CRITICS' CHOICE: This Weekend's Best Bets

Looking for something fun to do in Nashville this weekend? Have no fear, gentle BWW Nashville readers, we've done the necessary legwork - we're all about saving you time and helping you make informed decisions about how to spend your entertainment dollar, after all - and we are delighted to present you with our newest edition of Critic's Choice, filled to the brim with all sorts of fun stuff...enough to keep you off the streets and entertained until next weekend!

Of course, Nashville's Iroquois Steeplechase is Saturday (and despite weather forecasts to the contrary, chances are that means it's going to be raining), so when it comes time to dry off, we suggest you head to the theater, where there's all sorts of good stuff onstage.

Now, get out there and have some fun, y'all! And while you're at it, you'll be doing some good for the community by supporting the arts - and artists - in the Volunteer State!

Tennessee Women's Theater Project returns to the Z. Alexander Looby Theater starting tonight, Friday, May 8, with its Ninth Annual Women's Work festival of performing and visual arts created by women. Running through Sunday, May 24, the festival spans styles and genres to offer a completely different program at every performance: poetry and essays; one-woman shows; plays and readings; dance, music, film and a display of visual art works in the theater.

Middle Tennessee's first and only annual showcase for the creative efforts of women came about when Maryanna Clarke, the company's founder and artistic director, was sidelined with a back injury in early 2007: "After weeks with my pain meds and my walker, I had to concede I would not be able to direct the play we had booked for May that year," says Clarke. "I sent emails to every woman artist I knew, offering our stage for their plays, poems, films - all varieties of performing arts."

Women from Nashville and across the country responded, and nine years later the showcase is going strong.

Women's Work 2015 includes both new and returning artists from the Nashville area, plus presenters from Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Opening night on May 8 features a reading of Susan West Richardson's play The Ladies Who Swim, which looks in on a group of women who gather for regular meetings at a university swimming pool.

The ninth annual Mother's Day Poetry Sunday on May 10 features readings by returning poets Amy E. Hall and Ashley Mintz, and first-time presenters Barbara Moss, Lola White and Barbara Russell, and the duo of Dana Saunders and Denise Wilson, performing as Sassy Ds.

Saturday, May 23, is Dance Night, always one of the festival's most popular programs. This year's presentation features the work of returning presenters Elaine Husted and Husted Dance, Jen-Jen Lin and Lisa Spradley, Epiphany Dance and Marci Murphree's REASONS Contemporary Dance Ensemble. Alicia Dawn Williams of Girls on Trapeze, best known as an aerialist, will offer a performance of ground exercises. Li Chiao-Ping, a professor at University of Wisconsin, brings the Li Chiao-Ping Dance Troupe from Madison, and Cynthia Adams, a dance instructor at Iowa State, will perform a solo piece. Local dance artists making their Women's Work dance debuts include Megan Ciccolone White, and Erin Law, who will screen a video dance creation.

Women's Work offers playwrights a stage for readings and workshop performances - audience exposure is crucial to the development of a play. Robyn Brooks of Maryland and Marilyn Barner Anselmi of North Carolina understand the benefits: both are presenting readings of new plays for the fourth year in a row. Charissa Menefee, who teaches playwriting at Iowa State-Ames presents a reading of her play How Long Is Fifteen Minutes?, Naima Bush of Jacksonville, Florida brings her Confessions Of A Big Girl, and Janice Liddell of Atlanta offers a reading of her Ptomaine Poison. Also on the roster are plays by Judy Klass, and the comedy troupe Sketchy Nashville Femmes.

Other highlights of Women's Work 2015: a short film from Nashvillian Emily Steele and music from singer/songwriters Wendy Westmoreland, Nancy Nettles and Allison Kerr. This year's visual art display includes photography and mixed media pieces by Lola White and Ashley Mintz.

Single tickets to Women's Work are an affordable $10 each; a $40 Festival Pass is good for admission to all shows. Ticket revenues and the support of sponsors and grantors including HCA Tristar Health and The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, are enabling the company to compensate the presenting artists for their appearances.

