Jeffrey Ellis - Page 96

Nashville Shakespeare Festival will celebrate Shakespeare's birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death today, April 23, with the Bard's Birthday Bash at the Nashville Public Library Main Branch, located at 615 Church Street.

Nashville Ballet brings its 30th anniversary season to a close with two works choreographed by artistic director and CEO Paul Vasterlling:  a dazzlingly intricate and grand revival of Carmina Burana, set to the timeless music of Carl Orff, and the world premiere of Layla & The Majnun, which features the music of composer Richard Danielpour, which recreates one of the world's oldest love stories from Persian culture.

Imagine if Picasso and Einstein had actually met: That's the premise for comedian-turned-playwright Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which opens this Today, April 22, at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre.

First up, we're Getting To Know…Amber Buker, who with her partner Randall Tye Pike, is launching Nashville's latest theater company - Distraction Theatre - this summer at the iconic Darkhorse Theater. Even before we subjected her to a good and dramatic drilling/grilling and/or questioning, we knew her to be charming and direct, two of the attributes all theater folk should develop. But as we pummeled her with queries, we discovered something else: she once competed for the title of Miss Oklahoma, a fact that ingratiated her to us immediately.

There's a lot to learn about the two actors - Kyra Belle Johnson, who's cast as Sophie, and Stephen Ecklemann, who takes on the role of her boyfriend Sky - playing the young leads in Mamma Mia!, the ABBA-inspired musical that lands at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center next Tuesday night for an eight-performance run.

Widely regarded as one of the most successful, prolific and performed playwrights in the world, Neil Simon might well be considered the best comedy playwright in American Theater and Nashville audiences at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre will be able to revel in the coming weeks as one of Simon's best-loved plays is brought to life on the miraculous floating stage by a cast of award-winning actors.

Shows are opening (Carolyn German unveils her latest, Go From Here, and Nashville Ballet revives Carmina Burana, both this weekend), shows are closing (your last chance to catch The Taffetas at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre before they go the way of The Plaids is this weekend) and The Miss Firecracker Contest is back onstage at Donelson's Larry Keeton Theatre for the second of three weekends. Obviously, the 2016 theater season continues to reveal itself at a breakneck pace, giving audiences a veritable buffet of offerings from which to choose.

Oh, for the love of God, we get it, we get it: The superwomen – who might best be described as the superheroines of Nashville's theaterati and assorted non-stagey types – of SuperMAS love each other, admire each other's mad musical theater skills and get along as well as a bunch of Canadians trying to out-courteous one another! But just imagine how much fun it would be if the quintet of superior performers could somehow show us the seamy underbelly of their interactions and artistic collaborations, exposing us to the histrionics of the Real Housewives reality of their relationships…complete with overturned tables, repeated air kisses and trips to faraway lands where they redefine the term “ugly Americans.”

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.

Delving into the deeply complex culture of Russian life and history - and the fanciful, yet somehow disturbing, tales that have inspired and informed Russian literature for centuries - Miroshnik's equally complex play offers an intriguing and entertaining treatise on that literature, brought to life with contemporary twists and turns that make the stories more accessible to modern theater-goers, while inviting comparisons and contrasts of Russia in the 21st century with the ancient Tsarist era and the hardships of the Communist years of the last century.

David Lee directs an ensemble of actors which includes 2015 First Night Honoree Wesley Paine, along with Allie Huff, Alexandra Chopson, Brooke Gronemeyer, Becky Wahlstrom and Taylor Chew. The understudy cast is made up of Fiona Soul, Tessa Bryant, Sadie Andros, Morgan Conder, Nettie Kraft and Amanda Bell.

Nashville's Theater Craft, Inc. presents two new shows this weekend - April 21-23: Go From Here: The Music & Lyrics of Carolyn German and Improv Binge Watch! featuring the Spontaneous Comedy Company. The shows will be presented at the iconic Darkhorse Theater.

Rajiv Joseph's quirky and dark love story of Gruesome Playground Injuries, an engaging drama that follows childhood friends Kayleen and Doug over the course of 30 years of physical and emotional bumps and bruises - will be presented by members of Nashville Repertory Theatre's Professional Internship program April 29-30 at Nashville Public Television's Studio A.

Nashville Shakespeare Festival will celebrate Shakespeare's birthday and the 400th anniversary of his death this Saturday, April 23, with the Bard's Birthday Bash at the Nashville Public Library Main Branch, located at 615 Church Street.

Imagine if Picasso and Einstein had actually met: That's the premise for comedian-turned-playwright Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which opens this Friday, April 22, at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre.

Onstage through Saturday night at Lipscomb University's Collins Auditorium, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, represents a musical theater genre that has fallen out of favor in the 21st Century: its very innocence and perceived lack of guile guarantee that it will ultimately become the stuff of community theater, academic theater and their ilk. After watching the show play out on stage - even when it's directed by Kari Smith with gleeful exuberance - you can't help but wonder how it ever played Broadway (Twice, even!), even after a rather successful mid-1960s off-Broadway stand.

Nashville Children's Theatre (NCT) this morning announces its 85th Anniversary season. Since 1931, NCT has been leading the way in providing professional theatre to young audiences. As the oldest professional children's theatre in the nation, NCT is proud to continue its mission to provide extraordinary theatrical experiences to youth, families and adults.

Something Rotten! this way comes - along with a healthy assortment of recent Broadway hits, a homegrown version of an Andrew Lloyd Webber hit and a transfer from London's West End - as the Tennessee Performing Arts Center revealed the list of shows included in their 2016-17 HCA/TriStar Health Broadway at TPAC series during a Monday night event.

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.

All of this is to explain why Leo Joseph-Connell, the protagonist of Amy Herzog's Pulitzer Prize-nominated play 4,000 Miles, shows up at 3 a.m. at his Grandmother Vera's apartment in the West Village of New York City, longing to renew a connection to someone who has known him since birth and who will help him find balance in his life once again, whether he admits that or not. After all, the older woman at 92 must be far wiser and more adept at dealing with the realities of life than a 21-year-old wanderer in search of solace.