Jeffrey Ellis - Page 42

Managing to find time amid a hectic tech week, actor Brett Mutter - who plays Beadle Bamford - graciously agreed to submit to The Friday 5(+1) and to answer our questions, hopefully, intriguing potential audience members with some background about his theatrical career and to explain why he thinks you should reserve your tickets now for Sweeney Todd.

Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre transports audiences back to Baltimore - the capital of big hair and the city of big dreams - in 1962 with their production of Hairspray, now onstage through September 29. This weekend (which features the company's annual fundraising gala on Saturday night) kicks off the second weekend of the show's multi-week run in Historic Downtown Clarksville.

Heathers The Musical, based on the classic 1980s cult film of the same name, concludes its run at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts this weekend. Directed by Rachel Jones, the show - which has played to sell-out audiences during its first two weekends, features a cast of talented actors who are having the time of their young lives while bringing the story to life onstage.

Make no mistake about it: School of Rock isn't your mum's - nor your nan's - Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravaganza. There are no massive chandeliers to come crashing into the orchestra, no fascist dictators to fear, no silent screen divas yearning for a comeback, nor are there are any human-sized felines staring at you across the footlights. Nope, Sir Andrew (as he's known across the pond) has crafted an energetic rock musical that's based on a movie that starred Jack Black and it will rock your freakin' socks off!

Actress Crystal Kurek returns to a role some contend she was destined from birth to play, as she stars as the eponymous "practically perfect" nanny in Disney and Cameron Macintosh's Mary Poppins, opening this Friday night at Springhouse Theater in Smyrna. And who better than Crystal to help us bring another season of the Friday 5(+1) series back to BroadwayWorld Nashville?

Karissa Wheeler's senior year at The University of the South/Sewanee has only just started, but already she's caught up in the whirlwind of a typical – for her, especially – packed and rather crazy schedule, immersed in classes while moving into rehearsals for what may be the most demanding role in which she's ever been cast: Sally Bowles in the iconic Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret, which is based on John Van Druten's play I Am A Camera, which in turn is inspired Christopher Isherwood's memoir (Goodbye to Berlin) of his years as a struggling young writer in the heady days of Weimar Germany.

Never before have audiences responded with such startling enthusiasm and thunderous applause to a Nashville Repertory Theatre opening night - at least in my memory and I've been reviewing shows at the Rep for 30 years now - than what I witnessed last night as Avenue Q kicked off the company's 2018-19 season in astonishingly irreverent style. Theater historians would have a hard time finding a production in which Nashville Rep audiences had a better time celebrating diversity and internet porn while watching two puppets have unbridled and unrestrained sex even if they lack some of the parts necessary to consummate the act.

Country comedy legend Minnie Pearl is brought to life thanks to Minnie Pearl: All The News From Grinder's Switch, a musical comedy revue making its debut this weekend at Nashville's Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre in a very limited, four performance engagement through September 13. Directed with obvious respect by Joy Tilley Perryman and featuring a top-flight ensemble of tremendously talented actors, the newly created show from Belmont University professor and music historian Don Cusic takes a lovingly nostalgic look at the show business career of Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, the Hickman County native who rose to the top ranks of country stardom with the comic creation of her alter ego.

Actress Lexie Dorsett Sharp remembers very clearly when the father of a former castmate came backstage after an opening night during a national tour in which the two women were performing to wish them well and to express how much he enjoyed the show.

In her welcoming note to audiences at the 2018 version of Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream - the 30th anniversary of the company's annual Shakespeare in the Park festivities at Centennial Park (which now is without question the place to be on a midsummer's night in Music City, all other artistic offerings that abound notwithstanding) - executive artistic director Denice Hicks takes a fanciful look ahead to 2048, and suggests that she'll either be in the audience or, quite possibly, in the cast of whatever show happens to be onstage some 30 years hence. Let me just make this prediction by way of critical pronouncement: Denice Hicks, then 88, will once again be playing the ethereal Puck in NSF's then-current Midsummer and I, who will be a spry 91-year-old at the time (or possibly a critical hologram), will be in the audience once again to marvel at her ageless skills and timeless artistry.

Remaining faithful to the original story conceived and written by Mary Shelley, Studio Tenn takes its audiences on an epic gothic - and highly theatrical - journey with Frankenstein, newly adapted by playwright A.S. Peterson and onstage at Jamison Theater through September 9. Mesmerizing and startling, it's a masterpiece of design and imagination.

On first consideration, Brad Fraser's 1989 play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love is a darkly comical look at a group of disaffected young Canadians hurtling toward their 30s with no real sense of purpose or identity guiding them on their way. But if you look more closely - even a desultory glance at the script - it's easy to see that the playwright has more to motivate him in capturing a very particular time and place in his characters' lives.

Stellar performances from a superb ensemble cast have come to exemplify productions from Nashville's Street Theatre Company and, make no mistake about it, the company's latest musical - The Burnt Part Boys, with book by Mariana Elder, music by Chris Miller and lyrics by Nathan Tysen - delivers that and more through a haunting story of loss and redemption.

Nine Nashville area actors have been cast in the upcoming production of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, which will play six performances at The Barbershop Theatre, 4003 Indiana Avenue, in a production helmed by veteran director Jeffrey Ellis, who is known throughout Tennessee as a leading theater journalist and critic.

My heart is full for many reasons, not the least of which is that I can say, henceforth, that the last production of Steel Magnolias that I reviewed - this one at The Larry Keeton Theatre in Donelson through Saturday, September 1 - was almost as good as that very first production I saw in Chicago in the summer of 1988. In fact, direct Donna Driver and her cast deliver a reading of Steel Magnolias that is as close to what Robert Harling wrote more than 30 years ago as any I've ever seen.

Now onstage through August 25 at Woodbury's Arts Center of Cannon County, in a sumptuously mounted production helmed by director Kim Powers, with producer Brittany Goodwin, musical direction by Allison Hall and choreography by Julie Wilcox, Titanic takes its audience on an intriguing, emotional journey of their own, during which the legend of the mammoth ocean liner is writ large onstage, even as it becomes a more intimate tale of lost lives and the dissolution of dreams and aspirations set in relief against a backdrop of grandeur and greed.

High-spirited, energetic and enormously entertaining, Circle Players' Newsies is a certified hit - thanks in large part to the focused direction of Jim Manning, the athletic and challenging choreography of Tosha Pendergrast and the superb musical direction of DaJuana Hammonds - performed by an impressive cadre of actors young and old, a blend of familiar faces and Nashville stage newcomers, who infuse the show with all the spunk necessary to bring the turn-of-the-century newsboys and a smattering of historic figures to life.

There's probably no title in the contemporary theater repertoire guaranteed to spark more debate than Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias. Particularly among southern companies, Harling's story of six women who gather every Saturday morning in a small-town Louisiana beauty shop has legions of fans who clamor for more revivals of the oft-produced comedy-drama - yet there are just as many detractors who decry its seeming omnipresence among season's offerings from far too many organizations.

Sharply written dialogue and an engaging story as relevant as any you are likely to see onstage nowadays are the hallmarks of Molly Smith Metzler's Cry It Out, now onstage through August 18 at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater in a superbly acted production from SistaStyle Productions and Three in a Tree Productions.