Jeffrey Ellis - Page 3

News spread quickly among Nashville-area theaterati in January 2016: 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.

Today, we continue to celebrate the return of Collegiate Theatrics featuring one of our favorites from the theatre department at Nashville’s Lipscomb University: Connor Adair, a native of Edmond, Oklahoma. Throughout his time on-campus, he’s become a stalwart company member of virtually every Lipscomb University Theatre production we’ve reviewed, most recently taking on a significant supporting role in their acclaimed production of Big Fish.

With the season of Thanksgiving at hand, we celebrate Denice Hicks with A Nashville Theater Tribute: Giving Thanks for Denice, a multi-part retrospective of some of our favorite stories and interviews with her from over the years. We begin our special season of giving thanks for her theatrical legacy, abiding love and continuing presence in our lives with some thoughts from some of her closest friends and artistic collaborators…

It only takes a moment whenconductor Jo Lynn Burks raises her baton and the first notes of the overture are heard to remember that Herman’s score includes a treasure trove of Broadway chestnuts, including “So Long, Dearie,” “Before the Parade Passes By,” “Elegance,” “It Only Takes A Moment,” “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” as well as the title tune.

Today, we continue to celebrate the return of Collegiate Theatrics featuring one of our favorites from the theatre department at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville: Alex Vanburen, a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, who graduated from APSU last May. We first met Alex when they auditioned for a role in our January 2020 production of La Cage Aux Folles for Circle Players, a role for which they won much acclaim, and whom we most recently saw onstage at Clarksville’s Roxy Regional Theatre, playing Riff Raff in the company’s latest iteration of The Rocky Horror Show.

Today, we herald the return of Collegiate Theatrics – our first interview with a university-level actor since before the pandemic – featuring one of our favorites from the theatre department at Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro: Emma Bastin, a native of Lebanon, Tennessee, who will be graduating next spring.

Less than 48 hours after opening night of Cumberland County Playhouse’s 2023 holiday season offering of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, we are happy/sad to report that tickets are mighty scarce as the sparkling production is almost certainly headed to a complete sellout.

Rob McClure’s masterful turn onstage as the redoubtable title character is reason enough to make sure you see Mrs. Doubtfire, The New Musical Comedy, now onstage at Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Andrew Jackson Hall through Sunday. But odds are you’ll find so much more to love about this musical adaptation – from the “hometown” team that gave us Something Rotten, the endearing paean to musical theater – of the classic film comedy that, truth be told, McClure’s bravura performance will be the icing on the cake (or, more probably, the buttercream sandwiched between two layers of luscious Victoria sponge) of this delightfully theatrical confection.

While the debate rages on about the proper time to start celebrating the holidays, Nashville Children’s Theatre may have devised the ideal plan with their current onstage offering – the world premiere of the theater-for-younger-audiences version of the recent Broadway musical Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.

Today we celebrate our most recent sojourn with Cinderella and company, thanks to the sumptuously designed, beautifully staged and wonderfully sung Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella, presented in an all-too-brief one-weekend run at Middle Tennessee State University’s Tucker Theatre in Murfreesboro.

On its surface, there is so much about which to alternately fall in love with/wonder quizzically about in Big Fish, the musical with book by John August (based on his screenplay for the 2003 film version) and a score by Andrew Lippa, that there’s no wonder the show had trouble finding its audience on Broadway but now has proven tremendously popular among theaters all over the country.

The play in question? The Woman in Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the book by Susan Hill, that finishes up its three-weekend run in Mt. Juliet with performances through November 5. Directed by Meriwether, whose director’s note offers the tale of his own fascination with the script and his fervent belief it could engage his company’s audiences, The Woman in Black is brought to life through the splendid performances of two promising young performers in the prime of their abilities – Lucy Turner, who will be moving to New York City this winter, and Sawyer Latham, longtime friends and consummate artists, whose trust in each other is absolutely required for the production to work as effectively and as powerfully as it does.

Increasingly, it seems, all roads lead to Nashville – or at least everyone seems somehow to have a connection to our fair city. Case in point: Blaine Swen, the creator and director of The Improvised Shakespeare Company lives here – a fact unknown to me until I tracked him down to belabor him with questions about his company’s upcoming performances at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on November 10 and 11.

That laughter you hear coming from within the Troutt Theatre on the Belmont University campus this weekend and next should probably come with a trigger warning. For no matter how rollicking, rambunctious and uproarious it truly is, it should be pointed out that what is transpiring on that stage over two weekends is, indeed, the stuff of post-traumatic stress – or, not to put too fine a point on it, it would be if the shenanigans weren’t brilliantly scripted, infinitely well-rehearsed and just the way it should be.

What rugby shorts did for Paul Mescal’s thighs in 2020’s Normal People, so do fishnet stockings do for Bradley Oosterink’s thighs in the Roxy Regional Theatre’s The Rocky Horror Show in 2023. Not that Mr. Oosterink’s thighs are the best things about the Roxy’s 11th annual iteration of the classically off-kilter and decidedly off-beat musical, but they are indeed a highlight.

As plans were under way for the eleventh year of The Rocky Horror Show at Clarksville’s Roxy Regional Theatre, Emily Ruck, the company’s interim artistic director, had the idea to assemble an all-woman team to bring a new perspective and to reinvigorate the classic show: the director, musical director and choreographer would all be women. More importantly, the creative triumvirate would be made up of women who are longtime friends, having met while working together on a show at The Roxy some seven years ago.

A musical retelling of producer Sam Phillips' serendipitous gathering of four of music's most notable Southern boys - Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley - at his Memphis-based Sun Records Studio on December 4, 1956, Million Dollar Quartet will set your feet to tapping out a steady rhythm from its very first moments (a performance of Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” that very nearly blows the roof off Studio Tenn’s brand spanking new Turner Theater at The Factory in Franklin) and will keep your heart pumping right along to the very final notes of Jerry Lee's “Whole Lotta Shakin’” that closes out the concert musical that is directed by Studio Tenn artistic director Patrick Cassidy and featuring an exceptional cast of performers who pay homage to their eponymous counterparts with so much talent and commitment that you’re breathless – but still wanting more – by the time the curtain closes two hours later.

What if (of all the things possible in the mythical, magical world of musical theater) the four earnest boy singers of Forever Plaid hooked up with the vengeful Heathers, while at the same time Hedwig (of the Angry Inch fame) was getting busy with Carrie White (of the bucket of pig’s blood fame) and then their resulting progeny got together (or maybe they were all together in some orgiastic event of monumental proportions that also includes various and sundry characters and/or germane plot points from Be More Chill and The Toxic Avenger) – are you still with me, friends? – what would be the result?

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, I have had the privilege of seeing some remarkably talented and gifted young actors on every stage on the Belmont campus and never have I ever left a performance there without feeling inspired, absolutely certain that the future of theater as we know it is pre-ordained and so very hopeful.

In Ride The Cyclone, which debuted in 2008, members of the St. Cassian High School chamber choir of Uranium City, Saskatchewan, have died as the result of a freak accident on a roller coaster called The Cyclone. Now, each member is given the opportunity to tell their story in hope of winning a reward from a mechanical fortune teller: a return to life!