Jeffrey Ellis - Page 56

Today, our Friday Five spotlight is focused on Molly Breen and Jessica Theiss who last night celebrated, along with the rest of their cast and crew, opening night of White Orchard Theatre's Feels Colder Than Love, conceived by – and directed by and designed by, with video production overseen by – Irina Sundukova, playing the Black Box Theatre at Ensworth High School, in Nashville, through January 29.

News spread quickly among Nashville-area theaterati last week: Denice Hicks would be taking the stage of Belmont University's Troutt Theater to take on what could conceivably be her greatest theater challenge: Playing King Lear in the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of the Shakespeare tragedy which had opened a week earlier.

After 30 years away from her first professional theater home, Tennessee theater icon Martha Wilkinson proves that you can go home again as she directs Cumberland County Playhouse's first show of the 2016 season: Church Basement Ladies, which opened at the Crossville theater last Saturday, January 16.

Threatening weather forecasts of freezing rain, snow and otherwise wintry conditions notwithstanding, Nashville's White Orchard Theatre tonight debuts Feels Colder Than Love, premiering Thursday, January 21, at the Ensworth School Auditorium Black Box Theater, running through January 29.

LaToya Gardner adds yet another theatrical conquest to her already impressive resume: Sister Mary Clarence/Deloris Van Cartier in Sister Act, the musical theater version of the Whoopi Goldberg film that has delighted audiences since its debut in 1992, inspiring one sequel (with maybe another on the way) in the process.

One of the best parts of covering and reviewing theater in one region for almost 30 years is seeing new talent emerge from among the area's younger actors. Take, for example, Ryan Garrett - a 2012 First Night Most Promising Actor and a graduate of Williamson County's Centennial High School, he now studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, a program that has encouraged him to think outside the box and which has challenged him with ever-more intense roles onstage and in the classroom.

Case in point: Today's subject of Where Are They Now?, our regular feature in which we catch-up with those people who once called Nashville home but who are now reaching for their dreams all over the creative world. Dancer Garrett Marks first came to Nashville in 2009 to study at Belmont University and, in the process, became Belmont's first student to earn a BFA in Dance, creating his own line of study when one barely seemed to exist on a campus filled to the brim with talented young people.

With his final semester of collegiate study still ahead, Millikin University student Joseph J. Bezenek is clearly looking forward, making plans for his future - but make no mistake about, the talented theater student who hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, still has his attention focused squarely on what's to come before he leaves the Millikin campus in Decatur, Illinois.

Nashville actor and NFL Hall of Famer Eddie George, who makes his Broadway debut Tuesday night in the iconic musical Chicago, was named First Night's Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play for his searing portrayal of a former slave haunted by the spectre of abuse in Nashville Repertory Theatre's The Whipping Man. Rene Dunshee Copeland, producing artistic director of Nashville Rep, was named Outstanding Director of a Play, while her three-actor ensemble (which included James Rudolph and Matthew Rosenbaum) were awarded as First Night's Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play for their rendition of the Matthew Lopez play.

Tennesseans come from a long line of storytellers - it's in our collective DNA, it seems, what with the state being home to the National Storytelling Festival, among other things - and Chambers Stevens (the 2012 First Night Honoree who co-founded Nashville Shakespeare Festival) is no different. In fact, for generations, members of his family have entertained those around them with stories both far-fetched and resolutely true.

Theatrical surprises and sneak previews of upcoming productions of veteran director Tim Larson's Sister Act, from Nashville's Circle Players - Middle Tennessee's oldest community theater organization - and Center for the Arts' Dreamgirls, directed by 2012 Most Promising Actor Matthew Hayes Hunter, will highlight Sunday's Midwinter's First Night.

Just when you thought it was safe to fill the stockings by the chimney with care, Music City Theatre Company presents The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, a Christmas-themed theatrical diversion by playwright Jeff Goode, in which the eight reindeer - yep, those eight reindeer - dish about the real Santa Claus and all the accompanying scandals and hoopla that will have you talking about the big guy and his entourage until long past December 25.

It's that thematic power of hope and reconciliation that plays out so evocatively on theater stages throughout the world at this time of year, urging each of us on to our revelry during this hectic, oftentimes trying and crazy time of the year. Nashville's Larry Keeton Theatre presents just such an evocative story of Christmastime during wartime with A 1940s Radio Christmas Carol, the sequel to The 1940s Radio Hour, one of regional theater's most-often performed musical revues.

Just in time for the holiday season, the company's original 'musical comedy dinner show,' writer Curtis Reed's Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas is onstage through the end of 2015, offering audiences a tuneful, if sometimes tone-deaf, holiday extravaganza not unlike a Christmastime television special, the likes of which we haven't seen since the heyday of Hee Haw and other cornfed entertainment offerings. And like its predecessors, Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas offers a good-hearted, if sometimes confusing, holiday parable that features some mighty talented people deserving of a far-better script.

David Perlman - who plays Ralph Sheldrake, the sometimes manipulative, always cunning television producer in Irving Berlin's White Christmas - admits he may have been a tad 'aggressively inspirational' recently when it came time to persuade his castmates and company cohorts to take part in a pet project that ultimately became a labor of love and yuletide revelry for the lot them.

But there are those Christmas-themed shows that we're delighted to see no matter the time or place. Case in point: A Tuna Christmas, the seasonal sojourn to the third smallest town in Texas, where the wacky denizens are up to all kinds of hijinks as they celebrate baby Jesus' birthday, complete with a Christmas Phantom, a sale on firearms at Didi Snavely's gun emporium and a reintroduction of Helen Bedd and Inita Goodwin, the good-time gals at the Tasty Kreme, and Joe Bob Lipsey, the extravagantly over-dramatic director of Tuna Little Theater's beleaguered production of the royalty-free A Christmas Carol.

Rebekah Durham is not Reese Witherspoon, so no one is paying her a million bucks to star in some holiday-themed rom com - but make no mistake about it, they damn well oughta be! But for now, Nashville theater-goers are the lucky ones; we get to see her onstage in Tennessee Women's Theater Project's first-ever Christmastime production: Ginna Hoben's The Twelve Dates of Christmas, a thoroughly delightful and wonderfully entertaining one-woman show that offers up some universal truths for this or any other season.

Leave it to the ambitious and creative people of Nashville's Actors Bridge Ensemble to continue the celebration of the company's 20th anniversary season with the presentation of a new and compelling play – The Nether by Jennifer Haley – which ushers audiences into the dystopian world that has evolved in the not-too-distant future. It's an intriguing choice, to be sure, and one which could be fraught with failure and pretension were it not for the superb production concept and vision of director/producer Jessika Malone, given the wherewithal by ABE producing artistic director and co-founder Vali Forrister to challenge audiences in every way possible and to upend all conventional thought with a production that continues to haunt me almost a week after seeing it.

All this yuletide revelry to which I am alluding comes courtesy of BUMT's latest production: Irving Berlin's White Christmas, the onstage updating of the 1954 film version that features a score of the master musician's finest songs as it tells the story of two song-and-dance men and their female counterparts who join together during one particularly mild winter ski season to help save the bacon of an inspiring leader who's played a significant role in their lives. It's a tuneful, feel-good show that's certain to lift your spirits and, as performed by the BUMT cast, reaffirm your faith that the future of musical theater will be thriving for years to come.

Nashville Ballet returns this year - for the eighth consecutive year - with one of Music City's most beloved holiday traditions: Paul Vasterling's Nashville's Nutcracker, running tonight, December 5-23 at TPAC's Andrew Jackson Hall.