Jeffrey Ellis News

Tennessee's glittering theaterati gathered in Nashville for the 2011 edition of First Night, the Nashville Theatre Honors, paying tribute to six of the leading lights of the theater community -- PAM ATHA, DAN BREWER, GARY C. HOFF, DANNY PROCTOR, LAYNE SASSER and HELEN OLAKETI SHUTE-PETTAWAY -- on Sunday, September 4, the culmination of a nine-day long celebration of live theater in the Volunteer State. Hosted by two-time First Night Award winner David Compton, the Honors Gala featured staged musical and dramatic tributes to the six honorees, starring some of the best-known names in Tennessee theater.

Six of the leading lights of the theater world in Tennessee will be recognized as members of the 2011 Class of First Night Honorees August 27-September 4 as First Night, the Nashville Theatre Honors hosts a series of theatrical events to celebrate their achievements and accomplishments.

Directed by Buddy R. Jones, Jeffrey is like a nostalgic trip to the 1990s for older audience members, many of whom remember the tenor of those times intimately. Intelligently, Jones approaches Jeffrey as a period piece, ensuring that the design aesthetic for the show helps to capture the underlying confusion and questions of the advent of the AIDS era. And by casting two longtime friends - Manus and Richard Browder in the pivotal roles of Jeffrey and Sterling - he gives the production a sturdy underpinning that makes the story funnier and more poignant.

A Chicago native who has called Nashville home for only a year now since she first joined Dance Theatre of Tennessee, Lindsay Cregier has firmly established herself as a vital member of the company, taking on significant roles during her first season. With the start of the 2011-2012 season looming head, Cregier took time from her summer schedule to consider our list of questions in order to give us a glimpse into 'This Dancer's Life.' Read and enjoy...

Rhubarb Theater Company will present the final performance of Nashville playwright Valerie Hart's Rising and Falling, August 20, at Darkhorse Theater.

Daniel Reichard, Christian Hoff, J. Robert Spencer and Michael Longoria - the quartet of remarkable performers known collectively as The Midtown Men - are perhaps best known for their musical evocations of the best guy groups of the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to their previous starmaking turns in Broadway's Jersey Boys and their current concert tour, bringing their special brand of repartee, music and friendship to audiences all over North America. So, it might come as a surprise to their legions of fans that next up on the set list will be their 'interpretation,' if you will, of the very best of the girl groups.

Studio Tenn launches its eagerly anticipated sophomore season in its new home at the Franklin Theatre, kicking off the company's second act with a sparkling revival of one of musical theater's best-loved shows: Guys and Dolls, the 'musical fable of Bradway' based on a story and characters of Damon Runyon, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.

The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy, by Allen Meyer and Michael Nowak, is the tale of William Ellsworth Hoy, one of the first deaf baseball players to make it to the major league - and the man some people credit with the creation of baseball signals. The play opened last week at Lakewood Theatre Company in Old Hickory, running through August 27, in a production directed by John Carpenter.

Directed with a palpable sense of style and tongue-in-cheek respect for the musical's unique cast of characters by Brandy Austin, with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Boiler Room Theatre delivers yet another musical theater classic to the stage, reaffirming the company's dominance in that particular theatrical genre. You have a musical you want to see onstage? Tell the BRT folks and they'll deliver the kind of production you have dreamed about and longed for - and they'll do it with a cast of local performers who are guaranteed to knock your socks off! And with music direction by Jamey Green and choreography by Lauri Gregoire, both of whom are BRT resident artists, you'll be assured of a huge hit.

Jersey Boys veterans Jared Bradshaw and John Hickman join Nashville's own Carrie Tillis and Laura Matula to head the cast of Studio Tenn's production of Guys & Dolls, opening August 18-28 at the Franklin Theatare, kicking off the company's second season - their first in their new venue.

First Night: The Honors Gala is set for Sunday, September 4, at the Troutt Theatre at Belmont University, which kicks off at 5:30 p.m. with the Red Carpet Event, hosted by Jennifer Richmond and Trey Palmer, with fashion commentary by Cary Street, Joshua Waldrep and Lisa Garner Harrison. Impresario Johnny Delarocco (aka John Pyka) will produce a special Red Carpet performance by his company just for First Night.

