Nashville Theater Reviews: Best Shows & Critic Recommendations Page 16

BWW Review: Real Housewives of Sneden's Landing: RUMORS
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 29, 2016

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...

BWW Review: MAMMA MIA! Dances Onto the TPAC Stage
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 27, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Nashville Ballet's CARMINA BURANA and LAYLA & THE MAJNUN
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 22, 2016

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...

BWW Review: SuperMAS Leaps Tall Buildings
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 20, 2016

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 ...

BWW Review: Anya and Masha and Katya and The Big Prick: FAIRYTALE LIVES OF RUSSIAN GIRLS
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 18, 2016

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...

BWW Review: LDoT's YOU'RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 15, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Music City Theatre Company's 4000 MILES
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 08, 2016

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...

BWW Review: CCP's SPARKLEY CLEAN FUNERAL SINGERS
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 02, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Gaslight's BASKERVILLE is A Yawn
by Jeffrey Ellis - April 01, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Nashville Rep's Jazz-Age Triumph CHICAGO
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 20, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Circle Players' CHILDREN OF EDEN
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 19, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Chaffin's Barn's TAFFETAS Blends Nostalgia and Sentiment to Musical Perfection
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 18, 2016

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...

BWW Review: Paul, Adcock Sizzle in ACCC's MEMPHIS, THE MUSICAL
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 13, 2016

Melinda Paul and Michael Adcock lead an exhilarating production of the Tony Award-winning Memphis, the Musical - which features an exuberant cast that blends veteran talents like Michael McGee and Susan Walsworth with rising young performers such as Quantavius Rankins and Jordan McCullough, all of w...

BWW Review: National Tour of PHANTOM Continues to Enchant Nashville Audiences
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 12, 2016

After 28 years, more than 10,000 performances on Broadway (where it reigns as the longest running show in history), countless tours and with rabid fans greeting the show at every stop, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera continues to amaze and delight, as noted in its press opening at Nas...

BWW Review: Street Theater Company's IN THE HEIGHTS
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 05, 2016

Nashville audiences this weekend are treated to a unique opportunity insofar as In The Heights is concerned: two stunning and startling, yet somehow altogether different, productions of Miranda's first masterpiece (you young people who are caught up in the specter of Hamilton have this earlier work ...

BWW Review: Hume Fogg's IN THE HEIGHTS
by Jeffrey Ellis - March 04, 2016

Nashville audiences this weekend find themselves with two concurrently running opportunities to bask in the warm glow of Miranda's heartfelt creation as Hume-Fogg Academic High School's Theatre presents In The Heights for a three-performance run (which premiered last night - on Broadway, naturally, ...

BWW Review: FUNNY VALENTINES at Chaffin's Barn
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 28, 2016

Ah, the 1970s - what a decade, am I right? - the perfect time period for theatrical farce, what with its polyester double-knit slacks, soft and silky Nik-Nik shirts, some swell television sitcoms and the rise of entertainment conglomerates to gobble up the so-called 'little guys' in order to allow c...

BWW Review: CFTA's Remarkable DREAMGIRLS
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 27, 2016

Directed with confidence by a young director - Matthew Hayes Hunter, who was a 2013 First Night Most Promising Actor - and performed by an eager and energetic cast (led by a quartet of extraordinary actresses portraying the four Dreams and another First Night MPA [who very nearly steals the entire p...

BWW Review: SUNSET BOULEVARD at The Larry Keeton Theatre
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 26, 2016

There is an iconic scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of Sunset Boulevard - based on the memorable film by Billy Wilder - in which Norma Desmond returns triumphantly (in Norma's myopic view of life since the talkies spelled an end to silent pictures, in which she made her fortune with he...

BWW Review: Gunderson's EMILIE Comes to Life in TWTP Production
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 21, 2016

Evelyn O'Neal Brush's bravura performance is reason enough to see Tennessee Women's Theater Project's production of Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, but clearly it's Lauren Gunderson's play itself that should sell tickets. Emilie (as we will refer to the play from here on ou...

BWW Review: Blackbird and Lipscomb's Riveting THE CRUCIBLE
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 20, 2016

Beki Baker's extraordinary direction, which provides a stunningly fresh perspective of Arthur Miller's stage masterpiece - along with remarkable performances from a cast of both professional and student actors - ensures that audiences will long be considering the impact of The Crucible, now onstage ...

BWW Review: MOTOWN Slays 'em in Music City
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 17, 2016

It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that on Tuesday night, February 16, Music City officially fell in love with Motown. Berry Gordy's musical is the stuff of legend and, as it takes us from 1983 all the way back to 1938 and back again, you can't help but be impressed by the ambitious ...

BWW Review: Nashville Rep's GOOD MONSTERS
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 14, 2016

Make no mistake: Nate Eppler is far too good a playwright to remain Nashville theater's best-kept secret for much longer. If you need further proof of his brilliance (a word I don't use to describe people very often), even after witnessing it first-hand in his earlier plays - like the noirish Rear W...

BWW Review: Nashville Ballet's 2016 ATTITUDE Series
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 13, 2016

Without doubt, excessive exaggeration or hyperbole, Nashville is a veritable 'city of dreams,' a place where creativity thrives and collaboration is a way of life. Perhaps in no other way is this synergy expressed more artfully than in Nashville Ballet's Attitude series - playing through Valentine's...

BWW Review: Towne Centre's BLACK TIE BROADWAY
by Jeffrey Ellis - February 06, 2016

Luckily, for audiences of Towne Centre Theatre's 2016 season-opening Black Tie Broadway, an original revue conceived by director/arranger John Ray, they are offered two hours of entertainment given a luxe treatment by a 13-member cast who are having a swell time singing the best of musical theater. ...