand their artistic purview and to create theater that is as compelling as any you'll find on a stage anywhere in the good ol' US of A.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

If you have stopped by Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts lately, chances are you've heard the tapping feet of the cast of 42nd Street, who have been working to perfect their showy dance steps since February. With fifteen production numbers featuring memorable songs and toe-tapping choreography, this show is sure to please Center audiences.

Coming off of its tremendously successful season opener In The Heights, Street Theatre Company stages its second show of the 2016 season, Stephen Sondheim's provocative musical Assassins, May 20 through June 5.

Nashville Repertory Theatre will hold Open Call Auditions on May 18 and 19 at the Nashville Public Television building at 161 Rains Avenue. Auditions are by appointment only. Casting will be done for the five shows in Nashville Rep's 2016-17 season.

What happens when a group of teenagers idolize a celebrity - a figure from popular culture whose charisma ensures he will live on forever despite his death at a young age - reunite some 20 years later to further venerate their crush and to recall his impact on their young lives? That's the question considered in Ed Graczyk's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the tragicomedy now onstage as the final production of ACT 1's 2015-16 season at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater.

Eviscerating modern manners and mores with surgical skill and startling focus, playwright Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is among the most popular contemporary stage comedies of the early 21st century. Now onstage in an altogether agreeable, yet unsettling, production from Nashville's 4th Story Theater at West End United Methodist Church, the play - a searing indictment of pretentiousness and political correctness among the upper crust - remains just as provocative and entertaining as it has always been.

David Compton – one of the region's most accomplished and acclaimed and most beloved actors and directors – died early Wednesday morning, May 4, after a four-year battle with heart disease and cancer. He leaves his wife, Amanda Card Compton (whom he married on Tuesday, May 3, just hours before his death); his mother, Jo Compton of Badin, North Carolina; his sister Becky Compton Taylor; his brother Jim Compton; and countless other friends and family who are mourning his passing.

Hard to believe, but it's been four years since we sat down with Jeremy Benton, whom we've since referred to as Broadway's Best Tap Dancer every chance we've had, and now it seems as that title has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just yesterday, Benton - a native of Springfield, Tennessee - was honored with a nomination for a Fred and Adele Astaire Award in the category for best off-Broadway male dancer, heralding his critically acclaimed role in Cagney, the Musical.

OPEN CALLS in NASHVILLE, TN: Sit Down Production at the Grand Ole Opry House of Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical; Seeking Adults, Male and Female, Ages 18 and up

Hear ye, hear ye…Music City Confidential is back! Which means, of course, that I've heard an awful lot of scuttlebutt since last week's column went live on the interwebs - or, more likely, that I am trying to avoid boring and mundane stuff like packing - I'll let you decide what my motivation truly is...

Will Miranne and Daniel Morgan give top-notch performances, playing Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso in soon-to-be Lipscomb University theater grad Jonah Jackson's production of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, now onstage at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre through May 7.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

Not a word has been touched or added to Dr. Seuss' classic, ensuring anyone who's read the story will find themselves transported into the world they've long remembered and always imagined as Woodbury's Arts Center of Cannon County presents The Cat in the Hat for two Saturdays in May.

Tennessee Women's Theater Project's Tenth Annual Women's Work festival returns to Nashville's Z. Alexander Looby Theater beginning Friday May 6, featuring performing and visual arts created by women. Running through Sunday May 22, the festival spans a wide variety of styles and genres to offer a completely different program at every performance: poetry and essays; one-woman shows; plays and readings; dance, music, film and a display of visual art works in the theater.