Mitch Massaro News

Nashville's Actors Bridge Ensemble, named as First Night's Outstanding Theatre Company of 2010, today announces the creation of SIDESHOW: An Immersion Training Program for Emerging Professional Theatre Artists. Interviews and auditions for entrance into the new training program will be held May 7, from 9 a.m. to noon and 4 to 8 p.m. by appointment.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, her vibrant and provocative re-imagining of the classic Greek myth, is one of the most poignant theatrical treatises on love and loss, grief and redemption, that you're likely to witness. Brought to the stage of Belmont University's Troutt Theatre by the luminously gifted Jessika Malone - through a collaboration between Actors Bridge Ensemble and Belmont's Department of Theatre and Dance - Eurydice is certainly one of the most technically challenging productions we've seen of late on a Nashville stage.

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 entertaining and thoroughly inspiring, Vincent in Brixton is also heart-wrenching in its candor and honesty and the multi-layered performances of Feehely's talented cast only gives the play deeper meaning and resonance.

Wright's play focuses on the time that Vincent Van Gogh spent in London and Brixton in the 1870s - a period before he drew his first sketch and one that changed him completely. The play depicts Van Gogh as a young man, someone full of life yet struggling to find his way and to walk the artist's path. Vincent develops a rapport with a widow twice his age, which blossoms into a full-blown love affair, only to be cruelly curtailed by the arrival of his fiercely puritan younger sister.

Wright's play focuses on the time that Vincent Van Gogh spent in London and Brixton in the 1870s - a period before he drew his first sketch and one that changed him completely. The play depicts Van Gogh as a young man, someone full of life yet struggling to find his way and to walk the artist's path. Vincent develops a rapport with a widow twice his age, which blossoms into a full-blown love affair, only to be cruelly curtailed by the arrival of his fiercely puritan younger sister.

As can be expected from Nashville Children's Theatre, the production is colorful and fun, cleverly staged and superbly acted by the seven-member ensemble under the capable direction of NCT's producing artistic director Scot Copeland. With music direction by the gifted Paul Carrol Binkley, the musical's on a strong artistic footing and the versatility of the seven actors onstage, who enact the book's cast of characters, give winning performances that are made all the more entertaining by Viorst's focused storytelling.

To suggest that playwright Sarah Ruhl is obsessed with death and dying might be too much of a stretch, but it's clear that she has a rather unique view of the subject. Her earlier works, The Clean House, Eurydice and Passion Play, a Cycle, all focus on death and dying and the accompanying rituals, and in Dead Man's Cell Phone, she returns to that fertile ground once again-with satisfying results.