Let's Face It! 1941 - Articles Page 29

The SpongeBob Musical just opened at Broadway in Chicago's Oriental Theatre (24 West Randolph Street, Chicago, IL), where it will run through Sunday, July 10, 2016. 

Attempting to produce all of Shakespeare's plays would be daunting task for any theatre company but one young group of actors has continued to stay the course. Over a ten-year period, the Porters of Hellsgate have produced twenty of the playwright's thirty-eight plays, steadily working toward their goal of being the first in Los Angeles to mount the entire canon. This season, they tackle three at once with HENRY VI, Parts 1, 2 & 3.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center has announced the return of the legendary Miss Coco Peru. The YouTube sensation brings her latest solo show, A GENTLE REMINDER: MISS COCO PERU'S GUIDE TO A SOMEWHAT HAPPY LIFE, to the Renberg Theatre for four nights only -- Todays and Saturdays, May 13 & 14 and May 20 & 21.

As exhilaratingly in-your-face as only the very best of contemporary theater can deliver, Green Day's American Idiot - now onstage in a startlingly emphatic and exuberant production at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre - exemplifies just how far the company itself has come since its beginnings as a community theater. Now, serving as a training ground for some of the very best of musical theater stars-to-come, The Roxy has more than come into its own, continuing to push the envelope, to challenge audiences to expand their artistic purview and to create theater that is as compelling as any you'll find on a stage anywhere in the good ol' US of A.

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 the four productions of Rumors at Chaffin's Barn over the past quarter-century), Simon's broadly drawn characters are brought vividly to life by a cast of capable and very funny actors who know how to land a line, deliver a rejoinder and, when called upon, play the straight man to help a fellow actor out when it comes time for him to shine.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, starring Jessica Lange, began on April 3, 2016, and officially opens tonight, April 27, 2016, on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway. Let's see what the critics had to say...

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).

Powerhouse theatre program CCM brought the legacy to Broadway Sessions last week. Let's face it, there's not a Broadway show running without a CCM alum up in there. The 2016 graduating class performed alongside starry alums- Jessica Hendy (Cats, Aida), Max Chernin (Bright Star) and Alysha Deslorieux (Hamilton, Beautiful, Sister Act). The future of Broadway look awfully bright from where we stand. Check out these incredible performances and get excited, real excited!

Playwrights Horizons' world premiere production of ANTLIA PNEUMATICA, a new play by Anne Washburn, directed by two-time Obie Award winner Ken Rus Schmoll, officially opens tonight, April 4, at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater, for a limited engagement through Sunday, April 24. Let's see what the critics had to say...

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who's justly acclaimed for his high notes--forget about a high C; how about an F above that!?--just finished the New York premiere of the Daniel Schnyder opera CHARLIE PARKER'S YARDBIRD (Bridgette A. Wmberly, librettist), at the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Famed jazz saxophonist Charlie (“Bird”) Parker is a role that was written expressly for him--but that doesn't mean it was without its challenges.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center has announced the return of the legendary Miss Coco Peru. The YouTube sensation brings her latest solo show, A GENTLE REMINDER: MISS COCO PERU'S GUIDE TO A SOMEWHAT HAPPY LIFE, to the Renberg Theatre for four nights only -- Fridays and Saturdays, May 13 & 14 and May 20 & 21.

In between takes of a scene on 'The Good Wife' a few years ago, I was commiserating with veteran actor Zach Grenier-'Why is it that I'm completely relaxed in every shot EXCEPT my close up?' His response? 'Because this is for the ages. This will exist long after you and I are gone.' That's the weight you carry on your back in TV, film, and in the recording studio that you don't have in the theatre. In a play, there's always tomorrow night.

Winter's apparently over - it's in the mid-70s, balmy and windy, as we write this - and even before Spring pops up all over, there's an amazing amount of good theater to be found in the Nashville area. In fact, there's so much to choose from that you have absolutely no excuse staying alone in your room. Instead, in the wise and wonderful words of Sally Bowles, life is a cabaret and you're far more likely to find that out in the darkened confines of a theater, where magic and mayhem is bound to happen.

Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick's musical send-up of 1970s disaster flicks has a solid company of pros having fun.

Today, three of the folks most closely associated with the production - director Moore is joined by cast members Sarah Shepherd and Maggie Pitt - fall under our Friday 5 spotlight, allowing us to get to know more about what makes them tick and why each of them believe audiences should flock to Darkhorse Theatre to see their racy rendition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

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.

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 commercialism to run amok and for the notion of selling out one's soul for personal gratification and financial gain to become part of the American way of life. Let's face it: Isn't all that what has led to and created the current climate of political division and personal derision?

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 production right out from under everyone else onstage] in the role of James 'Thunder' Early - CFTA's Dreamgirls delights its audience from the beginning, engaging them with focused performances that come from the heart to inspire and entertain.

The Broadway production of Stephen Karam's much-raved-about new play, THE HUMANS, opens tonight, February 18, 2016. Directed by Tony Award winner Joe Mantello and featuring its entire acclaimed off-Broadway cast, THE HUMANS plays performances at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre (240 West 44th Street). Let's see what the critics had to say...

Joe's Pub at The Public has announced its nightly performances for February 10-21, 2016. Scroll down fo rmore details or visit www.joespub.com!

Joe's Pub at The Public has announced its nightly performances for February 10-21, 2016. Scroll down fo rmore details or visit www.joespub.com!

But there are those Christmas-themed shows that we're delighted to see no matter the time or place. Case in point: A Tuna Christmas, the seasonal sojourn to the third smallest town in Texas, where the wacky denizens are up to all kinds of hijinks as they celebrate baby Jesus' birthday, complete with a Christmas Phantom, a sale on firearms at Didi Snavely's gun emporium and a reintroduction of Helen Bedd and Inita Goodwin, the good-time gals at the Tasty Kreme, and Joe Bob Lipsey, the extravagantly over-dramatic director of Tuna Little Theater's beleaguered production of the royalty-free A Christmas Carol.

Now that we are a week removed from last Thursday's THE WIZ LIVE!, NBC's third live musical in as many years, we know that the production has predominantly been hailed as a critical and ratings success, vindicating the audacious experiment after two, less than artistically satisfying, outings. Led by a newcomer plucked from an open call, director Kenny Leon and executive producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan found a star in Shanice Williams and surrounded her with an all-star cast that ranged from serviceable to revelatory. However, as enjoyable as the event was, especially in relationship to past efforts, THE WIZ LIVE! was not a perfect production. There is, after all, a reason why no one did live TV musicals for nearly half a century; they are hard.

If you go to MACK & POPPY: LET IT SNOW expecting just a cheesy lounge  act for fluffy amusement, you would be selling Mack & Poppy way short. Tod Macofsky and Christopher Graham have created a fine tuned act of calibrated cheese eliciting many hearty laughs accented with actual solid vocal chops presenting songs straight up for a most entertaining 70 minutes. Holiday tunes (Christmas, Jewish and Kwanzaa) get both sent up and sung straight.

With an odd beginning to Season Five, Shondaland sends SCANDAL into the holidays with a bang. Not a literal one (okay, well maybe one), but there were plenty of shock-worthy moments in tonight's winter finale.