NASHVILLE THEATER REVIEWS

Clearly, Bud, Not Buddy is a promising opening to NCT's 2010-11 season and it sets the bar high for what is to follow in the coming year. It is a superbly acted production, featuring a number of Nashville actors making notable NCT debuts, and it is augmented by the tremendous design capabilities of ...

Director Maryanna Clarke's intelligent choice to retain the play's original setting instead of transplanting the playwrights' characters to some American hamlet helps to underscore the play's universality and to further illustrate how women all over the world must confront the cold reality of a canc...

With a trio of powerful leading performances from Ben Van Diepen, Ciaran McCarthy and Laura Matula, the Boiler Room Theatre production of Jonathan Larson's Pultizer Prize-winning Rent may well be the finest interpretation of the groundbreaking musical we've ever seen. Certainly, we've never seen a m...

Nashville theater audiences owe a huge debt of gratitude to Tennessee Repertory Theatre's creative team - led by producing artistic director Rene Dunshee Copeland, scenic and properties designer Gary Hoff, costume designer Trish Clark, lighting designer Phillip Franck and technical director Tyler Ax...

Dietz Osborne and Nate Eppler have quickly gained a reputation as Nashville's most accomplished playwriting team and, thanks to their latest effort - the winkingly titled Rear Widow, now onstage at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre - the talented duo have scored their biggest success to date. Rear Widow...

Make no mistake about it: everybody in Tennessee loves Dolly Parton! She's a Volunteer State treasure, a role model for people all over the world and an example of what hard work and a whole lotta heart can achieve. Hell, if Dolly (in Tennessee, no other modifier is needed to identify our favorite d...

Performed by Hillwig's large cast against the backdrop of Jim Manning's beautifully conceived and exquisitely realized set that magically transforms the Keeton's intimate stage into a panoramic view of dustbowl Oklahoma, the fiery Southwest and the lush, verdant fields and orchards of California, Th...

In a stylish and immensely entertaining fashion, director Melissa Bedinger Hade and her capable and confident band of merry players deliver a pleasantly diverting late-summer offering of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid to open ACT 1's 2010-11 season with vigorous aplomb at Darkhorse Theatre....

There comes a moment late in act two of the Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre production of Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming when now-married, about-to-give-birth daughter June Sanders Oglethorpe delivers a beautiful monologue in which she talks about her love for her family, her excitement at being a n...

Blackbird Theater, the newest member of Nashville's burgeoning community of theater companies, makes an auspicious debut with the premiere of Wes Driver and Greg Greene's smartly written new script - Twilight of the Gods - now onstage at David Lipscomb University's Shamblin Theatre. Featuring a trul...

Reckless - Craig Lucas' skewed vision of suburban life in contemporary America - is brought to life in an engaging and entertaining new production from Actors Bridge Ensemble. Directed with finesse by Jessika Malone and performed by a cast of talented actors who are supremely confident in interpreti...

Nashville playwright and director Trish Crist has brought her latest project to the stage of Darkhorse Theatre, a heartfelt consideration of the journey taken by Americans since 1969 - the summer in which the modern lesbian and gay civil rights movement was finally galvanized at the Stonewall Inn in...

Some 20-plus years after its Broadway debut - and about 15 or more years since I last saw the musical's first production at The Roxy - Into the Woods retains its powerful storytelling technique, made all the more memorable by Sondheim's beautiful score, and presents a plethora of characters from chi...

This confluence of events and elements has resulted in the perfect summer diversion at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre, Nashville's venerable theatrical venue, with their production of Ray Cooney's Funny Money. Directed with a certain twisted grace by the multi-faceted Nate Eppler and performed by a t...

Ciaran McCarthy gives such a stunningly raw and beautifully nuanced performance as film director Guido Contini in Boiler Room Theatre's production of Nine that it would be easy to lavish praise on him and leave it at that. But he is surrounded by a cast of women (and one very talented young man) who...

A revival of a much-earlier production during ACT 1's first 20 seasons, which was also directed by Seay, the cast featured some returning favorites including Riley Bryant, Caroline Davis, Douglas Goodman and Jordan Keller. The presence of these Nashville stage veterans made the production all the mo...

Provocative and compelling, John Patrick Shanley's script for Doubt remains stagebound - albeit a Pulitzer Prize-winning, stagebound masterpiece - until a confident director and cast take on the challenge of mounting a production, in which to breathe life into the characters created so vividly by th...

Johnny Peppers, the affable 'Every Man' of Nashville theatre, makes his directorial debut with Mixed Nuts, the latest from 3Ps Productions now onstage at Chaffin's Backstage at the Barn. Peppers, who might best be described as the most likable man in Nashville theatre circles - and certainly among t...

Starring a whole slew of Barn regulars hamming it up, The Butler Done It is cliche-filled romp -- and while it covers no new ground, Chaffin, Wilkinson and company are clearly in on the joke and make certain to include their audience in the fun. That's an essential part of the show's hard-won succes...

One of this season's most beautifully acted productions, Vincent in Brixton is moving and emotional, funny and evocative. Thanks to Feehely's wealth of experience and his discerning eye, it is a lively affair, completely engaging the audience in the tale being told onstage. By turns immensely entert...

What with all the star power of the assembled cast - featuring such theatre luminaries as Heather Headley, Alli Mauzey, Jodi Benson and Anthony Fedorov - it should come as something of a surprise that showHOPE's concert version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella was very nearly stolen out from...

When I ran into Carolyn one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, she invited me to attend Songs in a Silken Sky, a cabaret performance by participants in Metro Parks Theater and Music Department's Young Performers Program. Presented at historic Two Rivers Mansion, the production 'offers these talented y...

A revival of Circle Players' 2008 production, which was staged at the company's then-home at the Z. Alexander Looby Theatre, this 'new and improved' mounting (a collaboration between Circle and SCA) is astounding in its sheer chutzpah. Who'd have ever thought a community theatre could take on such a...

Keifer's superbly cast five-member ensemble delivers a performance that is compelling and provocative, bringing Beckett's rather nonsensical, although altogether shocking and introspective, premise to vivid life. Since its 1953 premiere, Waiting for Godot has left many of the world's greatest writer...

The resulting production that comes from Vasterling's unerringly skillful choreography and his clearly developed vision for the piece - exquisitely expressed through Baird's costume and scenic design, Scott Leathers' stunningly evocative lighting design and the beautiful music of Felix Mendelssohn p...