Women's Work opens Friday, May 8 at the Looby Theatre, adjacent to the Looby Branch Library at 2301 Rosa L. Parks Blvd. The festival continues weekends through Sunday May 24. Showtimes are at 7:30 pm Thursday through Saturday, and 2:30 pm Sundays. For a complete schedule of performers, show dates and times, reservations and information, call 615-681-7220, or visit Tennessee Women's Theater Project on Facebook or at its web site (www.twtp.org).

Starting tonight, Murfreesboro Little Theatre presents its 5th annual "Backyard Bard" with William Shakespeare's spirited romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

Bring a picnic, cooler, blanket or lawn chair and enjoy Shakespeare's most popular comedy outdoors in MLT's beautiful backyard. Opening Friday, May 8 at 7:00 pm, and running three weekends, this event is FREE to the public, though donations are graciously accepted and concessions will be sold.

Directed by Donna Seage, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing depicts the treacherous Don John's (Jacob Truax) attempts to destroy the true love of Claudio (Wesley Rutledge) for Hero (Jess Townsend) with false accusations of infidelity. Dogberry (Todd Seage), the comically self-important constable, and his hapless underlings stumble upon Don John's treachery, but are they too late to prevent tragedy? The play, however, is better know for its subplot, the battle of wits between Beatrice (Patti Long-Lee) and Benedick (Shane Lowery), and the Prince's (Pete Hiett) comic scheme to unite the two unlikely lovers.

Tonight, tonight! Mt. Juliet's Encore Theatre Company opens its production of Arthur Miller's classic play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible, at their venue at 6978 Lebanon Road. Doors open at 7 p.m.; For reservations, call (615) 598-8950.

Continuing through Sunday, May 10, at Zanie's Comedy Club, 2025 8th Avenue South, is Old Jews Telling Jokes! Jewish humor is everyone's humor, and the laughs never stop in this something-for-everyone New York hit. Join Morty, Bunny, Nathan and Reuben as they hysterically demonstrate why "kvelling is better than kvethching." Oy! Classic and contemporary jokes mix with songs and monologues that showcase the funny side of birth, sex, old age and more. Old Jews Telling Jokes is described as "a gleeful ode to humor that will have you laughing till you plotz."

The cast includes Francine Berk-Graver (Bunny), Perry Poston (Morty), Adam Horn (Nathan), Tobias J. Turner (Reuben), and Elizabeth Ayres Turner (Debbi). The show is directed and produced by Jay Kholos (Orchard Street Productions), with the multi-faceted L.T. Kirk serving as stage manager.

"You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy the show - Some people may think they won't 'get' the humor if they're not Jewish, but everyone can understand a few dirty jokes," says the lovely Elizabeth Ayres Turner (who plays Debbi, you may recall from the previous paragraph). "The majority of the show is just that, a round of jokes back to back, with some sweeter monologues mixed in to cut the funny. I won't give away any of the jokes we're using in the production, but here are some examples, clean and dirty, of what they might expect:

"I was having a drink at the bar the other night and I said to the bartender, 'Surprise me.' He showed me naked pictures of my wife."

"A guy picks up the phone, calls 911, and says, 'You have to send an ambulance to 327 Maple Drive! We're having a baby!' The operator says, 'Okay, calm down. Is this her first child?' The guy says, 'No, you idiot, this is her husband!'"

"A woman's walking through a cemetery, when off in the distance, she hears someone wailing. As she gets closer, she sees it's an older woman, pounding the earth in front of a headstone crying, 'Why did you have to die?! Why did you have to die?!' The woman goes over to the mourner, hoping to comfort her: 'I'm so sorry, the deceased must have been a dear loved one.' 'A loved one? I never even met her.' 'Then why are you crying? Who is it?' 'It's my husband's first wife!'"

