MetroPulse Stories: Theater

Clarence Brown Theatre Produces High-Speed Farce With Tom Stoppard’s 'On the Razzle'

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:41:00 -0000

Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle is a classic mistaken-identity, disapproving-parent, jealous-pursuit romp turned up a few notches. It’s like a long Marx Brothers routine, with about a dozen Marx Brothers, and no musical breaks.

Downtown’s Satirical Revue "Forbidden Knoxville" Tries Out a Fresh Venue

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:02:00 -0000

“You’re so odd but we love you still,” goes a refrain in the opening number of Flying Anvil’s new musical production. The endearment is directed, of course, at the city of Knoxville, and expresses our sentiments exactly.

We Finally Get To See the Long-Rumored Knoxville Play 'Five Women Wearing the Same Dress'

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:23:00 -0000

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress was first mentioned in these pages back in the ’90s. Back then, we’d heard rumors of a wacky off-Broadway comedy that happened to be set in Knoxville. We never made the trip to see it.

Clarence Brown Theater Takes on Rothko in 'Red'

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:38:00 -0000

The drama plays out as a very animated dialogue between the late-middle-aged Rothko, at the peak of his ca. 1960 vogue, and a (fictional) young assistant named Ken. The main context is Rothko’s famous challenge to decorate the walls of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s iconically modernist Seagrams Building.

Clarence Brown Theatre and KSO Collaborate On a Brilliant Production of Sondheim’s 'Sweeney Todd'

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:54:00 -0000

Perhaps like no other recent work for the musical stage, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is so eminently adaptable and bendable as theater that it practically cries out for fresh treatments. In the case of the Clarence Brown Theatre’s current staging of the musical, a collaboration with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, the production practically bursts out of the available width of the Clarence Brown Theatre stage, with the onstage orchestra and the dramatic space being afforded equal theatrical footing.

'Red Scare on Sunset': Theater Knoxville Downtown Takes on the Pinkos

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:56:00 -0000

The play twists some assumptions about that paranoid era. This play is unlikely to appeal to the Tea Party, but, as it turns out, some of Pilford’s paranoia is justified. In this tale, Communists do have a grip on Hollywood, and especially on the Stanislavski school. They operate like the Mob, controlling enemies through blackmail.

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.