Jeffrey Ellis - Page 144

Actor Jay Doolittle and three accomplices will bring to life favorites such as 'The Cask of Amantillado,' 'The Masque of the Red Death,' 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Raven,' allowing audiences to 'descend iinto the macabre madness of murderers, merry-makers and haunted souls described in grosteque detail by a mater of language.'

With consistently superb casting and amazingly focused direction, Avery Crozier's Eat The Runt is given its due in the play's Nashville premiere by GroundWorks Theatre. Now onstage through October 24 at the Darkhorse Theatre, the comedy is a smartly written treatise on the arts, workplace manipulation, 'human resources' and political correctness-heady subjects all that combine for one of the funniest plays of contemporary vintage that we've seen.

As I entered the theatre itself to find my seat, I came face-to-face for the first time in lord knows how long with Reba Perkins, one of my favorite Nashville actresses, who now works part-time as an usher for TPAC. Reba's genuinely heartfelt response to seeing me was heartwarming and reassuring. Instantly, my mind went back to the first time I had the opportunity to review Reba's onstage work, in the Circle Players production of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. She gave a wonderfully nuanced performance that garnered rave reviews all around and resulted in her being nominated for a First Night Award that season.

Roles are available for actors, dancers and singers of all ages (children, teens, and adults). Auditionees should prepare 16 bars of an up-tempo song. Pre-recorded accompaniment is preferred, but an accompanist will also be provided, and auditionees should be dressed in clothing appropriate for movement and be prepared to learn a short dance combination. Resumes and headshots will be accepted, but they are not required.

The inspired lunacy of Michael Frayn's Noises Off is a good choice for any theatre company seeking to offer a glimpse into the wacky antics of life on the boards and Circle Players continues its 60th annual season with a largely successful production that features the aforementioned stellar performances of Maggie Pitt and Jeremy Maxwell in the roles of Poppy and Tim (the techies in Frayn's show-within-a-show structure). Pitt and Maxwell deliver disarmingly natural performances amid all the hilarious hijinks taking place in Frayn's wonderfully funny farce and they very nearly-actually, they do it outright-steal the show.

'ACT 1 is doing things a little differently this year and asking all interested directors to submit a play he or she is particularly intertested in directing,' Hade explained. 'Whether you are a first-time director or an experienced one, the ACT 1 Board invites you to submit a script along with a proposal.'

Written by artistic director Trish Crist, The Nashville Monologues 'explores the dark side of diversity through Halloween season performances of frightening, dramatic, revealing and (yes) comic monologues inspired by public submission' of those personal accounts.

Circle Players, Middle Tennessee's oldest community theatre, is seeking directors who are interested in mounting productions for the company's 61st anniversary season in 2010-2011.

'Alexander knows it is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day when he wakes up with gum in his hair, and he is right! Things only get worse as the day goes on: his best friend bails on him, there's no dessert in his lunch bag, there's lima beans for dinner and kissing on TV! The only reasonable response is to move to Australia. Judith Viorst adapted her own award-winning children's book into a marvelous musical that is wacky, wild, and wonderfully wise!'

Nashville's Street Theatre Company will hold auditions this weekend for a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It, written by Cori Laemmel.

Staged at the W.O. Smith Nashville Community Music School, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later offers a follow-up to the original work and was produced internationally on the 11th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was so brutally murdered by two young men near the city limits of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Audiences the world over were given the tremendous opportunity to share in the new work with the contemporaneous productions, an undertaking that amplifies the notion that live theatre can be transformative in its power to challenge conventional wisdom and, quite simply, provoke thought and introspection.

A. Sean O'Connell will direct the Middle Tennessee premiere of Avery Crozier's Eat the Runt, opening Friday, October 16 at Darkhorse Theatre, 4610 Charlotte Avenue in Nashville. The contemporary comedy will continue at Darkhorse through October 24. In the play, 'Crozier toys with ideas of perception, political correctness and societal and cultural norms as we follow a job applicant through an art museum interview process,' O'Connell said.

Bringing together the rich characters and wry humor of celebrated Texas playwright Horton Foote (The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta), Dividing the Estate 'deftly combines the claustrophobia of the Southern families from Tennessee Williams, the physical and psychological dysfunctions of Eugene O'Neill's families, and the humor and pathos of small town Southern life portrayed by Flannery O'Connor,' according to a press release from Tennessee Rep.

Opening Friday, October 16, at Nashville's Z. Alexander Looby Theatre, and running for three weekends, the plot of Noises Off focuses on a 'highly dysfunctional theatre troupe as it puts on an unfunny farce called Nothing On,' explains Regine McClain, Circle's public relations director. 'In Act 1, the audience gets to see a dress rehearsal that is not going well. In Act 2, the cast performs the first act as the audience watches from the backstage perspective, where things are getting out of hand. The final act shows the play after two months of touring, when the show has deteriorated into a total disaster, yet a delightful one.'

Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the next production in the 2009-2010 season at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre, starring Linda Ellis as Mag. In McDonagh's Tony Award-winning play, 'Maureen lives a lonely life with her ailing mother, Mag, in a small village in western Ireland. At forty years of age, Maureen has yet to experience love. When a romantic interest moves into her life, Mag incites a desperate game of deceit and manipulation to keep her daughter at home.'

General auditions for Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre's 2010 season will be held on Saturday, November 21, according to Martha Wilkinson, artistic director for the venerable company. Among shows included in this first round of general auditions are: Rumors, Blithe Spirit, Frankly My Dear, The Butler Done It and Funny Money.

Thanks to director Jessika Malone and her cast of talented actors, you'll find oh-so-much to identify with and relate to in Nashville's own version of My First Time, onstage at Darkhorse Theatre through this Saturday night. It's a funny, poignant, laugh-out-loud hour that flies by as Malone's six thespians relate some of the dozens of tales sampled in Davenport's script. Gleaned from the thousands of responses to the First Time website (some 40,000 responses, in fact) that was launched in 1998 during those halcyon pre-blogging, pre-social networking days when posting something online could still be kind of anonymous and somewhat safer than it is now.

Nashville Opera opens its 2009-2010 season with a sumptuous mounting of Puccini's classic Tosca, onstage at TPAC's Andrew Jackson Hall October 8 and 10. Starring soprano Erika Sunnegardh in the title role, the production features William Joyner as Cavaradossi, Luis Ledesma as Scarpia, Matthew Trevino as Angelotti/The Jailer, Stefan Skafarowsky as Sacristan/Sciarrone and Tracy Wise as Spoletta. The production is directed by John Hoomes, artistic director for Nashville Opera, and the Nashville Symphony is conducted by Steven White, artistic director of Opera Roanoke. The Nashville Opera Ensemble, under chorusmater Amy Tate Williams, is also featured.

From the first strains of the music, so beautifully played by members of the Nashville Symphony, under the baton of conductor Steven White (himself the artistic director of Opera Roanoke and a frequent collaborator with Nashville Opera artists) to the final, dramatic scene in which Tosca falls to her death after the execution of her lover, Tosca is a feast for both the eyes and ears. Creatively designed, utilizing the scenery from the Virginia Opera mounting of the work and sumptuous costuming from Baltimore's AT Jones & Sons, it has all the impressive trappings of grand opera. Yet John Hoomes' thoughtful direction results in something that is far more relatable-and certainly more accessible-than one might imagine.

Clarksville's Roxy Theatre will be one of some 100 theatres across the United States to produce a staged reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later on Monday, October 12. The landmark event, which commemorates the 11th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard, the openly gay University of Wyoming student who was brutally beaten and killed ina homophobic hate crime.