Arik Vega News

Tony Award winner Anthony Crivello will join the cast of Studio Tenn and Tennessee Performinig Arts Center's production of Evita this September, playing the role of Juan Peron. Playing opposite Crivello in the eponymous role of Eva Peron is Broadway diva Eden Espinosa.

At long last, Music City Confidential is back to help you get caught back on the talk of the town - all the news that's fit to print about the Nashville theater community - and to immerse you in the minutiae of life in Theater City (a term we've been trying to copyright since we were in junior high with Thespis, Aristophanes and Martha Wilkinson).

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 to thank for your newfound enthusiasm for musical theater) to be inspired by - two shows that are almost alarmingly good and amazingly performed. Daron Bruce and Lisa Forbis' cadre of young performers at Nashville's Hume Fogg Academic High School will deliver their rendition of In The Heights for only one more performance (tonight, on Nashville's Broadway, is the last of three shows), while Street Theatre Company's founding artistic director Cathy Street bids farewell to her adopted hometown of ten years with her beautifully directed staging at Bailey Middle School, which opened last night for the first of three weekends of performances.

Theater-goers from our neck o' the woods have been quite spoiled already this year - and 2016 is barely three months old - and the hits, as they are wont to say, just keep on coming. In fact, there's so much great theater going on in the Nashville area right now, that you may be having a difficult time choosing among the bounteous offerings local companies are providing you.

Today, we introduce you to four cast members from In The Heights - Lipscomb University's Bekah Purifoy, Belmont University's Chris D. Lee and Arik Vega, and one of the newest members of the Nashville theater community, Ashley Wolfe. Purifoy is a 2015 First Night Most Promising Actor, while Lee and Vega are members of the 2016 Class. Wolfe electrified the audience with her performance at Midwinter's First Night in January.

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.

All this yuletide revelry to which I am alluding comes courtesy of BUMT's latest production: Irving Berlin's White Christmas, the onstage updating of the 1954 film version that features a score of the master musician's finest songs as it tells the story of two song-and-dance men and their female counterparts who join together during one particularly mild winter ski season to help save the bacon of an inspiring leader who's played a significant role in their lives. It's a tuneful, feel-good show that's certain to lift your spirits and, as performed by the BUMT cast, reaffirm your faith that the future of musical theater will be thriving for years to come.