Jeffrey Ellis - Page 3

Today, we continue to celebrate the return of Collegiate Theatrics featuring one of our favorites from the theatre department at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville: Alex Vanburen, a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, who graduated from APSU last May. We first met Alex when they auditioned for a role in our January 2020 production of La Cage Aux Folles for Circle Players, a role for which they won much acclaim, and whom we most recently saw onstage at Clarksville’s Roxy Regional Theatre, playing Riff Raff in the company’s latest iteration of The Rocky Horror Show.

Today, we herald the return of Collegiate Theatrics – our first interview with a university-level actor since before the pandemic – featuring one of our favorites from the theatre department at Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro: Emma Bastin, a native of Lebanon, Tennessee, who will be graduating next spring.

Less than 48 hours after opening night of Cumberland County Playhouse’s 2023 holiday season offering of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, we are happy/sad to report that tickets are mighty scarce as the sparkling production is almost certainly headed to a complete sellout.

Rob McClure’s masterful turn onstage as the redoubtable title character is reason enough to make sure you see Mrs. Doubtfire, The New Musical Comedy, now onstage at Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Andrew Jackson Hall through Sunday. But odds are you’ll find so much more to love about this musical adaptation – from the “hometown” team that gave us Something Rotten, the endearing paean to musical theater – of the classic film comedy that, truth be told, McClure’s bravura performance will be the icing on the cake (or, more probably, the buttercream sandwiched between two layers of luscious Victoria sponge) of this delightfully theatrical confection.

While the debate rages on about the proper time to start celebrating the holidays, Nashville Children’s Theatre may have devised the ideal plan with their current onstage offering – the world premiere of the theater-for-younger-audiences version of the recent Broadway musical Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.

Today we celebrate our most recent sojourn with Cinderella and company, thanks to the sumptuously designed, beautifully staged and wonderfully sung Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella, presented in an all-too-brief one-weekend run at Middle Tennessee State University’s Tucker Theatre in Murfreesboro.

On its surface, there is so much about which to alternately fall in love with/wonder quizzically about in Big Fish, the musical with book by John August (based on his screenplay for the 2003 film version) and a score by Andrew Lippa, that there’s no wonder the show had trouble finding its audience on Broadway but now has proven tremendously popular among theaters all over the country.

The play in question? The Woman in Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the book by Susan Hill, that finishes up its three-weekend run in Mt. Juliet with performances through November 5. Directed by Meriwether, whose director’s note offers the tale of his own fascination with the script and his fervent belief it could engage his company’s audiences, The Woman in Black is brought to life through the splendid performances of two promising young performers in the prime of their abilities – Lucy Turner, who will be moving to New York City this winter, and Sawyer Latham, longtime friends and consummate artists, whose trust in each other is absolutely required for the production to work as effectively and as powerfully as it does.

Increasingly, it seems, all roads lead to Nashville – or at least everyone seems somehow to have a connection to our fair city. Case in point: Blaine Swen, the creator and director of The Improvised Shakespeare Company lives here – a fact unknown to me until I tracked him down to belabor him with questions about his company’s upcoming performances at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on November 10 and 11.

That laughter you hear coming from within the Troutt Theatre on the Belmont University campus this weekend and next should probably come with a trigger warning. For no matter how rollicking, rambunctious and uproarious it truly is, it should be pointed out that what is transpiring on that stage over two weekends is, indeed, the stuff of post-traumatic stress – or, not to put too fine a point on it, it would be if the shenanigans weren’t brilliantly scripted, infinitely well-rehearsed and just the way it should be.

What rugby shorts did for Paul Mescal’s thighs in 2020’s Normal People, so do fishnet stockings do for Bradley Oosterink’s thighs in the Roxy Regional Theatre’s The Rocky Horror Show in 2023. Not that Mr. Oosterink’s thighs are the best things about the Roxy’s 11th annual iteration of the classically off-kilter and decidedly off-beat musical, but they are indeed a highlight.

As plans were under way for the eleventh year of The Rocky Horror Show at Clarksville’s Roxy Regional Theatre, Emily Ruck, the company’s interim artistic director, had the idea to assemble an all-woman team to bring a new perspective and to reinvigorate the classic show: the director, musical director and choreographer would all be women. More importantly, the creative triumvirate would be made up of women who are longtime friends, having met while working together on a show at The Roxy some seven years ago.

