MetroPulse Stories: Theater

Clarence Brown Produces an Energetic 'Kiss Me, Kate'

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:59:00 -0000

It’s almost silly to review these things. If you like musicals, you’ll like Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of Kiss Me, Kate. You won’t lose money betting they get a standing ovation every night. There’s a lot of energy in the performance, and it comes off without ever seeming cute.

CBT's 'Dead Man's Cell Phone' Raises Questions About Our Modern Obsession

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:13:00 -0000

Here’s your dilemma: You’re in a cafe with a lone stranger whose incessantly ringing cellphone is bugging you. He’s the most annoying jerk in the world until you walk over to give him a piece of your mind, and you realize he is, in fact, deceased. What do you do?

This Is So Surreal: Tennessee Stage Co. Premieres 'The Good Son'

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:09:00 -0000

Craig Smith's debut is an interesting and unpredictable thriller, often darkly funny, with moments of physical violence and with a few shocks along the way that elicited gasps from the audience.

CBT Saves Folk Musical 'Black Pearl Sings!' From Sanctimony

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:22:00 -0000

Directed by Kate Buckley, Black Pearl Sings! turns out to be better than you expect it to be. The premise—a naïve white folklorist interviewing a black convict for the “authentic” songs she knows—seems a recipe for sanctimony, and an after-school lesson for whites on how clueless we are about the black experience.

Clarence Brown Theatre's 'Fuddy Meers': A Minor Riot of Absurdist Modern Comedy

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:56:00 -0000

Fuddy Meers is a comedy about cognitive dysfunction, but don’t go with a grim sense of duty and a checkbook. It is not an appeal for greater awareness for dementia or posttraumatic stress disorder, with a website that shows how you can help. It’s a comedy—almost old-fashioned, in a way, the sort of comedy that used to suggest quaint adjectives like “madcap” and “screwball.”

Theatre Knoxville Uncovers Existential Absurdity in Tom Stoppard's 'Heroes'

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:32:00 -0000

Heroes isn’t as bleak or, probably, as provocative as Beckett, but like that crypto-existentialist’s work, occasionally breaks through the mundane reality of mere sadness to absurdity, which can make the human condition seem pretty hilarious.

CBT Takes on Award-Winning Musical 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee'

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:13:00 -0000

This is a modern-style Broadway musical, not much like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, maybe, but not so different from, say, Rent.

CBT Takes on the Old Chestnut 'The Music Man'

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:35:00 -0000

I wish I could square my regular dismay at being obliged to review another all-too-familiar musical with the fact—hard to confess to my intellectual pals—that I enjoy them, usually more than the fresher plays that seem serious and important.

Clarence Brown Theatre Updates Racine's Update of the Phaedra Myth

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:58:00 -0000

What do you do when you come home and find out your wife and stepson are, as the gossips say, an item? That’s the domestic dilemma of the Greek hero-king Theseus, who’s been gone so long everybody thinks he’s dead.

CBT Refreshes Shakespeare's Classic Comedy 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:57:00 -0000

Last month PBS ran a solemn documentary about TV comedies, and the announcer gravely intoned that Jackie Gleason “invented a new art form: the situation comedy.” That claim is most credible, of course, when you find some way to discredit the 350 years of situation comedies before it, like Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Clarence Brown Stages a Live Performance of a Fictional Radio Broadcast of 'It's a Wonderful Life'

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:43:00 -0000

Maybe the most-watched black-and-white movie today, It’s a Wonderful Life was the first movie ever available on home video, and still gets shown on network TV. If you don’t get enough of it at home, the original movie was shown twice this past weekend at the Tennessee Theatre. Most of us can recite dialogue. And the University of Tennessee is inviting us to watch a “radio play” version of it.

At Clarence Brown, an Unnerving 'Woyzeck'

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:38:00 -0000

"Woyzeck" arrives at the University of Tennessee’s Carousel Theatre with a strange pedigree. Georg Buchner, a political writer and ineffectual revolutionary in 1830s Germany, died of typhus at age 23, leaving unfinished this peculiar drama about a paranoid wife-killer. Something about its stark, absurdist, barely coherent plot has caught the attention of several generations of ground-breaking artists. UT’s production is vivid and startling.

Two Local Productions Explore Sisterhood and Solidarity

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:47:00 -0000

The Woman-Power play in America dates from the 1980s, when Crimes of the Heart and Steel Magnolias were being performed in every little theater across the country. The Hallelujah Girls is definitely in the same gene pool.

CBT Cast Breathes Life Into Uninspired Material in "Amadeus"

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:21:00 -0000

With a central premise recycled from his earlier hit Equus, Amadeus has always felt to me like second-hand goods. With so little dramatic material to work from, most of the artistic heavy lifting falls to the actor playing Salieri, and here the Clarence Brown is fortunate to have John Feltch returning to the stage.

'Sherlock’s Last Case' Fulfills All the Requirements of Summer Theater

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:52:00 -0000

Theater companies reserve the summer for their frothiest, most lightweight entertainments. Theatre Knoxville Downtown opens its sixth season with Sherlock’s Last Case, a play so unencumbered by meaning that it practically evaporates before your eyes. And if the company puts the production over with more brio than skill, it’s all part of the summer theater experience.

Oak Ridge Playhouse Dusts Off Rice/Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Wed, 12 May 2010 15:23:00 -0000

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, that staple of middle schools and church groups (and Donny Osmond’s personal cash cow for a decade), closes the 67th season at the Oak Ridge Playhouse this weekend. People feel passionately about Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber and divide neatly into two camps: those who worship at their feet, and those who have had enough already.

Clarence Brown Theatre Takes on '60s Icon Man of La Mancha

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:17:00 -0000

The story has some existential heft, and quips worthy of Oscar Wilde—“I don’t have the courage to believe in nothing,” says the main character, as he bemoans “the melancholy burden of sanity.” And it opens with a twist.

Two Romantic Comedies, Written a Century Apart, Share a Single Truth

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:35:00 -0000

Regardless of the play’s strengths or weaknesses, Frankie and Johnny will be spoken of for the rest of this year, and maybe for years to come, as the nude play. Stage nudity is not a regular thing hereabouts.

Clarence Brown’s "Oedipus the King" Leaves the Audience Out of the Action

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:22:00 -0000

What is theater? That’s a big question, possibly better suited for a graduate seminar than a newspaper review, but one brought up by Cal MacLean, the producing artistic director of the Clarence Brown Theatre, on the opening night of Oedipus the King.

Theatre Knoxville's "Forbidden Knoxville" Leaves Nothing Sacred

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:54:00 -0000

In its second rendition, Forbidden Knoxville is a two-act roasting of everything K-town, cooked to perfection. With its original libretto sharply written by its director, Jayne Morgan, and its musical score set wonderfully to familiar Broadway tunes by its musical director, Christopher Hamblin, Forbidden Knoxville profanes the self-aggrandized with a robust incorrigibility only appropriate for those speaking the truth.