Jens Jacobson

The magic of the season comes through in 'Home for the Holidays' at Rocky Mountain Repertory Theatre!

The magic of the season comes through in 'Home for the Holidays' at Rocky Mountain Repertory Theatre!

Let us "take [you] home to the place where [you] belong"!  Rocky Mountain Repertory Theatre wraps up its 50th Anniversary season with Almost Heaven: Songs of John Denver.  Opening Friday, September 1st at 8:00pm, Almost Heaven plays Thursday through Sunday during the month of September.  Coincidentally, it is the 20th anniversary of the tragic plane crash in which we lost John Denver.  So join us in celebrating the music and legacy he has left behind!

My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, a musical revue at Theatre at the Center (TATC) in Munster, relives the legendary career of Frank Sinatra as four actors share more than 50 of his beloved hits that span the breadth of his career from the 1950s to the 1990s. The show opened Sunday, February 12, to a packed house for a run that continues through March 19. Scroll down for photos from the festivities!

Nashville actor and NFL Hall of Famer Eddie George, who makes his Broadway debut Tuesday night in the iconic musical Chicago, was named First Night's Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play for his searing portrayal of a former slave haunted by the spectre of abuse in Nashville Repertory Theatre's The Whipping Man. Rene Dunshee Copeland, producing artistic director of Nashville Rep, was named Outstanding Director of a Play, while her three-actor ensemble (which included James Rudolph and Matthew Rosenbaum) were awarded as First Night's Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play for their rendition of the Matthew Lopez play.

Looking for a way to beat the heat this weekend? What's better than sinking into a seat in a darkened auditorium and letting the talented actors onstage whisk you way to a whole different world from the world iin which you toil Monday through Friday? Theater companies throughout the midstate are ready to dazzle you with their latest productions and here are some of this weekend's best bets...

We pride ourselves on our bounteous Southern hospitality here in Nashville, so who's gonna explain this: On Thursday, as thousands of country music fans gathered downtown for CMA Fest and thousands more fans of every musical genre you can think of were headed southward for the Bonnaroo Music Festival - just another summer in Tennessee, mind you - a truck spilled its load all over Interstate 65-S, adding to the hot, humid atmosphere with a whole mess of fish parts. Yep, you heard it right: smelly, disgusting fish parts baking on the hot asphalt under the blazing sun.

It's another busy theater week in Tennessee, and in Nashville there are an extra 50,000 to 100,000 country music fans jamming up traffic and increasing wait times at local restaurants, thanks to CMA Music Fest, which natives and longtimers will remember as Fan Fair. So while you're steering clear of our version of Broadway in downtown Nashville, which will be teeming with more people than you can shake a stick at (as my mama would say),  you should instead make reservations to see some local talent onstage at some of the shows included in our Critic's Choice column today!

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 forever. That initial scene in Dogfight – the hit off-Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and a book by Peter Duchan, based upon a little-known movie of the same name that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor – serves as a gateway to the story of Eddie Birdlace and his fellow Marines and a winsome, idealistic young woman who left her imprint on his heart despite his best efforts to forget her.

It's another busy weekend of new shows opening and many others continuing to delight audiences, with ACT 1's Dog Sees God and Street Theatre Company's Dogfight both opening tonight, while two shows that opened yesterday will continue to treat audiences to some especially wonderful music. Plus, there's a whole slate of shows being performed at Crossville's Cumberland County Playhouse, a revival of Osborne & Epplers' Southern Fried Nuptials down in Woodbury at the Arts Center of Cannon County, and John Chaffin's Cliffhanger enters its final weekend at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre. Go to the theater, young man (and woman) and let yourself be transported to a whole new world of magic and enchantment!

Inspired by BroadwayWorld.com's Friday Six, welcome to BroadwayWorld Nashville's latest installment of The Friday Five: five questions designed to help you learn more about the talented people you'll find onstage throughout the Volunteer state. Today, we introduce two actors from Street Theatre Company's production of Dogfight - one of the most eagerly anticipated new musicals we've heard about in the past 25-plus years of covering Nashville/Tennessee theatre - and, judging from their answers to our five questions and our new 'bonus round' question, Audrey Johnson and Jens Jacobson are two names we think you'll be talking about in the coming months

No matter what the calendar says, we're in early summer already - insofar as theater in Tennessee is concerned, at least - and there are four new shows opening this week that should command your attention. Along with a number of shows that are continuing their runs (like John Chaffin's Cliffhanger at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre), you have plenty of diverse and intriguing onstage offerings to keep you in the relative, air-conditioned comfort of a darkened theater. We've done the necessary research, made the calls to the people-in-the-know and have included the dates, the phone numbers and the websites to make it as easy as possible for you to buy tickets and go show some support for the arts while indulging in the magic of live theater…

Street Theatre Company, continuing to meet its goal to stage Nashville premieres, opens its second show of the 2015 season with the Off-Broadway musical DOGFIGHT. The show originally opened in New York in 2012 and, after receiving rave reviews and numerous awards, made its way to the London stage in 2014. Following its incredible success, regional theaters in both the United States and Europe will be mounting productions of DOGFIGHT this year.

Photographer Kenn Stilger and Heavnly Perspective Photography have captured some gorgeous photographic images of Street Theatre Company's production of Memphis the Musical, which opens at Bailey STEM Middle School in Nashville tonight.

This week the spotlight shines on Lauren Frances Johnson, who has made her mark in Music City, performing on stages all over town and sharing the remarkable talents that have won her legions of followers. Charming and gorgeous, she has stage presence to spare and tonight, as she opens as Felicia Farrell in Street Theatre Company's production of Memphis the Musical, she's destined to command the stage like nobody's business!