Variety says, "You'll laugh your tuchus off..." while The New York Times says the show is "Executed deftly with affection, celebrating many glorious traditions," and The New Yorker says "the laughs per-minute average is as high as anything you'll find on stage."

SHOW DATES AND TIMES: May 5: 7:30 p.m.; May 6th: 7:30 p.m.; May 9: 2:00 p.m.; and May 10: 2:00 p.m.

Meanwhile, over at the TPAC, the international sensation Motherhood the Musical comes home for a run at TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre. The hilarious show first debuted as a workshop at the Darkhorse Theater in November 2008 and was picked up by several producers by the end of that year.

Motherhood the Musical is a four-woman show from author, songwriter and Nashville mom Sue Fabisch, who tapped into the country market with her wildly successful parody The Mom of Constant Sorrow. Sue performed her songs about motherhood as a one--woman show for years in the Nashville area before rewriting it into the four-­woman format that Motherhood the Musical is today.

The musical, which has 18 original songs, all written or co-­written by Fabisch, includes the hilarious Billboard Top 10 comedy hit, "The Kids Are Finally Asleep"; the rousing call-­to-­shoppers "Costco Queen;" and the tender ballad "I'm Danny's Mom."

Motherhood the Musical shares the humorous, loving journey of Amy, a soon?to-­be first-­time mom; Barb, an over-­worked, underpaid, stressed-­out mother of five; Brooke, a lawyer who works too much and barely sees her kids; and Tasha, a single mom struggling to balance work, family and a divorce. The cast is full of local talent, most of them moms as well: Jaclyn Lisenby Brown, Jennifer Whitcomb-Oliva, Corrie Miller and Sue Fabisch. The company is directed and choreographed by Kim Nygren, with Production management by Cecelia Lighthall, two more local talents and moms. The award-winning Johnny Rodgers supplies music direction and supervision, arrangements and orchestrations.

Here's my take on the show: Just in time for Mother's Day, Fabisch and her Faby Baby Productions LLC bring their rollicking - and oh-so-entertaining - revue, Motherhood the Musical, to TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre. Featuring dynamic direction by Kim Nygren and starring a quartet of winning singer/actresses, it's a superbly performed and staged show that pulls back the curtain on what moms talk about when the husbands, kids and in-laws (and gay BFFs) are away. It's heartwarming, laugh-out-loud funny and oftentimes remarkably sentimental without being mawkish or maudlin.

Subtitled "The Good, The Bad...and The Laundry" (the only thing I didn't like was the subtitle, by the way), the 90-minute revue takes place at a baby shower for first-time mother Amy (played by Jaclyn Lisenby Brown), thrown by her coterie of mom friends, including divorcee Tasha (Jennifer Whitcomb-Oliva), Brooke (Corrie Miller) and Barb (creator Fabisch herself). The three friends welcome Amy to the sorority of moms and take her on a tuneful journey to show her what her life will be like once she welcomes her wee one home.

The potential here is for a treacly sweet paean to motherhood - let's face it, in a society where sailors and longshoremen have long had the word "Mom" tattooed upon their sweaty biceps, mamas rank at the top of the list of things that are sure to render even the most tough, cynical person to wax rhapsodic on the subject - but, thanks to Fabsich's razor-sharp wit, Motherhood the Musical is just freakin' funny, but it has so much heart that it still packs an emotional wallop. In deference to the idea of motherhood (and the very real memories of my own mother that were conjured up in the course of the show), my eyes were fairly leaking during certain moments.

Playing through Saturday night at Towne Centre Theatre (136 Frierson Street, Brentwood) is the farcical Not Now, Darling!

