Jeffrey Ellis - Page 106

Directors and producers throughout Middle Tennessee are seeking actors for upcoming productions of 42nd Street (at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts) and God of Carnage (Nashville's 4th Story Theatre) - and Metro Parks and the Music City Theatre Collective team up for a series of special classes, including an audition worshop, for this spring. We've gathered the details together here to make your planning easier. So now you have no excuse: go follow your dream!

Bradley Moore directs his own adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, as ACT 1 readies its fourth show of the 2015/2016 season, featuring a cast of respected Nashville actors. 

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

Evelyn O'Neal Brush's bravura performance is reason enough to see Tennessee Women's Theater Project's production of Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, but clearly it's Lauren Gunderson's play itself that should sell tickets. Emilie (as we will refer to the play from here on out - at least to the conclusion of this review) is an engaging treatise on the life and times of the mathematician, physicist, writer and critic, whose supreme intellect and prodigious literary output during the Age of the Enlightenment made her both notorious and admired at a time when women were thought of primarily as chattel.

Beki Baker's extraordinary direction, which provides a stunningly fresh perspective of Arthur Miller's stage masterpiece - along with remarkable performances from a cast of both professional and student actors - ensures that audiences will long be considering the impact of The Crucible, now onstage at Shamblin Theater through February 28, after the final curtain is rung down on this joint production of Blackbird Theater and Lipscomb University Department of Theatre.

Here's a question you may have asked yourself about Tosha Pendergrast: When does she sleep? Mundane, perhaps - but it's a question that comes to mind when you realize that she's always working, whether she's teaching students at Lauri Gregoire's Bellevue Dance Center, choreographing her latest show (Dreamgirls opened just last week at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts, Street Theatre Company's production of In The Heights opens in a couple of weeks), performing onstage (she was among the cavalcade of stars in the Music City Theatre Collective's debut production Showstoppers), doing television appearances (The Dance Network is calling) or just living life with her handsome and charming husband Benjamin Pendergrast (together they are the perfect couple, each devoted to the other)…

Evelyn O'Neal Brush stars in the title role of Lauren Gunderson's Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, as Tennessee Women's Theater Project continues its ninth season of provocative professional theater with the Tennessee premiere of Gunderson's play. The production opens at Nashville's Z. Alexander Looby Theater tonight, February 19, running weekends through March 6. 

Jaclynn Jutting directs Belmont University's Department of Theatre and Dance's spring semester-opening production of Lynn Nottage's Las Meninas, a play they contend will 'grab the attention of any audience member, of any background,' opening tonight, February 19, at Belmont's Troutt Theatre.

It's been an exciting week for actress Meghan Glogower, a graduate of the musical theatre program at Nashville's Belmont University: On Monday night, she joined with her friends and cohorts from the original cast The Nutty Professor - the musical written by Marvin Hamlisch and Rupert Holmes, which premiered in Nashville in 2012 - for its New York City premiere in concert at Birdland. The musical's NYC debut, which has been a long time coming, reconvened the cast and Holmes to pay tribute to Hamlisch's final score for the theater while rekindling dreams and aspirations.

Even as a high school student, Brandon Hoyt is something of a renaissance man: he sings, he dances, he acts - and he's into information technology, he's a whiz at math and science, he's considering a college career that includes any number of top level universities and the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. And he's a 2016 First Night Most Promising Actor, part of a cadre of young actors from area colleges and high schools who have already distinguished themselves both onstage and offstage.

2014 First Night Honoree - and one of Nashville's most acclaimed actresses, cabaret artists and music directors - Ginger Newman is "ready for [her] close-up," as Norma Desmond in The Larry Keeton Theatre puts the finishing touches on their upcoming production of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Sunset Boulevard.

It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that on Tuesday night, February 16, Music City officially fell in love with Motown. Berry Gordy's musical is the stuff of legend and, as it takes us from 1983 all the way back to 1938 and back again, you can't help but be impressed by the ambitious young man's rise to preeminence; his story is the American dream come true and Gordy's impact on pop culture and the very fiber of our nation's history cannot be overstated - it's a story that resonates in Nashville to be certain.

Chris Ramirez is an excellent example of the talented, driven and committed individuals honing their craft at USC. A native of Kansas City, Kansas - "aka Wyandotte County, aka The Dotte!" - he earned his B.A. in theatre performance at the University of Kansas before heading westward to USC.

Martha Wilkinson directs Brett Cantrell, Audrey Johnson, Jenny Norris-Light, Jeremy Maxwell and Lydia Bushfield in Funny Valentines – the latest offering from Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre – which opened February 11 and continues at the iconic Nashville dinner theater through March 12.

Tonight at Birdland - for the first time since it debuted in Nashville in 2012 - a New York audience will finally have the opportunity to hear Marvin Hamlisch's final theatrical score for Nutty Professor, the musical based on the iconic Jerry Lewis film.

Nashville's remarkable quintet of divas - Erin Parker, Melodie Madden Adams, Cori Laemmel, Laura Matula and Megan Murphy Chambers, aka Mas Nashville - implore you to save the date of Tuesday, April 19, when they'll unveil their latest collaborative effort (which will reveal their superheroine alter egos): SuperMAS.

Sometimes it seems there is so much theater happening that it's difficult to keep track of it all. From personal experience, despite all the datebooks, smart phones, tablets, desktop computers and laptops...it's hard to keep everything straight in this wacky business of the show.

Make no mistake: Nate Eppler is far too good a playwright to remain Nashville theater's best-kept secret for much longer. If you need further proof of his brilliance (a word I don't use to describe people very often), even after witnessing it first-hand in his earlier plays - like the noirish Rear Widow, the imaginative Larries or the compelling Long Way Down - then get yourself as quickly as humanly possible down to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Johnson Theatre and allow yourself to be immersed in his latest work of stage wizardry: the challenging, enlightening and provocative Good Monsters.

Without doubt, excessive exaggeration or hyperbole, Nashville is a veritable 'city of dreams,' a place where creativity thrives and collaboration is a way of life. Perhaps in no other way is this synergy expressed more artfully than in Nashville Ballet's Attitude series - playing through Valentine's Day at TPAC's James K. Polk Theatre - which captures the very essence of Music City, encapsulating it in the music of local songwriters and then translating it for an audience via the ephemeral nature of dance.

Arnold Lobel's beloved characters hop from page to stage today, February 13 and February 20 as The Arts Center of Cannon County presented A Year With Frog and Toad, the Tony Award-nominated musical with book and lyrics by Willie Reale and music by Robert Reale.