Larry Keeton News

In anticipation of the gala 30th anniversary celebration of The First Night Awards, Tennessee's best and brightest in live theater were revealed tonight as First Night's Top Ten of 2018 - reviewer and critic Jeffrey Ellis' annual recognition for theater in the Volunteer State - were announced during a Facebook Live presentation from Nashville.

Looking ahead, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, including a number of holiday season offerings to put you in the Christmas spirit, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for December 3, 2018, to help you plot your course through the first few weeks of 2019...

Looking ahead, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, including a number of holiday season offerings to put you in the Christmas spirit, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for December 3, 2018, to help you plot your course through the beginning of a new year...

Here's hoping you had a splendid Thanksgiving holiday weekend and that you're settling in for another action-packed season of events and shows to make Christmas 2018 sparkle even more! Looking ahead, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for November 26, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Looking ahead, you'll find a number of new productions on tap, including a whole slew of holiday favorites, for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for November 12, 2018, to help you plot your course through next February...

Looking ahead, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for November 5, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 29, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 22, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 15, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Today, just in time for their show's opening, two cast members - Jason Scott, who plays the self-involved Chip Tolentino, and Jena Salb, who is cast as former champion Rona Lisa Peretti, step up to the microphone to answer our Thursday 5(+1) questions and to offer the suggestion that a revival of Legally Blonde: The Musical might be a good consideration for next season at The Keeton.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 1, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar for October 1, 2018, to help you plot your course through the end of the year...

It's the day of the show, y'all: The Nashville premiere of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band is tonight - at The Barbershop Theatre, 4003 Indiana Avenue in The Nations - and six of the actors portraying Crowley's now-iconic characters took time from tech week to answer questions about their processes and to offer their reasons for why you should come see the show.

Nine Nashville area actors have been cast in the upcoming production of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, which will play six performances at The Barbershop Theatre, 4003 Indiana Avenue, in a production helmed by veteran director Jeffrey Ellis, who is known throughout Tennessee as a leading theater journalist and critic.

Looking into the future, you'll find a number of new productions on tap for your entertainment pleasure, thanks to the efforts of theater companies all over Middle Tennessee. Here's our calendar to help you plot your course...

Actress Crystal Kurek returns to a role some contend she was destined from birth to play, as she stars as the eponymous "practically perfect" nanny in Disney and Cameron Macintosh's Mary Poppins, opening this Friday night at Springhouse Theater in Smyrna. And who better than Crystal to help us bring another season of the Friday 5(+1) series back to BroadwayWorld Nashville?

Karissa Wheeler's senior year at The University of the South/Sewanee has only just started, but already she's caught up in the whirlwind of a typical – for her, especially – packed and rather crazy schedule, immersed in classes while moving into rehearsals for what may be the most demanding role in which she's ever been cast: Sally Bowles in the iconic Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret, which is based on John Van Druten's play I Am A Camera, which in turn is inspired Christopher Isherwood's memoir (Goodbye to Berlin) of his years as a struggling young writer in the heady days of Weimar Germany.

Nine Nashville area actors have been cast in the upcoming production of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, which will play six performances at The Barbershop Theatre, 4003 Indiana Avenue, in a production helmed by veteran director Jeffrey Ellis, who is known throughout Tennessee as a leading theater journalist and critic.

My heart is full for many reasons, not the least of which is that I can say, henceforth, that the last production of Steel Magnolias that I reviewed - this one at The Larry Keeton Theatre in Donelson through Saturday, September 1 - was almost as good as that very first production I saw in Chicago in the summer of 1988. In fact, direct Donna Driver and her cast deliver a reading of Steel Magnolias that is as close to what Robert Harling wrote more than 30 years ago as any I've ever seen.