Not Now, Darling is a madcap British farce set in an exclusive London fur salon. Gilbert Bodley (played by Art Elrod) plans to sell an expensive mink to a mobster (Jackson Rector) dirt cheap for his wife (Hillary Mead), who happens to be Gilbert's mistress. However, instead of doing his own dirty work, Gilbert gets his reluctant partner, Arnold Crouch (Tim Larson), to do it for him. Things go awry when the mobster plans to buy it for his OWN mistress and soon the whole plan goes out the window along with women's clothing and a few other things. Tony and Lanie Shannon, Maureen Hawks, Annie Rice, Jasmine Rose, Kelly Dutton and Cameron Bortz round out this very talented cast and everything somehow manages to work out as it should. For ticket information, call (615) 221-1174.

The 2015 Ingram New Works Festival at Nashville Repertory Theatre kicked off Wednesday night with another brilliant script by Nate Eppler, and there's more to come, including a new work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, and staged readings of five new plays. The Festival runs through May 16.

The Ingram New Works Project gives playwrights an opportunity to develop new theatre works while in residency at Nashville Rep. Each year, the Project selects a Fellow and three Lab playwrights who all work together with Nashville Rep's Playwright in Residence to develop their new works. For Nashville Rep's 2014-15 season, the Ingram New Works Fellow is Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Margulies, the Lab playwrights are Tori Keenan-Zelt, Bianca Sams and Gabreille Sinclair, and Nashville Rep's Playwright-in-Residence is Nate Eppler.

Readings of the new works will be held May 6-16 at 7 P.M. each evening. A talkback will immediately follow each reading. The complete Festival schedule is listed below, along with brief descriptions of each show. Each reading is $10 per person, or a Festival Pass to see one reading of each play is available for $35. Reservations can be made online at NashvilleRep.org.

Nashville Rep is a non-profit theatre bringing classic and contemporary theatre to Nashville that inspires empathy and prods intellectual and emotional engagement in audiences. Nashville Rep's upcoming 2015-16 season will include productions of Rapture, Blister, Burn; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Good Monsters; Chicago; and A Christmas Story.

The Ingram New Works Festival will be held in Nashville Rep's rehearsal hall: Studio A at Nashville Public Television, located at 161 Rains Avenue in Nashville.

About the plays:

• The Ice Treatment by Nate Eppler. Readings: May 6 and 16. Left behind on the garbage heap of history and misremembered by everyone (herself included), the world's most infamous Olympic figure skater struggles to reinvent herself as a screenwriter. By pitching the blockbuster screenplay of her own amazing and unbelievable life story. It's definitely not the facts, but it's all true.
• Showing by Gabrielle Sinclair. Readings: May 7 and 11. Today is the gender reveal party for Tracy's baby, but when she discovers there may be something wrong with her pregnancy, this cute and fun event with a cake filled with blue or pink frosting becomes for her a ritual with the power to reveal the future, to cleanse her past, to make her a good mother and to keep her child safe.
• Simply Bess by Bianca Sams. Readings: May 8 and 12. Simply Bess follows a young African American actress trying to make a name for herself. We see her backstage trials and tribulations on the 1950s European tour of Porgy and Bess, sponsored by the American State Department as a way to combat communist propaganda about racial problems in the United States.
• Air Space by Tori Keenan-Zelt. Readings: May 9 and 15. Thirty years ago, Babs and Mack built a house in a small Rust Belt city. One year ago, they lost it to foreclosure. With no place to go, they packed up and moved into the crawl space - secretly. Six months ago, Glory and Kyle bought a foreclosure for $500. As they struggle to flip the falling-down house, two strangers show up to help. A surreal comedy about inventing home, managing family and what we hold onto when nothing that we do is enough.
• A Work-in-Progress by Donald Margulies. Readings: May 13 and 14. We have an exclusive and exciting opportunity to look inside the process of Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Margulies and to be a part of his play that is still under construction. We can't wait to see what unfolds! Margulies is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright and professor of English at Yale University. He served as Playwright-in-Residence at Sundance Playwright Conference for three summers, and has won a Lucille Lortel Award, an American Theatre Critics Award, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, two OBIE Awards, two Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Awards, five Drama Desk Award nominations, two Pulitzer Prize nominations and one Pulitzer Prize.

