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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

There are rumors of a curse when it comes to Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. As with all rumors and curses, truths tend to be overwhelmed by myth, but in previous productions of the play, I have seen where such ...

The challenge for a company attempting this precarious piece is that Shepard ruthlessly plops his hapless characters into a world that has no true history. Or if the truth ever did exist, it now hides in the folds of the ...

As Blanche descends into frailty and fantasy, the demands of the part escalate, and the final act is a responsibility harrowing enough to make even an exceptionally strong actor uneasy. Director Calvin MacLean’s wonderful production is lucky indeed to boast ...

Like all vital arts organizations, the Clarence Brown Theatre is, in equal parts, exhilarating and infuriating. This is as it should be; if a theater is to take risks then by definition it must occasionally misjudge, offend, and even fail, ...