First Night's Top Ten of 2010: Nashville's Best Actresses in a Musical

Nashville's divas proved their mettle and showed their immense talents in 2010 while assaying some of the most challenging and best loved roles in all of musical theater. Ranging from classic musical comedy heroines that any actress would love to play to newer, more contemporary characters, Music City's women were given the opportunity to showcase their multitude of talents on various stages while again proving they are capable of virtually anything - and everything. Here are our choices for the top ten musical performances by an actress in 2010...

• Nicole Begue, She Loves Me, Cumberland County Playhouse, Crossville. Daniel Black's Georg's palpable chemistry with the beautiful Nicole Begue as Amalia is sweetly compelling - and just a joy to behold.. She is nothing short of stunning, of course, with a glorious voice that perfectly matches her physical loveliness as Amalia; her winsome performance is by turns brimming with effervescence and introspection, eloquently expressed in all her musical numbers, but most especially in "Will He Like Me?" and the delightful "Vanilla Ice Cream," resulting in 2010's most impressive musical performance by an actress in the Nashville area.

• Stephanie Jones Benton, Jekyll & Hyde, Circle Players. Actress Stephanie Jones Benton, who obviously is destined for bigger things, gives a strong reading as Lucy Harris in Frank Wildhorn's musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's timeless tale of horror and ambition gone awry, the lady of the evening (with a heart of gold, so you know what's in store for her by play's end), and her performance of both "Someone Like You" and "A New Life" rank among Jekyll and Hyde's musical highlights. Winner of the BroadwayWorld.Com Nashville Theatre Award for best actress in a musical (non-professional).

• Megan Murphy Chambers, Macabaret, Street Theatre Company. While Megan Murphy Chambers should probably claim top honors in the entertainment sweepstakes among director/choreographer Pam Atha's five actors, the remaining members of the ensemble are clearly no slouches themselves. In fact, this five-member cast is so uniformly good that we'd be tempted to go see them do this show again if our calender weren't already full to overflowing. But for my money, it's Chambers's show. She gives such a vividly off-the-wall performance that you can't take your eyes off of her; her big Act Two number, in which she sings of being "Possessed" is a comic tour de force and the versatile Chambers chews up every last piece of scenery with a self-assured charm that is dazzling.

• Heather Dispensa, Into the Woods, The Roxy Regional Theatre, Clarksville. The characters in James Lapine's well-crafted book are all colorful and multi-dimensional, while he somehow retains the storybook attributes of each of them. Lapine's book provides the foundation from which director Tom Thayer's cast build their own individual - and unique - onstage versions. Heather Dispensa as the Baker's Wife, creates a portrayal that is at once sentimental and no-nonsense, giving her line readings a deeper meaning while ensuring that her musical performances, particularly "Moments in the Woods" and "Children Will Listen" in the plays closing moments, are notable. Winner of the BroadwayWorld.Com Nashville Theatre Award for best actress in a musical (professional).

• Nan Gurley, Hello, Dolly!, Studio Tenn. Make no mistake about it: Nan Gurley and the role of the irascible, confounding Dolly Gallagher Levi were made for each other. Perhaps that's not what Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart had in mind when they created the legendary musical comedy, Hello, Dolly! (after all, they wrote the role - based on a character created originally by Thornton Wilder in his play The Matchmaker - for Ethel Merman, who turned it down, and eventually the title role became synonymous with the inimitable Carol Channing), but it's clear after seeing the Studio Tenn staging of the big, brassy Broadway musical at Belmont's Troutt Theatre that Nan and Dolly are a match made in heaven. Gurley is nothing short of phenomenal as Dolly, playing her with trademark wit and grace and investing her with so much heart that you can't help but fall in love with her. From her first entrance, clad in a beautiful brown Victorian gown with an impossibly large hat festooned with peacock feathers, Gurley takes complete command of the stage and never lets go, in the process taking the audience on a fanciful journey through turn-of-the-century New York. Her Act One closer - "Before the Parade Passes By" - is particularly moving, at one moment a rousing anthem and at another a powerfully felt song of hope and redemption.