May 1 and continuing through May 9, ACT 1 presents Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, their fourth show of the 2014-15 season, directed by Joy Tilley Perryman.

Here's my take: Set against the backdrop of major league baseball, peopled with characters who evoke images of sports superstars, and considering what might transpire if one of those athletes were to come out as gay in the middle of a season destined to be one for the record books, Take Me Out - although manipulative and didactic at times despite Greenberg's sharply tuned dialogue and storytelling - focuses tightly upon prejudice, bigotry, classism and racism. Boldly and directly, Greenberg asks his audience to consider the question of "who's to blame?" for all the prejudice in the world - in sports, certainly, but perhaps more intriguingly in the larger world of which baseball is but a small part.

Tilley Perryman's remarkable eye for casting is what is particularly noteworthy about this production of Take Me Out. Somehow (knowing the vagaries of casting community theater in a city such as Nashville), she has assembled an ensemble of actors who breathe vigorous life into their script-bound characters to create the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that is essential to the show's success. Her collaboration with Dave McGinnis (who also assays a couple of effective cameo roles in the piece) on the production's set design results in a winning backdrop for the play's action: a baseball stadium situated in the intimate confines of the Darkhorse Theatre.

Take Me Out is directed by Joy Tilley Perryman, and features Joel Diggs, Kurt Jarvis, Bradley Moore, Eric Butler, Connor Hall, Daniel Vincent, Leon Blandon III, Robert Marigzia, Fernando Ochoa, Shawn Whitsell, Cabot Pyle and Dave McGinnis.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. for the May 8 and 9 evening performances (Sunday's dark so the players can go see their mamas), and performances have been added for Wednesday and Thursday nights, May 13 and 14. Tickets are only $15 and can be purchased in advance thru Tickets Nashville at tickets.act1online.com.

Concluding its three weekend run on Sunday is Imaginary Theatre Company's production of Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias, directed by Robert Coles. The show's at Eastland Baptist Church, 1215 Gallatin Avenue. Evening shows are at 7:30 p.m., matinees at 2:00 p.m. For details, go to www.imaginarytheatrecompany.com or call the box office at (615) 538-7620.

Cole's cast includes: Kate Adams as M'Lynn; Heather Vaughn Alexander as Truvy; Angela Gimlin as Annelle; Beth Woodruff as Clairee; and Ann Street-Kavanaugh as Ouiser. April Hardcastle-Miles joins the ensemble for its final weekend, replacing the otherwise engaged Britt Byrd, to play the juice-drinking, bashful and blush, pediatric nursing Shelby.

From my review of opening night: It's been 26 years since I first saw Steel Magnolias onstage - at Chicago's Royal George Theatre - which means I have seen an estimated 2,308 productions of Robert Harling's iconic comedy about six strong Southern women whose smart quips and disarming manner have ingratiated themselves to theater-goers and movie viewers everywhere.

Filled with memorable lines, remarkably real-life situations and events distilled for maximum theatrical impact, and characters who seem more like family than the script-bound creations of a playwright, Steel Magnolias has become the favorite of theater companies from here to Constantinople and every place in between. And, despite all my efforts to convince producers, directors and the rest of their ilk to declare a moratorium on new productions for the time being, they continue to mount the show.

Adams and Byrd, longtime friends offstage, share the spotlight for the first time ever and, in the process, give extraordinarily moving performance as mother and daughter. Imbuing their characters with warmth and feeling that is refreshingly free of mawkish sentimentality, Adams and Byrd give the relationship of their characters a contemporary update while remaining faithful to Harling's script. Adams plays M'Lynn with a focused reserve that makes her second-act monologue all the more affecting and impactful. Byrd, who has never looked lovelier onstage, somehow creates a Shelby unlike the thousands of other pink-loving diabetics about to preside over a bashful and blush wedding who have come before her. She delivers her lines with naturalistic charm, creating a portrayal that is somewhat unexpected.

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