NASHVILLE THEATER REVIEWS

Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years is one of the most popular contemporary musicals currently en vogue, particularly among newer (read: younger) generations of theater devotees and those older musical theater lovers “in the know.” So it should come as no surprise that Nashville Repertory T...

As assured and confident as any long-running musical now - or ever, for that matter - on Broadway, the altogether worldly and completely engaging production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, playing at Andrew Jackson Hall through September 18, gives Nashville audiences the kind of exceptional theater ...

Perhaps it's a case of perfect timing - or maybe it's simply the fact that a revival of a much-beloved Tony Award-winning best musical is enough to attract a strong ensemble of men to the project - but make no mistake about it, Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts succeeds where so many companies have...

Rachel Agee's bravura performance - which, arguably, any actor would love to add to a resume - as a fictionalized Tonya Harding-like personality is enough to guarantee that audiences will continue to talk about the world premiere production of Nate Eppler's latest work, The Ice Treatment, for years ...

Who would have ever thought a musical about urban planning could be as effective and engaging, and as thoroughly compelling (if somewhat confusing and confounding, by turns) as If/Then, the latest work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning (for next to normal) duo of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey?...

Savannah Gannon makes a startling - and, no doubt, star-making - debut as country music superstar Patsy Cline in the Matt Smith-directed production of Ted Swindley's play with music Always, Patsy Cline, now onstage at Woodbury's Arts Center of Cannon County through June 18....

If there is a Broadway musical that more gleefully and accurately encapsulates the magic and mayhem of creating a brand spanking new blockbuster at the height of the Great Depression than 42nd Street, I want to see it post-haste!...

Johnna Adams is a consummate storyteller: employing fantasy and fiction, conjecture and supposition, she weaves together a tale that is at once intensely intriguing and enormously off-putting, using her skill as a writer to transport her audience to an otherworldly place that exists only in her imag...

Stephen Sondheim's Assassins - his musical treatment of the history of presidential assassinations in America - remains one of the most compelling and intriguing works to be found in the musical theater canon, focusing on a veritable rogue's gallery of historic figures whose infamy lives on decades ...

As exhilaratingly in-your-face as only the very best of contemporary theater can deliver, Green Day's American Idiot - now onstage in a startlingly emphatic and exuberant production at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre - exemplifies just how far the company itself has come since its beginnings as ...

What happens when a group of teenagers idolize a celebrity - a figure from popular culture whose charisma ensures he will live on forever despite his death at a young age - reunite some 20 years later to further venerate their crush and to recall his impact on their young lives? That's the question ...

Eviscerating modern manners and mores with surgical skill and startling focus, playwright Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is among the most popular contemporary stage comedies of the early 21st century. Now onstage in an altogether agreeable, yet unsettling, production from Nashville's 4th Story Thea...

Will Miranne and Daniel Morgan give top-notch performances, playing Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso in soon-to-be Lipscomb University theater grad Jonah Jackson's production of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile, now onstage at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre through May 7....

Neil Simon's Rumors - one of the most popular stage farces of the late 20th century - is given its due with the fourth production at Nashville's iconic and I daresay historic Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre. Directed with panache by stage veteran Lydia Bushfield (who, herself, has starred in one of th...

Make no mistake about it: the current production of Mamma Mia!, the musical theater hit now onstage at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall is just as entertaining, just as over-the-top in all its ABBAesque glory that audiences cannot help but be awestruck by the sheer theatricalit...

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 feature...

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 try...

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...

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 comm...

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 wil...

Lori Fischer's The Sparkley Clean Funeral Singers does what so many shows before it have attempted: To create a completely new world out of whole cloth and set it down amid the already existing world (in which we mere mortals ply our collective trade), peopled by characters who are easy to love or a...

Ken Ludwig created one of theater's best-loved and critically acclaimed farces with Lend Me A Tenor, then updated the book of one of musical theater's most revered Gershwin titles (Girl Crazy) with the long-running and equally beloved Crazy For You. Since those two mega-hits, however, he's been less...

Chicago is one of my favorite cities on the planet, so it goes that Chicago, the Tony Award- and Oscar-winning musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, is also one of my favorite stage musicals. Brash, sassy, laugh-out-loud funny at one moment, and heart-tuggingly and sweetly sentimental at the next - w...

It would have taken a miracle to save the opening night of Circle Players' Children of Eden - one of the most eagerly anticipated productions of the season in Music City - from the wrath of God: in this case an abysmal sound design that prevented the audience from hearing Lauren Frances Jones' exqui...

There's nothing quite so entertaining - and nothing goes down more easily after a trip to the groaning board at Nashville's iconic Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre - than a musical revue that is sure to whisk you away to yesterday. Not the day before today, necessarily, but 'yesterday' as in a sentimen...