A musical retelling of producer Sam Phillips' serendipitous gathering of four of music's most notable Southern boys - Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley - at his Memphis-based Sun Records Studio on December 4, 1956, Million Dollar Quartet will set your feet to tapping out a steady rhythm from its very first moments (a performance of Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” that very nearly blows the roof off Studio Tenn’s brand spanking new Turner Theater at The Factory in Franklin) and will keep your heart pumping right along to the very final notes of Jerry Lee's “Whole Lotta Shakin’” that closes out the concert musical that is directed by Studio Tenn artistic director Patrick Cassidy and featuring an exceptional cast of performers who pay homage to their eponymous counterparts with so much talent and commitment that you’re breathless – but still wanting more – by the time the curtain closes two hours later.

What if (of all the things possible in the mythical, magical world of musical theater) the four earnest boy singers of Forever Plaid hooked up with the vengeful Heathers, while at the same time Hedwig (of the Angry Inch fame) was getting busy with Carrie White (of the bucket of pig’s blood fame) and then their resulting progeny got together (or maybe they were all together in some orgiastic event of monumental proportions that also includes various and sundry characters and/or germane plot points from Be More Chill and The Toxic Avenger) – are you still with me, friends? – what would be the result?

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, I have had the privilege of seeing some remarkably talented and gifted young actors on every stage on the Belmont campus and never have I ever left a performance there without feeling inspired, absolutely certain that the future of theater as we know it is pre-ordained and so very hopeful.

In Ride The Cyclone, which debuted in 2008, members of the St. Cassian High School chamber choir of Uranium City, Saskatchewan, have died as the result of a freak accident on a roller coaster called The Cyclone. Now, each member is given the opportunity to tell their story in hope of winning a reward from a mechanical fortune teller: a return to life!

While we wait for Ethel Waters to get the large-scale showbiz treatment she deserves, Nashville audiences, for now at least, can show respect and give recognition to the legendary figure who is brought to life onstage once more by Connye Florance and Saaneah Jamison via the Kennie Playhouse Theatre production of Parr’s His Eye Is On the Sparrow: The Ethel Waters Musical. Director Kennie Dozier’s production is somewhat uneven, but his two leading ladies – the aforementioned Florance and Jamison – are mesmerizing, each one creating her own indelible portrait and unique interpretation of Ethel Waters in two acts that feature some of her best-known songs, tunes that are a part of the Great American Songbook and among the most haunting, most beautiful melodies ever written.

Baker’s superb direction brings all the various moving parts of this huge production together to deliver a gratifyingly heartfelt paean to the millions of working women (and men) who inspired the screenplay and musical book by Patricia Resnick. Baker’s vision for the piece, in concert with her team of collaborators, delivers a production of 9 to 5: The Musical that is delightfully fresh and new, eschewing the tendency of some directors to offer a rehash of what’s already been seen on Broadway, on tour or in regional theater.

Thanks to Andrew Maraniss’ best-selling book Strong Inside – adapted for the stage by Tyrone L. Robinson – Wallace’s storied basketball career in the Southeastern Conference and the details of his upbringing in the segregated South are now brought vividly to life onstage in a history-making production from NCT, the third-oldest theater for younger audiences in the United States. Founded in 1931 by members of the Junior League of Nashville, there can be no denying that NCT, like its hometown itself and one of its favorite sons (Wallace), has been reflective of the growing diversity of its people and the evolution of its cultural and educational institutions.

For more than 30-plus years, Jack E. Chambers has been a stalwart of the Nashville stage, working with virtually every theater production company to ever exist here during those three-plus decades. And although audiences have seen him in a wide variety of roles (he’s taken on all kinds of characters to exist in an ever-evolving plane of fictional existence), it is perhaps on now, in the fall of 2023, that they have the opportunity to see the once fresh-faced, just-out-of-college Chambers – now grown into the affable middle-aged actor they eagerly anticipate onstage – as the thoughtful, observant and creative everyman he is.