Jeffrey Ellis - Page 6

Studio Tenn – the Franklin-based professional theater company – launches its 2022-23 season in collaboration with Tennessee Performing Arts Center for a concert staging of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, playing for just two nights at TPAC’s James K. Polk Theatre September 30 and October 1. Under the direction of Studio Tenn artistic director Patrick Cassidy (who shares duties with co-director and choreographer Gerry McIntyre), Aida features a starry cast of actors with Broadway pedigrees (Jackie Burns and Rex Smith), along with some of Music City’s most beloved stage veterans (Bakari Jamal King and Mark Cabus) and featuring the stunning triumph of a young woman who audiences have watched grow up on Nashville stages (Maya Riley) in the title role.

In 2010, the Clarksville-based Roxy Regional Theatre staged a production of Stephen Sondheim and James LaPine’s “exquisitely off-kilter and melodiously rapturous musical Into the Woods” which remains firmly ensconced in my memory for its many attributes, not the least of which were the actors (Sarah Levine, Rachael Fogle, Josh Bernaski, Gregory Pember, Jackie Ostick and current artistic director Ryan Bowie) who brought the show so vividly to life and whose performances remain among some of the best we’ve seen at the venue in its 40 years. In fact, we often cite that 2010 Into the Woods (after another fondly remembered production some 15 years even before that) as a turning point, of sorts, in the history of The Roxy.

Pretty Woman The Musical – the latest offering in the 2022-23 Broadway at TPAC Series – is one of those shows that almost defies explanation and proves even more difficult to review. (Case in point: I’ve rewritten that sentence 758 times in the past 22 hours and it’s still not “singing,” is it?) Pretty Woman The Musical is a pleasant enough diversion, entertaining even, but there is little in the show’s first act to convince most people that the 1990 rom com, which starred Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, needed to be transformed into a glitzy and glittering Broadway musical (a term we use loosely in this case), with Olivia Valli and Adam Pascal in the leading roles.

Nothing engages the theaterati in Nashville and the surrounding provinces as the production of an eagerly anticipated new play no one’s done before in these parts, but about which we’ve read glowing reviews. The very promise of something new to energize the cultural zeitgeist – particularly under the aegis of Nashville Story Garden (a creative collective whose work always generates major buzz); something new and unseen from across the pond which will provide a showcase for the remarkable talents of some of the region’s most respected actors – is virtually guaranteed to be a “must-see” for a theater-going public more accustomed to titles with which they are already quite often overly familiar.

As with most intelligent and clever actors struggling to find paying work during difficult times, LeLand Gantt readily admits that he was inspired to create Rhapsody in Black, which has been described as “a powerful personal narrative on racism, identity, and self-image” to provide some work for himself, allowing him to “stay in town to do more tv and film.” Now, however, as acclaim for his one-man show continues to grow, he’s finding himself “out of town” – he's based in New York – to give theater-goers all over the country a chance to see his the result of his creativity on his personal journey to transcene racism in America.

Thanks to the rousing performances of director Micah-Shane Brewer’s talented company who have brought the show to vivid life for Nashville audiences, Rent provides a noteworthy opening to the company’s 38th season. Performed with commitment and sharp focus by a cast of young performers, this revival of Rent proves the show’s timelessness, the score’s resonance and the story’s relevance well into the 21st century.

Wendy Kesselman’s new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank – which is based upon the acclaimed 1955 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and is an update of her 1997 script which has been widely produced since – is given a superb world premiere production by Nashville Children’s Theatre, which adds luster to the original work and makes it more accessible to contemporary audiences in director Ernie Nolan’s new iteration onstage through October 2.

The production of The Color Purple, now onstage at the Roxy, is without doubt the most emphatically, beautifully and electrifyingly sung musical I’ve seen at the historic theatre on the corner of First and Franklin in downtown Clarksville over the past three decades. Directed with confidence by Broadway veteran/Belmont University alumnus/Austin Peay State University professor Deonte Warren, with the spirited choreography of Ebone Amos and one of the finest, most talented casts ever to grace the stage, The Color Purple clearly ranks as one of the best shows in the company’s 39-season history (number 40 gets under way next month).

It’s been a while since Liz Callaway last performed on a Nashville stage – it was a performance of “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra – and longer still since the time she auditioned for Opryland USA while still a high school student (she wasn’t cast, but more about that later…), so sharing the stage of Andrew Jackson Hall with her longtime pal and confidant Jason Graae on Saturday, August 20, is something she eagerly anticipates.

