Jeffrey Ellis - Page 54

2014 First Night Honoree - and one of Nashville's most acclaimed actresses, cabaret artists and music directors - Ginger Newman is "ready for [her] close-up," as Norma Desmond in The Larry Keeton Theatre puts the finishing touches on their upcoming production of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Sunset Boulevard.

It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that on Tuesday night, February 16, Music City officially fell in love with Motown. Berry Gordy's musical is the stuff of legend and, as it takes us from 1983 all the way back to 1938 and back again, you can't help but be impressed by the ambitious young man's rise to preeminence; his story is the American dream come true and Gordy's impact on pop culture and the very fiber of our nation's history cannot be overstated - it's a story that resonates in Nashville to be certain.

Chris Ramirez is an excellent example of the talented, driven and committed individuals honing their craft at USC. A native of Kansas City, Kansas - "aka Wyandotte County, aka The Dotte!" - he earned his B.A. in theatre performance at the University of Kansas before heading westward to USC.

Martha Wilkinson directs Brett Cantrell, Audrey Johnson, Jenny Norris-Light, Jeremy Maxwell and Lydia Bushfield in Funny Valentines – the latest offering from Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre – which opened February 11 and continues at the iconic Nashville dinner theater through March 12.

Tonight at Birdland - for the first time since it debuted in Nashville in 2012 - a New York audience will finally have the opportunity to hear Marvin Hamlisch's final theatrical score for Nutty Professor, the musical based on the iconic Jerry Lewis film.

Nashville's remarkable quintet of divas - Erin Parker, Melodie Madden Adams, Cori Laemmel, Laura Matula and Megan Murphy Chambers, aka Mas Nashville - implore you to save the date of Tuesday, April 19, when they'll unveil their latest collaborative effort (which will reveal their superheroine alter egos): SuperMAS.

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.

Make no mistake: Nate Eppler is far too good a playwright to remain Nashville theater's best-kept secret for much longer. If you need further proof of his brilliance (a word I don't use to describe people very often), even after witnessing it first-hand in his earlier plays - like the noirish Rear Widow, the imaginative Larries or the compelling Long Way Down - then get yourself as quickly as humanly possible down to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Johnson Theatre and allow yourself to be immersed in his latest work of stage wizardry: the challenging, enlightening and provocative Good Monsters.

Without doubt, excessive exaggeration or hyperbole, Nashville is a veritable 'city of dreams,' a place where creativity thrives and collaboration is a way of life. Perhaps in no other way is this synergy expressed more artfully than in Nashville Ballet's Attitude series - playing through Valentine's Day at TPAC's James K. Polk Theatre - which captures the very essence of Music City, encapsulating it in the music of local songwriters and then translating it for an audience via the ephemeral nature of dance.

Arnold Lobel's beloved characters hop from page to stage today, February 13 and February 20 as The Arts Center of Cannon County presented A Year With Frog and Toad, the Tony Award-nominated musical with book and lyrics by Willie Reale and music by Robert Reale.

Written in 1947 - and inspired by events of World War II and the true-life story of a woman who alerted authorities to her father's wartime wrong-doing - All My Sons focuses on the story of a businessman who once narrowly avoided financial ruin by shipping cracked machine parts to the military. He blames his business partner and builds an empire, but eventually his crime comes back to haunt him in Miller's riveting play, which is now considered a modern American classic.

Doubtless, there's a lot of hustling, bustling and what-not going on at Murfreesboro's Center For The Arts today as the company prepares for tonight's premiere of the musical extravaganza Dreamgirls. Directed by 2013 First Night Most Promising Actor Matthew Hayes Hunter (who may or may not answer to the name of "Matt" these days), the grand-scale production features four of the loveliest, most talented and mesmerizing leading ladies to be found on any stage, anywhere: Ra'Shaun Simon (playing Deena Jones), Brianna Booker (Lorell Robinson), Brittany Easley (Michelle Morris) and Robbyn "Vyrgo" Daniel, who plays the clarion-voiced Effie Melody White, the part made famous on Broadway by Jennifer Holliday.

Nate Eppler is, arguably, the best playwright now pursuing his art in Nashville - and with his latest work, Good Monsters, opening tomorrow night at TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre, he finds himself squarely back in the spotlight. It is, after all, the world premiere production of his newest, perhaps most controversial and provocative, play.

Nashville Ballet's acclaimed Attitude series will shake up its annual performance - slated for this weekend at TPAC's James K. Polk Theatre - to feature a collaboration with Music City's world-famous Bluebird Cafe for a unique series of dances.

Nashville's Street Theatre Company launches its 11th season with Lin Manuel Miranda's Tony Award-winning In The Heights, the smash musical that took Broadway by storm and paved the way for Miranda's new Broadway blockbuster Hamilton. Directed by STC founding artistic director Cathy Sanborn Street, In The Heights, running March 4-20, will be her farewell production in Nashville as she and her husband, JJ Street - an integral member of the theater's creative team since its beginnings - move to Wilmington, North Carolina in March.

Dreamgirls – the Tony Award- and Oscar-winning musical by Academy Award nominee Henry Krieger and book and lyrics by Tony and Grammy Award-winner Tom Eyen – opens at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts this Friday night, running February 12 through Sunday, February 28.

Here is your opportunity to get to know USC's Salome Mergia in this week's edition of Collegiate Theatrics. Miraculously, it would seem, she found time to sit down and consider our questions - and to offer some elucidating answers - about her time at USC and how her experiences there have prepared her for the future…

Metro Parks' Theatre Program will host several classes and workshops for interested students ages 9 to 17 this spring, leading up to this summer's co-production with Music City Theatre Collective of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! at the Centennial Park band shell.

Directors and producers throughout Middle Tennessee are seeking actors for upcoming productions of David Mamet's November (from BWW Nashville Award-winning KB Productions), Gruesome Playground Injuries (coming up as this year's production from Nashville Repertory Theatre's interns) and Dickson's Gaslight Dinner Theater is looking for someone to play the iconic Sherlock Holmes in the regional premiere of Baskerville, a new Ken Ludwig comedy. We've gathered the details together here to make your planning easier. So now you have no excuse: go follow your dream!

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.