• Cori Laemmel, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Street Theatre Company. The final speller is Olive Ostrovsky, played rather perfectly by Cori Anne Laemmel. The daughter of a mother on a religious sojourn to India and a father with his head in the clouds, Olive first finds her love for words while reading her trusty dictionary. Laemmel gives a richly drawn performance and her extraordinary voice soars on "The 'I Love You' Song" (which features strong support from Corrie Miller and Mike Baum as her parents). Her charming stage presence is palpable and, clearly, Laemmel has the talent to deliver the goods, which she does beautifully. Frankly, he should be giving Sutton Foster a run for her money on Broadway instead of working all over Nashville (though, lord knows, we're endlessly grateful that she is).

• Lauren Marshall, A Sanders Family Christmas, Cumberland County Playhouse, Crossville. Finally, there is the lovely Lauren Marshall, whose performance as Vera gives Sanders Family Christmas its very heart and soul. Not much older than the actors playing her children, Marshall's performance is all the more impressive as a result and her voice on "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem" gives the production one of its musical highlights. And it is during that particular sequence that gives the show it's most moving moment: As Vera sings, Dennis' eyes fill with tears and reaches for his mother's hand. The emotion expressed during that moment is palpable and just goes to show you how a sweet little play about a family of Southerners in the 1940s can pack such a wallop today. It doesn't go unnoticed, of course, that the superbly talented cast members play all their own instruments and that five of the seven members (including Marshall) had, earlier in the day, performed in a stellar matinee of Brigadoon. That they so seamlessly were able to transform themselves in a matter of two hours and to give such stunning performances in both shows is nothing short of spectacular and worthy of praise.

• Laura Matula, Rent, Boiler Room Theatre, Franklin. With a trio of powerful leading performances from Ben Van Diepen, Ciaran McCarthy and Laura Matula, the Boiler Room Theatre production of Jonathan Larson's Pultizer Prize-winning Rent may well be the finest interpretation of the groundbreaking musical we've ever seen. Certainly, we've never seen a more passionate or more engaging mounting of Rent and the cast assembled by director Corbin Green deserve every accolade possible for the obviously heartfelt rendering they give Larson's work. Matula, whose beautiful voice gives new life to the doomed Mimi and whose exquisite portrayal is so genuinely conveyed that she gives, without doubt, the best reading of the role we've ever seen. Of the 525,600 Mimis we've seen in the past almost-15 years, Matula is definitely the finest. Paired romantically onstage with McCarthy (their "Light My Candle" is fun and sexy - and maybe just a little scary), she creates a memorable characterization and their scenes together are beautifully structured and heartbreakingly emotional.

• Laura Thomas Sonn, The Fantasticks, Boiler Room Theatre, Franklin. Director Sondra Morton and musical director Jamey Green have crafted a sweetly winning revival of The Fantasticks that is, by turns, romantic, funny and moving - everything you want this timeless theatre classic to be - and featuring an exceptionally capable cast led by the gifted Ciaran McCarthy and Laura Thomas Sonn as the star-crossed lovers and the immensely talented Will Sevier as El Gallo. McCarthy's boyishly appealing Matt, Sonn's winsomely beguiling Luisa and Sevier's beautifully sung El Gallo are, clearly, the lynchpins that guarantee audiences will respond favorably to the show, and they are given ample support from a gifted veteran cast assembled by Morton. The blonde and beautiful Sonn is ideally cast as Luisa, giving her character the right mix of girlish naivete and wonder at the world outside her own small environs. Her voice is crystal clear and her performance is made all the more compelling because of it...again, her duets with McCarthy are effectively presented.

• Martha Wilkinson, john and jen, 3PS Productions. There may be actors who could give better performances as john and jen than Patrick Waller and Martha Wilkinson but they would have to be some sort of imaginary, dream-like apparitions to even come close to the stunningly brave and thoroughly focused interpretations given by these two exemplary Nashville artists. Consider it an ideal marriage of actors and characters, the perfect confluence of artists at their creative best coming together to breathe life and renewed vitality into their fictional counterparts, who are so richly drawn and evocatively written by Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald in their chamber musical. Wilkinson proves her mettle from the start, playing the six-year-old Jen welcoming her baby brother into the world; Waller, charming and self-assured from his very first moment onstage, effectively plays John at every stage of life. Certainly, the pair's chemistry is palpable, drawing the audience into their shared intimacies. When Act One comes to its cataclysmic, though completely expected denouement, you find yourself fighting back the emotions you're feeling, tears stinging your eyes. Clearly, the script is somewhat manipulative in this respect, but more likely your emotional investment is because of the beautiful interactions of Waller and Wilkinson.

Pictured: Daniel Black and Nicole Begue in She Loves Me at Cumberland County Playhouse