NASHVILLE THEATER REVIEWS

Friday night, Street Theatre Company continued their history of bringing edgy, daring theatre to the Nashville theatrical community. HEATHERS: THE MUSICAL is the latest venture for Street Theatre Company. Based on the 1989 movie of the same name, starring Wynona Rider and Christian Slater as Veronic...

AMERICAN IDIOT is about a generation of youth disenchanted with the world around them, angry about things they don't understand, and scrambling to find their place in the world. A post- 9/11 look at America, AMERICAN IDIOT has more rage and love than most theatrical audiences are probably used to s...

Nashville shows her talent yet again, by way of VWA Theatricals' inaugural production, THE LAST 5 YEARS. With a two person cast and a nearly completely sung through book, THE LAST 5 YEARS follows the relationship of Jamie, a young writing prodigy, and Cathy, an aspiring actress....

Elvis Presley – aka “The King,” Tupelo's most famous favorite son and Memphis' most revered musical icon – sure had a lot of music in his catalogue of hits, and it seems that almost  all of it is included in the score of All Shook Up, the jukebox musical now onstage at Chaffin's Barn Dinner...

Here's some unsolicited career advice for those of you who might be considering relocating to Tuna, the third smallest town in Texas:  Tunanians - or Tunaites or however they refer to themselves - are sorely in need of a good beauty operator to help them keep their unruly wigs in shipshape, Bristol...

To give credit where credit is indeed due: Wes Driver and Greg Greene, with the creation of Blackbird Theatre, have given Nashville audiences some of the finest theater of the past five years, consistently providing thoughtful and provocative drama and music to a public clamoring for more intellectu...

Truth be told, one of my favorite movies is Bring It On, the story of competitive cheerleading starring Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford and Gabrielle Union - and if I had a dollar for every time I've uttered the phrase 'Brrr…it's cold in here, there must be some Toros in the atmosphere...

You have to wonder why it took someone so long to bring Del Shores' The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife to the Nashville stage. After all, the play opened to widespread acclaim in Los Angeles in 2003 and was made into a movie in 2011 (Blues for Willadean)....

The company is back onstage for its summer offering of Shrek the Musical, the Jeanine Tesori-David Lindsay Abaire stage musical based upon the delightful animated film that first introduced us to the green ogre Shrek, his lady love Fiona, the unctuous Lord Farquaad and a feisty, straight-talking don...

There are certain things audiences have come to expect in a new production from Studio Tenn, the Franklin-based, Nashville-nurtured professional theater company headed up by Matt Logan and Jake Speck: You know it will be beautifully designed, sumptuously mounted and impeccably cast....

For 49 years, Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre has provided a theatrical home for actors, directors, designers, stage managers and sundry other artists and techies who are striving to make a living in Nashville. In that time, the Chaffins have served up tons of roast beef and enough marinated mushrooms...

It's 1967 and a young Marine, returning from a life-changing experience in Vietnam, is on a bus bound for San Francisco, the site of his last hurrah in 1963: a momentous night before he shipped out for Okinawa in the company of friends and cohorts with whom he'd created a bond he thought would last ...

With an experienced hand guiding a production, you can rest assured that any show - no matter its theatrical lineage or how often it has been revived - will be filled with flashes of creativity and imagination. Case in point: director Jim Manning's mounting of Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God, now onsta...

Is there anything more magical or more transformative than live theater? Honestly, I can't think of anything which can take you from the depths of despair to the fanciful heights of imagination so quickly - and there certainly is no art form in which things can change so capriciously or quicker, eit...

That will also explain my rapturous response to the performance of A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline, a dramatized tribute to the country music superstar that opened at Dickson's Gaslight Dinner Theater on Thursday, June 4, running for a much-too-short two weekends at what was once known as The Renaiss...

For, make no bones about it: The First Church of Mary, The Repentant Prostitute's Fifth Annual Benefit Concert, Revival and Pot Luck Dinner (or “Prostitute's Picnic,” as it was called by director Martha Wilkinson in her pre-show welcome to the congregants gathered at BLDG Nashville for opening n...

No matter how well you know a show - how easily you can recall plot points or parrot dialogue - it's sometime good to revisit a musical even if you've seen it countless times. Oftentimes it rekindles your love for a show or, hell, it just reminds you how much fun you have every time you see a new re...

It often seems today that life is fraught with apathy and complacency and Newsies becomes a great conversation starter for young and old alike. This musical essentially becomes what the original newsboys strike of 1899 was: a call to action....

You don't have to be a devotee of Chekhov - you don't even have to be a fan of live theater necessarily - but it clearly helps if you are in the audience for Verge Theater Company's production of Steven Dietz's The Nina Variations, which is sometimes whimsical and oftentimes dramatic in the rich tra...

Christopher Gattelli's superb choreography - spirited and athletic, amazingly theatrical and awe-inspiring - may be reason enough to see Disney's Newsies, the show now ensconced at TPAC's Andrew Jackson Hall through Sunday, where it's entertaining audiences and eliciting some of the loudest response...

Just in time for Mother's Day, Fabisch and her Faby Baby Productions LLC bring their rollicking – and oh-so-entertaining – revue, Motherhood the Musical, to TPAC's Andrew Johnson Theatre. Featuring dynamic direction by Kim Nygren and starring a quartet of winning singer/actresses, it's a superbl...

Who's to blame? That's the question that looms large over the onstage action of Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, now in performance at Darkhorse Theatre in a superbly cast production directed by Joy Tilley Perryman for ACT 1....

Steel Magnolias is currently onstage in Nashville, thanks to a well-acted production from director Robert Coles' Imaginary Theatre Company, featuring some of Music City's best known actresses, led by Kate Adams as M'Lynn and Britt Byrd as Shelby, Heather Vaughn Alexander as Truvy, Angela Gimlin as A...

Perhaps no singing group more aptly captures the spirit of America during World War II than the glorious Andrews Sisters: the sound of Patty, Maxene and Laverne somehow encapsulates the romantic notions of a world at war that still delights audiences and conjures up visions of all-American spirit an...

If writer P.L. Travers, the notoriously protective creator of Mary Poppins, was even half so prickly as we have been led to believe she was - thanks in large part to the screenplay for Saving Mr. Banks, the film retelling of her experiences with Walt Disney, et al, over the film adaptation of her be...