Jeffrey Ellis - Page 131

Street Theatre Company presents its original production of classic O. Henry stories, written and adapted for the stage by Nashville playwright Scott Hutcheson (of the recently produced Alice in Wonderland, a Musical), and presented for a holiday season run December 10-18. This cast features 20 area teenagers and eight children, as well as Judy and Ken Jackson, two of Nashville's favorite adult actors.

Amid all the hoopla of the approaching holiday season, Lakewood Theatre Company promises that Hello Christmas! An Evening in December with Mark J Thomas and Friends is the perfect show to inspire the holiday mood. 'It is part Trans-Siberian Orchestra, part Radio City Music Spectacular, and part Bing Crosby Christmas special, with comedy and original music to celebrate the season,' promises producer Asa Ambrister.

Barbara Rucker, who enjoyed a successful career as an actress in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles before making her way to Tennessee, leads the cast in Towne Centre Theatre's holiday season production of the latest Southern-bred comedy from Jones/Hope/Wooten, The Hallelujah Girls, which opens at the Brentwood theater Friday night, November 19, continuing through December 11.

Now onstage at Crossville's Cumberland County Playhouse is Sanders Family Christmas, the second part of the trilogy, in which the gospel-singing family returns to Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church for a Christmas Eve singing in 1941, just two days before son Dennis ('He's the boy!') leaves to join the Marines and go off to the big adventure that is World War II. The Playhouse has been very good to the Sanders Family over the years (in fact, next year Smoke on the Mountain will start its 18th annual season at the venue) and, in turn, the Sanders Family has been very good to the Playhouse, bringing in countless devoted and new fans for the theater. And it's easy to see why.

Brigadoon, onstage at Cumberland County Playhouse through November 21, could well be one of the closest-to-sheer-perfection musical theater experiences I've ever had, beautifully played and exquisitely staged, performed by a phenomenally gifted cast led by the multi-talented Britt Hancock (who sings, act and dances with vigorous conviction) as Tommy Albright. If you are a true lover of musical theater, you really must go see it before Brigadoon once again disappears into the mist.

Directed with his customary flair and oh-so-obvious affection for the material by NCT producing artistic director Scot Copeland, it's one of the sweetest shows you'll ever witness. But Seussical's sweetness isn't of the cloying variety that sets your teeth on edge; rather, NCT's Seussical is slightly satirical and wonderfully warped (just as you would expect from a show based upon the writings of the time-honored Dr. Seuss) and is brought to life by an ensemble of performers at the top of their game.

Donelson's Larry Keeton Theatre will present the turn-of-the-century classic Meet Me in St. Louis, November 5-21, directed and choreographed by Kate Adams-Johnson, with music direction by Ginger Newman. The show, based on the beloved 1944 MGM movie, contains many of the popular songs from its film counterpart including 'The Trolley Song', 'The Boy Next Door', 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' and 'Meet Me In St. Louis.'

Casting is complete for the world premiere of An American Country Christmas Carol, a new musical that will be presented in a staged reading at Franklin's Boiler Room Theatre on December 5, 6 and 12 at 8 p.m. Heading the cast as Ebenezer Scrugg is Larry Tobias, whose selected credits include the national tour of Stand By Your Man and numerous productions of Ring of Fire. In Nashville he has been seen as Pap in Tennessee Rep's Big River and in Studio Tenn's Our Town.

There's no doubt about it: Circle Players' Tim Larson is fearless. Perhaps no director in Nashville is more ambitious than Larson who, time after time, takes on the seemingly impossible and reimagines it as something well within the reach of his creative collective of actors, designers, technicians and musicians. Larson's staging of Titanic, a project he's taken on twice to great and justifiable acclaim, proves that even that musical is something which seasoned and capable community theater groups can tackle.

Now, in a sumptuously mounted revival touring the country, director/choreographer Robert Longbottom - who made his Broadway debut with Side Show, a musical of similar themes (again with music by Henry Krieger) that had the same visceral impact on me - has re-fashioned Dreamgirls for the new millennium, while remaining faithful to the original material. The result is musical theater at its best, telling a universal tale filled with onstage spectacle and backstage drama that is as stunning and as moving as the Broadway original.

With an imaginative staging and details-oriented direction by Matt Logan, with the superb musical direction of Nathan Burbank and the spirited choreography of Ashley Anderson McCarthy (who does double duty as 'Minnie Fay' in the cast - and has never looked lovelier onstage), Studio Tenn's first official season kicks off in high style with this charming production that is as colorful and heartwarming as any we've seen.

If you've a hankering for some wickedly good fun this Halloween season, you need look no further than Street Theatre Company's wonderfully staged Macabaret, a musical send-up of all things ghostly, that features a terrific cast under the direction of one of Nashville's most beloved director/choreographers. Even if you're not a big fan of Halloween, you must at least make the trip to Street Theatre Company's new performance space to revel in the spectacle heretofore known as the lovely and talented Megan Murphy Chambers.

Clearly, Bud, Not Buddy is a promising opening to NCT's 2010-11 season and it sets the bar high for what is to follow in the coming year. It is a superbly acted production, featuring a number of Nashville actors making notable NCT debuts, and it is augmented by the tremendous design capabilities of NCT's imaginative artisans.

Following the reversal of their convictions and their release from prison, six Death Row inmates tell their harrowing stories in their own words in the drama, The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jenson. The play will be performed at Nashville's Christ Church Cathedral's Cheek Hall in six performances October 7-9 and 14-16 as the kick-off to the seventh season of the Sacred Space for the City Arts Series.

One of the best things about living in Nashville - known throughout the world as Music City USA - is that even when you're mounting a high school production, you have the opportunity to draw inspiration from the wealth of talent found in the city. That certainly was the case this week when Daron Bruce, director of theater at Hume-Fogg Academic High School welcomed country music superstar and Broadway veteran Gary Morris to conduct a workshop for the cast his upcoming production of Les Miserables.

Director Maryanna Clarke's intelligent choice to retain the play's original setting instead of transplanting the playwrights' characters to some American hamlet helps to underscore the play's universality and to further illustrate how women all over the world must confront the cold reality of a cancer diagnosis. With the tremendous guidance of dialect coach Jill Massie, the three actresses in the piece (Corrie Miller, Kristin James and Linda Sue Simmons) display a remarkable gift of actually sounding as if they come from the Emerald Isle, instead of sounding like a bunch of Tennessee actresses mimicking the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

Opening just in time for the Halloween season, Circle Players continues its 2010-11 season with a production of Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's rarely performed musical thriller Jekyll and Hyde, running October 15-31 at Donelson's Keeton Theatre. Jekyll and Hyde is described as 'an evocative tale of the epic battle between good and evil,' based on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story about a brilliant doctor whose experiments with human personality create a murderous counterpart.

Jennifer Richmond, Dietz Osborne, Ben Dawson, Debbie Kraski and Charlie Winton star in Squabbles, the next show opening at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre in Nashville on Thursday, October 14. In Squabbles, Jerry Sloan is a successful jingle writer of commercial jingles married to an equally successful lawyer. Living with the happy couple is Jerry's not so happy father-in-law, Abe. When Jerry's mother Mildred is also forced to move in, the fur flies between Abe and Mildred in a succession of confrontations.

DTT artistic director Christopher Mohnani offers his adaptation of Carmen based on the famous opera of the same title. In Mohnani's adaptation, Seville's vibrant beauty serves as the background for this tragic story of a fiery gypsy girl whose seduction of a naïve officer leads to rejection, jealousy and ultimately death.