Jeffrey Ellis - Page 49

David Lee directs an ensemble of actors which includes 2015 First Night Honoree Wesley Paine, along with Allie Huff, Alexandra Chopson, Brooke Gronemeyer, Becky Wahlstrom and Taylor Chew. The understudy cast is made up of Fiona Soul, Tessa Bryant, Sadie Andros, Morgan Conder, Nettie Kraft and Amanda Bell.

Nashville's Theater Craft, Inc. presents two new shows this weekend - April 21-23: Go From Here: The Music & Lyrics of Carolyn German and Improv Binge Watch! featuring the Spontaneous Comedy Company. The shows will be presented at the iconic Darkhorse Theater.

Rajiv Joseph's quirky and dark love story of Gruesome Playground Injuries, an engaging drama that follows childhood friends Kayleen and Doug over the course of 30 years of physical and emotional bumps and bruises - will be presented by members of Nashville Repertory Theatre's Professional Internship program April 29-30 at Nashville Public Television's Studio A.

Nashville Shakespeare Festival will celebrate Shakespeare's birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death this Saturday, April 23, with the Bard's Birthday Bash at the Nashville Public Library Main Branch, located at 615 Church Street.

Imagine if Picasso and Einstein had actually met: That's the premise for comedian-turned-playwright Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which opens this Friday, April 22, at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre.

Onstage through Saturday night at Lipscomb University's Collins Auditorium, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, represents a musical theater genre that has fallen out of favor in the 21st Century: its very innocence and perceived lack of guile guarantee that it will ultimately become the stuff of community theater, academic theater and their ilk. After watching the show play out on stage - even when it's directed by Kari Smith with gleeful exuberance - you can't help but wonder how it ever played Broadway (Twice, even!), even after a rather successful mid-1960s off-Broadway stand.

Nashville Children's Theatre (NCT) this morning announces its 85th Anniversary season. Since 1931, NCT has been leading the way in providing professional theatre to young audiences. As the oldest professional children's theatre in the nation, NCT is proud to continue its mission to provide extraordinary theatrical experiences to youth, families and adults.

Something Rotten! this way comes - along with a healthy assortment of recent Broadway hits, a homegrown version of an Andrew Lloyd Webber hit and a transfer from London's West End - as the Tennessee Performing Arts Center revealed the list of shows included in their 2016-17 HCA/TriStar Health Broadway at TPAC series during a Monday night event.

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.

All of this is to explain why Leo Joseph-Connell, the protagonist of Amy Herzog's Pulitzer Prize-nominated play 4,000 Miles, shows up at 3 a.m. at his Grandmother Vera's apartment in the West Village of New York City, longing to renew a connection to someone who has known him since birth and who will help him find balance in his life once again, whether he admits that or not. After all, the older woman at 92 must be far wiser and more adept at dealing with the realities of life than a 21-year-old wanderer in search of solace.

Shows are opening, shows are closing and Fiddler on the Roof is back onstage for Actors Pointe Theatre Company while Tom Sawyer takes a bow at Springhouse Theatre in Smyrna! Obviously, the 2016 theater season continues to reveal itself at a breakneck pace, giving audiences a veritable buffet of offerings from which to choose.

To whet your appetite, today our Friday 5 spotlight falls upon Jonathan Whitney, who plays Petruchio, and Roxy veteran Jackie Ostick, who takes on the role of Grumio. Frankly, after hearing their responses to our question, the real show might be in the dressing room before curtain.

Britt Byrd takes on the challenging role of Carnelle Scott - and Nashville photographer Jenny Petit Steiner has the pictures to prove it - in The Larry Keeton Theatre's upcoming production of Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest, running at the Donelson theater April 14-30 - the first presentation of a non-musical at The Keeton in quite some time, according to producer Jamie London.

Roxy Regional Theater, in a multimedia partnership with CDE Lightband, will combine the music from a multi-platinum album turned into one of the most notable Broadway musicals of recent vintage, brought to life via the creativity of artists from Austin Peay State University and a dozen high-energy performers from around the USA for an eagerly anticipated production of Green Day's American Idiot, opening April 29 in Clarksville.

Terryl Hallquist directs Moliere's The Misanthrope, with a setting in modern-day Nashville, as Vanderbilt University Theatre takes a creative leap with its April 7-10 production.

When you're talking about dance and dancers in Nashville, one name immediately rises to the top of the list: Billy Ditty. No matter the genre, no matter the venue, no matter the project, he exemplifies dance in Music City for many people.

Tech week is under way for Lipscomb University's theatre students as they find themselves coming down to the wire for Friday night's opening of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown and there is perhaps no cast member more anxious to perform the popular musical in front of a living, breathing audience than Scott Patrick Wilson, one of the most notable LDoT students on campus.

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.

Lori Fischer's The Sparkley Clean Funeral Singers does what so many shows before it have attempted: To create a completely new world out of whole cloth and set it down amid the already existing world (in which we mere mortals ply our collective trade), peopled by characters who are easy to love or at least accessible enough to be engaging and fun to watch. Where Fischer's new musical - now onstage at Crossville's Cumberland County Playhouse - succeeds so impressively is in its refreshing storytelling structure that invites audiences into the fictionalized version of Ashland City, Tennessee, where people care deeply about their neighbors and are likely to sing songs displaying their affection and which are bound to make you guffaw (probably more than once).

Ken Ludwig created one of theater's best-loved and critically acclaimed farces with Lend Me A Tenor, then updated the book of one of musical theater's most revered Gershwin titles (Girl Crazy) with the long-running and equally beloved Crazy For You. Since those two mega-hits, however, he's been less successful (although, inarguably, he's kept busy churning out scripts and cashing royalty checks) and perhaps no new script has proved that point more than Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.