Jeffrey Ellis - Page 53

Ah, the 1970s - what a decade, am I right? - the perfect time period for theatrical farce, what with its polyester double-knit slacks, soft and silky Nik-Nik shirts, some swell television sitcoms and the rise of entertainment conglomerates to gobble up the so-called 'little guys' in order to allow commercialism to run amok and for the notion of selling out one's soul for personal gratification and financial gain to become part of the American way of life. Let's face it: Isn't all that what has led to and created the current climate of political division and personal derision?

Directed with confidence by a young director - Matthew Hayes Hunter, who was a 2013 First Night Most Promising Actor - and performed by an eager and energetic cast (led by a quartet of extraordinary actresses portraying the four Dreams and another First Night MPA [who very nearly steals the entire production right out from under everyone else onstage] in the role of James 'Thunder' Early - CFTA's Dreamgirls delights its audience from the beginning, engaging them with focused performances that come from the heart to inspire and entertain.

There is an iconic scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of Sunset Boulevard - based on the memorable film by Billy Wilder - in which Norma Desmond returns triumphantly (in Norma's myopic view of life since the talkies spelled an end to silent pictures, in which she made her fortune with her expressive face) to Paramount studios for an impromptu meeting with Cecil B. DeMille on the set of Samson and Delilah. Impressively played by Ginger Newman in the Nashville debut of Sunset Boulevard at The Larry Keeton Theatre, Norma is beautifully clad in haute couture, generating star power and unaware that she has slipped into obscurity for the most part, her legions of fans decimated by time and the general vagaries of life.

Scot Copeland, longtime producing artistic director of Nashville Children's Theatre and one of the world's leading proponents of theater for younger audiences, died during the overnight hours of February 25 from an apparent heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Rene Dunshee Copeland, producing artistic director of Nashville Repertory Theatre, his two sons, many family members and countless 'chosen family' and friends all over the world.

There's so much great theater going on in the Nashville area right now, that you may be having a difficult time choosing among the bounteous offerings local companies are providing you. We're delighted to herald the return of BWW Nashville's Critics Choice with today's feature, offering up a compendium of what's available, what we recommend you see, and - in the cases of show's we've seen already - snippets of our reviews to help you make up your mind!

Taking on a stage role that was indelibly created onscreen by Erich Von Stroheim has got to be a daunting experience, but Nashville actor Randal Cooper takes on the theatrical challenge in The Larry Keeton Theatre's production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, onstage in Donelson through March 5.

Kristin McCalley Landis and Tamara Todres will star in the Nashville premiere of Jenny Magnus' The Strange, produced by The Chicago Talking Machine Company at the Centennial Black Box Theater, 211 27th Avenue North, March 21-26.

In an effort to focus attention on the overwhelming need to eradicate poverty in this lifetime, Vanderbilt University Theatre will present How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes this weekend, running tonight, February 24, through Sunday, February 28, in Neely Auditorium on the VU campus in Nashville.

2015 First Night Honoree Martha Wilkinson - the winner of nine First Night Awards for outstanding lead actress in a musical - leads the Nashville Repertory Theatre cast of the Oscar- and Tony Award-winning Chicago, running March 19-April 16 at the Andrew Johnson Theater at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

Chae Chaput - a native of Manchester, New Hampshire, who did her undergraduate work at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, where she earned her BA in Theater Arts with a double concentration in Acting and Technical Theater with a minor in film - is one such member of the group.

Directors and producers throughout Middle Tennessee are seeking actors for upcoming productions of 42nd Street (at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts) and God of Carnage (Nashville's 4th Story Theatre) - and Metro Parks and the Music City Theatre Collective team up for a series of special classes, including an audition worshop, for this spring. We've gathered the details together here to make your planning easier. So now you have no excuse: go follow your dream!

Bradley Moore directs his own adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, as ACT 1 readies its fourth show of the 2015/2016 season, featuring a cast of respected Nashville actors. 

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

Evelyn O'Neal Brush's bravura performance is reason enough to see Tennessee Women's Theater Project's production of Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, but clearly it's Lauren Gunderson's play itself that should sell tickets. Emilie (as we will refer to the play from here on out - at least to the conclusion of this review) is an engaging treatise on the life and times of the mathematician, physicist, writer and critic, whose supreme intellect and prodigious literary output during the Age of the Enlightenment made her both notorious and admired at a time when women were thought of primarily as chattel.

Beki Baker's extraordinary direction, which provides a stunningly fresh perspective of Arthur Miller's stage masterpiece - along with remarkable performances from a cast of both professional and student actors - ensures that audiences will long be considering the impact of The Crucible, now onstage at Shamblin Theater through February 28, after the final curtain is rung down on this joint production of Blackbird Theater and Lipscomb University Department of Theatre.

Here's a question you may have asked yourself about Tosha Pendergrast: When does she sleep? Mundane, perhaps - but it's a question that comes to mind when you realize that she's always working, whether she's teaching students at Lauri Gregoire's Bellevue Dance Center, choreographing her latest show (Dreamgirls opened just last week at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts, Street Theatre Company's production of In The Heights opens in a couple of weeks), performing onstage (she was among the cavalcade of stars in the Music City Theatre Collective's debut production Showstoppers), doing television appearances (The Dance Network is calling) or just living life with her handsome and charming husband Benjamin Pendergrast (together they are the perfect couple, each devoted to the other)…

Evelyn O'Neal Brush stars in the title role of Lauren Gunderson's Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, as Tennessee Women's Theater Project continues its ninth season of provocative professional theater with the Tennessee premiere of Gunderson's play. The production opens at Nashville's Z. Alexander Looby Theater tonight, February 19, running weekends through March 6. 

Jaclynn Jutting directs Belmont University's Department of Theatre and Dance's spring semester-opening production of Lynn Nottage's Las Meninas, a play they contend will 'grab the attention of any audience member, of any background,' opening tonight, February 19, at Belmont's Troutt Theatre.

It's been an exciting week for actress Meghan Glogower, a graduate of the musical theatre program at Nashville's Belmont University: On Monday night, she joined with her friends and cohorts from the original cast The Nutty Professor - the musical written by Marvin Hamlisch and Rupert Holmes, which premiered in Nashville in 2012 - for its New York City premiere in concert at Birdland. The musical's NYC debut, which has been a long time coming, reconvened the cast and Holmes to pay tribute to Hamlisch's final score for the theater while rekindling dreams and aspirations.

Even as a high school student, Brandon Hoyt is something of a renaissance man: he sings, he dances, he acts - and he's into information technology, he's a whiz at math and science, he's considering a college career that includes any number of top level universities and the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. And he's a 2016 First Night Most Promising Actor, part of a cadre of young actors from area colleges and high schools who have already distinguished themselves both onstage and offstage.