Jeffrey Ellis - Page 38

What about the story keeps audiences coming back again and again to see The Phantom of the Opera? Is it the lushly romantic score composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber? Or could it be the costumes and scenery, so widely seen across the globe - and so easily identifiable as being from The Phantom - that they are considered iconic? Or could it be the mysteriously intriguing and sumptuously romantic Gaston Leroux story?

Nora's back - and she's pissed! Some 15 years after Henrik Ibsen's proto-feminist Nora Helmer came to the momentous decision to leave her controlling husband at the end of A Doll's House - and some 140 years after she first stepped in front of the footlights at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre in 1879 - she finally returns to her Norwegian home to confront her estranged husband and to reveal just what she's been up to since she left her utterly conventional life behind in search of something more.

And if there's any justice in the world of the performing arts, you can rest assured that University of Memphis' Layne Mackenzie Crutsinger will be among the names of particular note. A graduate of Mt. Juliet High School, she's now a senior at the University of Memphis, looking ahead to what the future holds in store for her.

Lucy Turner has been a fixture in Nashville theater since she was a toddler, it seems, and now - in an example of how times flies by - the senior at Nashville School of the Arts is in the throes of choosing a college, filing applications and scheduling auditions. She burst upon the local theater scene at ten years old, playing Rhoda Penmark in director Cathy Street's critically acclaimed production of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed at Street Theatre Company.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 15, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Serving as dramaturg for Falling Out, a provocative new performance piece from the New York-based Phantom Limb Company, which has its world premiere this weekend at Nashville's OZ Arts, has been unlike any other project Janice Paran has ever worked on.

Nashville businesswoman, philanthropist and arts advocate Martha Rivers Ingram is one of three individuals to be recognized at the annual gala of Theatre Communications Group in 2019. In addition to Ingram, who is co-founder of Nashville Repertory Theatre and who spearheaded the creation of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, honorees included Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and Broadway press agent Rick Miramontez, president of DKC/O&M.

Today, just in time for their show's opening, two cast members - Jason Scott, who plays the self-involved Chip Tolentino, and Jena Salb, who is cast as former champion Rona Lisa Peretti, step up to the microphone to answer our Thursday 5(+1) questions and to offer the suggestion that a revival of Legally Blonde: The Musical might be a good consideration for next season at The Keeton.

Everything that could conceivably trip up seasoned performers - who've been reciting monologues in front of their bathroom mirrors since they were toddlers, bring down a set considered to be a landmark in design for the stage (or in the history of architecture since the Greeks built their first temple and the Romans engineered their first aqueduct), and/or send scores of trembling thespians to the emergency room after but one performance - actually befall the cast and crew of The Play That Goes Wrong.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 1, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Hair is a great big hit on the symbolic and mostly imaginary bong that is theater in Music City - or anywhere else artists come together to share the largesse of their own indomitable spirits. The resulting production will leave you inspired, maybe even more readily equipped with the realities of life in the 21st century, which proves that no matter how much times have changed, they remain stultifyingly the same. While our prejudices and biases may have been altered by the social upheaval of the 1960s and the decades that followed, introspection reveals that we only have refocused our baser instincts on issues of equal significance.

There is a wonderful scene in act two of Aaron Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird - the first production of ACT 1's 2018-19 season - during which actors Tamara Scott and Diego Gomez, playing mother and son, launch into a years-in-the-making confrontation that gives both actors an opportunity to prove their mettle in decidedly theatrical fashion. If only for that one scene in Posner's three-act play, audiences could walk away satisfied, but thanks to Mark Cabus' inspired direction of a particularly notable cast there are far more moments to entertain and, perhaps, to challenge audiences to think about the personal cost of creating art.

A word to the wise is sufficient: Never turn your back on Rhoda Penmark. No matter how well-behaved, how polite or how sickeningly sweet she may seem, the little girl with the larcenous heart simply cannot be trusted and it is at your own peril that you decide to trust her - the fact that she is a fictional character notwithstanding.

Students participating in the annual Spotlight Awards, a celebration of musical theatre in Tennessee high schools, were special guests of Tony and Emmy award winner Kristin Chenoweth last week during sound check prior to her performances with the Nashville Symphony at Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

"Two hours of uncompromising joy" is how Evan Alexander Smith describes the critically acclaimed The Play That Goes Wrong, the West End and Broadway comedy hit which just recently embarked on its first national tour of the USA, bringing its unique amalgam of theatrical artistry, uproarious humor and full-out laughter to audiences all over the country.

Circle Players continues to celebrate of its 2018-19 season with tonight's opening of Hair, the 1969 tribal love-rock musical that made musical theater history with its premiere 50 years ago. Directed by Jason Lewis and choreographed by Tosha Pendergrast, the eagerly anticipated production features a cast of Nashville's favorite actors, with Nicholas Page as Claude.

Students participating in the annual Spotlight Awards, a celebration of musical theatre in Tennessee high schools, were special guests of Tony and Emmy award winner Kristin Chenoweth last week during sound check prior to her performances with the Nashville Symphony at Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

Director Renee Robinson brings the Frank Wildhorn musical Jekyll & Hyde - based on Robert Louis Stevenson's iconic novella - to life at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts, opening Friday, October 5 and continuing through October 21.

Following a summer spent as an intern with Studio Tenn (and appearing in the company's production of Frankenstein), Regan Holmberg finds herself in the midst of her junior year at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and already is hard at work on her first show of the semester. In fact, she predicts fall semester 2018 is going to be as jam-packed as her summer was as Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine opens in MTSU's Dorethe Tucker Theatre tonight.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 1, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...