Jeffrey Ellis - Page 19

Very few actors can boast the resume, replete with some of the most iconic roles in musical theater, of Hume-Fogg Academic High School's Ava Locknar. Now a senior in Daron Bruce's and Lisa Forbis' renowned musical theatre program at the school, Ava's been at home on Broadway - albeit Nashville's Broadway - for four years, although it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to envision her on the Great White Way, taking on more musical theater challenges.

Another in the long line of impressive talents who are part of the legacy of musical theater at Nashville's Belmont University, Maggie Hutchison claims the spotlight once more in this semester's eagerly anticipated production of Side Show, in which she is one of two actresses cast in the role of Daisy Hilton.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 29, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Forget about those whiny, cry-baby Walking Dead fans and the increasing din of their lamentations regarding the imminent demise of Rick Grimes from their universe and instead focus your attention and horror film-inspired energies on Evil Dead, The Musical - a wickedly wild and ridiculously off-kilter send-up of the genre - now onstage in a terrifically entertaining, if uneven, production from Radical Arts, the little theater company who, for all intents and purposes, can.

Thirty years after its Broadway premiere - and just two-and-a-half years since its last run at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center - Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera returns to Music City in celebration of that momentous anniversary with another stand in Andrew Jackson Hall, replete with all the firepower and starpower one so readily associates with the production. And Nashville aduiences once more respond with rapt attention and thunderous applause, almost as if they are witnessing the Phantom's exploits for the very first time.

Part contemporary fairy tale/part modern day parable about lost love, missed chances and the cruelty of fate, Brooklyn: The Musical, is given a startlingly good production by Nashville's Street Theatre Company, with strong direction by Bakari King (the much-in-demand peripatetic - and multi-hyphenated - actor/singer/director/choreographer/producer/educator) and the consistently impressive performances by an ensemble of nine actors who bring the show to life with palpable vitality and remarkable commitment.

Theater people love to talk - especially about other theater people. So it should come as no surprise that it was during a recent conversation with Nashville theater choreographer extraordinaire Tosha Pendergrast that the name of Ravenwood High School's Kelly Whitlow came up.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 22, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Fog comes billowing out over the footlights, bringing with it a pervasive sense of foreboding that sets the tone for the next three hours of what is - without any fear of exaggeration - the most satisfying theatrical experience of 2018. Eye-poppingly gorgeous, with a design aesthetic that's perfectly wedded to the source material provided by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book writer Hugh Wheeler, and featuring some of the most electrifying performances we've ever witnessed at Cumberland County Playhouse (where they know a thing or 100 about staging musicals), Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is spectacular.

Quentin Oliver Lee, the man behind the mask - the dynamic singer/actor leads the national company of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, now on tour throughout the United States - first stepped onstage in the iconic role during its Memphis run earlier this year and he freely admits that the experience left him eager to return to Tennessee to perform on the stage of Nashville's Andrew Jackson Hall.

What about the story keeps audiences coming back again and again to see The Phantom of the Opera? Is it the lushly romantic score composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber? Or could it be the costumes and scenery, so widely seen across the globe - and so easily identifiable as being from The Phantom - that they are considered iconic? Or could it be the mysteriously intriguing and sumptuously romantic Gaston Leroux story?

Nora's back - and she's pissed! Some 15 years after Henrik Ibsen's proto-feminist Nora Helmer came to the momentous decision to leave her controlling husband at the end of A Doll's House - and some 140 years after she first stepped in front of the footlights at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre in 1879 - she finally returns to her Norwegian home to confront her estranged husband and to reveal just what she's been up to since she left her utterly conventional life behind in search of something more.

And if there's any justice in the world of the performing arts, you can rest assured that University of Memphis' Layne Mackenzie Crutsinger will be among the names of particular note. A graduate of Mt. Juliet High School, she's now a senior at the University of Memphis, looking ahead to what the future holds in store for her.

Lucy Turner has been a fixture in Nashville theater since she was a toddler, it seems, and now - in an example of how times flies by - the senior at Nashville School of the Arts is in the throes of choosing a college, filing applications and scheduling auditions. She burst upon the local theater scene at ten years old, playing Rhoda Penmark in director Cathy Street's critically acclaimed production of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed at Street Theatre Company.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 15, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Serving as dramaturg for Falling Out, a provocative new performance piece from the New York-based Phantom Limb Company, which has its world premiere this weekend at Nashville's OZ Arts, has been unlike any other project Janice Paran has ever worked on.

Nashville businesswoman, philanthropist and arts advocate Martha Rivers Ingram is one of three individuals to be recognized at the annual gala of Theatre Communications Group in 2019. In addition to Ingram, who is co-founder of Nashville Repertory Theatre and who spearheaded the creation of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, honorees included Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and Broadway press agent Rick Miramontez, president of DKC/O&M.

Today, just in time for their show's opening, two cast members - Jason Scott, who plays the self-involved Chip Tolentino, and Jena Salb, who is cast as former champion Rona Lisa Peretti, step up to the microphone to answer our Thursday 5(+1) questions and to offer the suggestion that a revival of Legally Blonde: The Musical might be a good consideration for next season at The Keeton.

Everything that could conceivably trip up seasoned performers - who've been reciting monologues in front of their bathroom mirrors since they were toddlers, bring down a set considered to be a landmark in design for the stage (or in the history of architecture since the Greeks built their first temple and the Romans engineered their first aqueduct), and/or send scores of trembling thespians to the emergency room after but one performance - actually befall the cast and crew of The Play That Goes Wrong.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 1, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...