Jeffrey Ellis - Page 24

All of Nashville is a stage - or will be at some point - as Nashville Shakespeare Festival's celebration of its 30th anniversary continues at venues both expected and unexpected during the coming months.

With its vision focused squarely on the future, Nashville Children's Theatre (NCT) - the nation's oldest professional theatre for young audiences - last night revealed its upcoming "Season of Discovery," a slate of six challenging productions, along with an updated rendering of the company's iconic dragon logo.

Bleak and darkly menacing, playwright Martin McDonagh's view of the world in his blackest of black comedies The Pillowman focuses on the investigation into a series of child murders in a fictional totalitarian state sometime in the near future - or, given the political climate in this real country in which we finds ourselves existing right now, it could well be representative of a parallel universe of which we will learn in the next few weeks or even moments.

Poignant and compelling, Mockingbird - the play adapted for the stage by Julie Jensen from the National Book Award-winning novel for younger audiences by Katherine Erskine - is a remarkably timely and prescient look at the aftermath of a school shooting for the people most intimately affected by it, in particular an 11-year-old girl named Caitlin, who has Asperger's syndrome, and whose beloved older brother was a victim of the horrific incident that takes place (mercifully, for audiences) prior to the start of the play.

Hedda Gabler, both Henrik Ibsen's legendary anti-heroine and his eponymous play from whence she comes, challenges even the most experienced directors and actors to create a version of the piece that is engaging and authentic - and, perhaps more importantly, appealing to the people sitting in the audience witnessing the willful Hedda succumb to her baser instincts, even while attempting to become a dutiful wife in a society for which she seems emotinally ill-equipped.

One thing becomes abundantly clear while witnessing Bailey McCall Thomas' emotionally charged performance of the song 'Cabaret' during a performance of the iconic Broadway musical of the same name: there is perhaps no 'title song' quite so evocative, quite so stunning as John Kander and Fred Ebb's composition for Cabaret. For it is during that song, performed by Sally Bowles in a Weimar era nightclub in Berlin, that the show's entire focus - every theme that shapes the work in order to tell its totally engrossing and entertaining story - is brought sharply into view, set to a memorable melody that seems at once to be both joyous and mournful, ensuring that every audience member experiences a response unique to them.

Broadway star and two-time Tony Award nominee Laura Osnes will headline Nashville Children's Theatre's Grand Night benefit, set for Saturday, April 14. Nashville Children's Theatre is the nation's oldest professional theater for young audiences.

Theater's next generation of actors will come from all over the globe, to be certain, but one might find an impressive concentration of artists on the campus of the University of Southern California, where the list of candidates for the Master of Fine Arts in acting rivals any group to be found anywhere. Take Michael Khachanov, for example. Born in Azerbaijan, he grew up (from the age of 7 to 17) in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and now calls Los Angeles as his hometown. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, he majored in business and economics, and now he finds himself in the midst of USC's MFA three-show repertory of plays while he and his classmates prepare for showcases in New York City and LA.

Traversing the world as we know it, the journey from Weimar Germany in the 1920s to Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2018 is a circuitous, challenging one for Bailey McCall Thomas, the talented University of Tennessee graduate now playing the iconic Sally Bowles in the national touring company of the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret.

Greg Wilson, artistic director of Actors Point Theatre Company, will direct Little Women - The Broadway Musical, which is based on the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott, running March 8-17.

American Idol finalists - and real-life husband and wife - Ace Young and Diana DeGarmo will star as Danny and Sandy this spring as Studio Tenn's production of Grease hits the stage at Jamison Theater at the Factory at Franklin for a May 10-27 run.

Who'd have thought that a play written in 2000 and based upon a work by Aeschylus from 463 BC (give or take a year or two) would prove to be so timely in the 21st Century? Yet that is exactly what Big Love, a play by Charles Mee, directed by Amanda Card and produced by Tamara Todres, Kristin McCalley and Clayton Landiss, has proven in six performances at a former Methodist Church in Inglewood, delivering a production that challenges preconceived notions about a myriad of issues, ranging from sexism, racism and any number of other "isms" that punctuate our current conversation.

Marguerite Lowell's exquisitely crafted performance as Sister Aloysius will continue to reverberate long after the curtain has come down on Studio Tenn's remarkably prescient and timely production of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, which runs at Jamison Theatre in the Factory at Franklin through Sunday.

Are Caucasians (specifically, white men) 'hard-wired' to be prejudiced - genetically engineered to be biased against the members of other races - their so-called white privilege perhaps mitigated by circumstances beyond their control? That's but one of the intriguing queries posed during the two-and-a-half-hours of Lydia R. Diamond's provocative and stimulating Smart People, now onstage at TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre in a winning production directed by Jon Royal.

Theater's next generation of actors will come from all over the globe, to be certain, but one might find an impressive concentration of artists on the campus of the University of Southern California, where the 2018 list of candidates for the Master of Fine Arts in acting rivals any group to be found anywhere. Take Isadora Lee Cintron Moya, for example. A native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, she earned her bachelor's degree in theater from the University of Puerto Rico, where she was a member of the university's acclaimed Traveling Theatre Group.

Terrific performances across the board, sprightly direction that keeps the action moving at a quick clip-clop and a no-holds-barred sense of ridiculous theatricality all come together in Center for the Arts' production of Monty Python's Spamalot, the hilarious stage musical based on the irreverent troupe's 1975 film comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With a slate filled with stage favorites - of both the musical and 'straight' variety - still to come in 2018, Murfreesboro's CFTA will likely have a banner year.

Nashville Children's Theatre, the nation's oldest professional theatre for young audiences will perform Mockingbird from March 1-18. Based on the award-winning book, Mockingbird provides a look at how a parent and his daughter with Asperger's syndrome cope with a tragic loss due to a school shooting.

Jessika Malone (a Fred Coe Artist-in-Residence) directs the Vanderbilt University Theatre production Orlando, Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of a 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf, through February 24.

Passionate and captivating, The Hunchback of Notre Dame - the stage musical based on the Disney animated classic, featuring music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Peter Parnell - is given a superb production at Woodbury's Arts Center of Cannon County and discerning theater patrons in Middle Tennessee have but two performances left to experience the show under the direction of Darryl Deason and Rachel Jones.

Directed by Debbie Shannon and Jay Shannon, the musical stars Hunter Thaw as Charlie Brown; Elizabeth Krebs as Lucy; Charlotte Myhre as Sally; Haydin Oechsle as Linus; 2018 First Night Most Promising Actor Danielle Threet as Snoopy; Jared Taylor as Shroeder; 2018 First Night Most Promising Actor Maddi Keaton as Frieda/Woodstock; Halley Andrews as Peppermint Patti; and Rachel Baskin as Marcie.