Even after a brief telephone conversation – which covers as many subjects as time will allow – it’s quite clear that Jason Graae is not only an acclaimed actor, entertainer and stage/film/tv performer. He is, at his very core, a raconteur (which is a fancy French way of saying he can tell a great story).

But beloved as it may be, why in the ever-loving hell has it taken so long for To Kill A Mockingbird to become a theatrical play that is actually worthy of its literary heritage? Sure, there’s been a 1990 (?!) version by Christopher Sergel that’s made it way through every high school auditorium, community theater playhouse and reginal theater over the intervening three decades that we are, quite frankly, sick to death of it. In fact, if we never see it again, we’ve seen it far too often: a warmed over, treacly and maudlin rehash that’s far too dependent on the title’s movie roots to really emerge from a darkened theater to become a consummate American play.

In much the same way that a piece of evocative music can suddenly whisk you away to another time and place, there are moments in Cynthia Harris’ beautifully written The Calling Is In The Body that can take one just as swiftly to the Nashville of the early 1990s. Almost imperceptibly, Harris’ heartfelt reminiscence – a tribute styled as a “choreopoem” – of a young woman who inspired her to believe in herself and to aspire to more than she might have believed possible at the time, becomes a universal treatise on how every life has meaning far beyond any expectation.

When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic masterpiece Hamilton was last in residence at Nashville’s Tennessee Performing Arts Center – where it is now ensconced for an as equally anticipated, if briefer, two-week run through August 7 – the world was a far different place than that in which we live today. Yet somehow, due in very large part to the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6th insurrection at our nation’s Capitol, and the repercussions and reverberations of those two cataclysmic events that have followed in the intervening two-and-a-half years, Hamilton seems to be more resonant, its story more relevant and its presentation more heartrending and current than ever before.

Stunning. Powerful. Deeply moving. The words come rather easily in an attempt to adequately describe the awe-inspiring performances to be found in director Matt Logan’s beautifully crafted production of A.S. Peterson’s The Hiding Place. Now onstage in its Nashville premiere at the Soli Deo Center (which, to be frank, is equally notable and worthy of excessive praise) at Christ Presbyterian Academy through July 23, the play – which had its premiere in September 2019 at A.D. Players in Houston, Texas – proves to be both accessible, engaging and, we daresay, hopeful even as it tells a story from one of the darkest eras in human history.

In theater, as in life, it’s all in the timing: Bucket List Productions’ Assassins: The Musical opened its Nashville run at Darkhorse Theater on Friday, July 8, the same day that former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe died by an assassin’s gun. As news of Abe’s assassination reverberated throughout the world yesterday, it underscored the timelessness and the unfortunate relevance of the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical outside the oftentimes fanciful, yet eerily prescient, world of musical theater.

Broadway legend and Tony Award winner Donna McKechnie will be presented with Nashville Repertory Theatre’s Ovation Award during the company’s upcoming annual fundraiser Broadway Brunch, set for August 21, at the Wildhorse Saloon.

Thanks to the successful and continuing partnership of Studio Tenn and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Sam Harris returns to Nashville this Saturday night for an evening of Cabaret On Stage, the kick-off of the second season of such offerings on the stage of TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall.

Leave it to Ernie Nolan and his creative gang at Nashville Children’s Theatre to take audiences on a much-appreciated holiday under the sea with their riotous, rollicking and altogether joyful production of The Spongebob Musical – featuring some of Nashville’s most beloved stage performers – now onstage through July 17.

First conceived prior to the global Covid 19 pandemic and nurtured through those dark and challenging times by Gimlin and Breen, the two halves of THAT WOMAN have finally debuted at Nashville’s Darkhorse Theatre this week and will continue there and at The East Room in East Nashville through June 29, affording audiences throughout the city an opportunity to see this unique collection of original works of art close to home.

That Woman - The Dance Show is produced by Tennessee Playwrights Studio and directed by Molly Breen. This production has been co-created with the following Nashville choreographers: Molly Breen, Caitlin Del Casino, Brandon Johnson, Thea Jones, Cornell Kennedy, Jodie Mowrey (Director of Choreography), Schuyler Phoenix, Rachel Simons, Brittany Stewart, and Emma Williams.