So, this is how it all started: Cori Laemmel, who despite her many flaws (she's too sweet, too talented and too pretty, not to mention that she is, well, just darling) is one of my favorite theatrical types, calls me up and asks me to come see The Most Amazing Anything of Evertime, the new show she wrote and directed for the first, big-scale, open-to-the-public, onstage production of The Theater Bug, her performing arts training program for younger actors.

Directed by Trish Crist in a confidently acted and well-paced production from Rhubarb Theater Company at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater, Rising & Falling offers a fictionalized account of a controversy that swirled among members of the public and throughout the tony New York City art world about an artist's attempt to come to terms with the tragedy of 9/11 through the creation of a work of art depicting a woman falling from one of the WTC towers. In Hart's script, the artist is a resident of Nashville who, like so many of us, was privy to the horrors of 9/11 through television coverage of the events as they unfolded on-screen.

Wes Driver directs a thoroughly charming and beautifully acted revival of G.K. Chesterton's first play, Magic, now onstage at the Shamblin Theatre on the David Lipscomb University campus in a sumptuously appointed production from Blackbird Theatre Company. Featuring a stellar cast of Nashville stage professionals, Magic might best be described as a gentle drawing-room comedy from the post-Edwardian period (it debuted in 1913) that somehow remains relevant and intriguing almost 100 years after its premiere.

Allen Meyer and Michael Nowak's The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy, the tale of one of the first deaf baseball players to make it to the major league - and the man some people credit with the creation of baseball signals - opens at Lakewood Theatre Company in Old Hickory on August 12, running through August 27, in a production helmed by director John Carpenter.

Nashville's Blackbird Theater in August will mount a rare production of Magic - a play by the great, if largely forgotten, literary figure G.K. Chesterton - with performances at Shamblin Theatre on the David Lipscomb University campus, running August 12-27. Magic is described as 'a funny, fiercely dramatic, unabashedly romantic play that involves an aristocratic family whose conflicting beliefs and doubts about the supernatural are all challenged by the arrival of a mysterious conjurer.'

In last February's Aspects of Love, Dance Theatre of Tennessee's midwinter concert featuring a wide variety of dance styles that perfectly showcased the superb talents of company members, Guadalupe Medina was featured along with Amanda Whites and Lisa Schmidt in Nuts, a contemporary piece set to 'Beatles Go Baroque' by Peter Preiner and His Chamber Orchestra. Staged by DTT artistic director Christopher Mohnani, after the original choreography of R. Culalic, the smart and sprightly work exuded humor that was exemplified by the spirited dancing of the trio who presented the winning work with an easy grace, making it a sure favorite of the audience.

Just over a year since she debuted her critically acclaimed cabaret act at New York's Café Carlyle (and only weeks after her 2011 stint at the same venue), Lea Salonga's new live CD - The Journey So Far - is set for release by LML Music/Allegro Distribution on Tuesday, August 9, giving her fans the world over a chance to hear her crystalline voice on a new recording, which was executive produced by Nashville's own Chris Keaton.

Lea Salonga's new live CD - The Journey So Far - is set for release by LML Music/Allegro Distribution on August 9. Salonga, the Tony Award-winning Filipina singer and actress, is best known for originating the lead role of Kim in the musical Miss Saigon (and for which she won the Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk Outer Critics and Theatre World Awards), will highlight the release of the CD with a worldwide tour throughout 2011-12.

In the days that followed the 9/11 attacks, Circle leaders and members of the Assassins production team were forced to consider closing the show (included in Sondheim's musical is the character of Samuel Byck, an unsuccessful presidential assassin who talks vividly about flying an airplane into the White House to kill President Richard Nixon in 1968. As Circle leaders discussed whether to shutter the show for a weekend, or to cancel the remaining three weeks of the show's run, the show's cast members debated whether or not they could justify to themselves, their friends and their families their own decision to continue with the show in the days just after the deadliest attack ever on American soil.