Archive for the ‘Theater/Theater Feature’ Category
December 17th, 2009
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Author: Voices celebrates Memphis; Jenkins visits NextStage.
by Chris Davis
Reviewing audience members is unusual, but Stephanie Beasley is awesome. Her radiant presence on the front row at Voices of the South’s eighth installment of Pre-sent Pres-ent made me laugh, cry, and want to see the show again. Okay, perhaps I should explain myself. Voices of the South’s annual holiday show is all about giving, and at intermission the audience draws names and exchanges impromptu gifts. It’s a fun way to create brief but meaningful connections between strangers, and nothing…
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Circuit’s The Seafarer is a dark holiday delight.
by Chris Davis
Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, at Circuit Playhouse, is a gritty, gross, and generally hilarious answer to overly familiar holiday parables like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. The pitch-black comedy about a pair of hard-drinking brothers living in squalor in Dublin’s northern suburbs plays out like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone but without the obvious moral punch line. It has been fawned over by critics who’ve all drawn singular conclusions about the play’s meaning while comparing…
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Rhodes College exhibits The Elephant Man — tastefully.
by Chris Davis
Tis true my form is something odd, But blaming me is blaming God. Could I create myself anew, I would not fail in pleasing you. If I could reach from pole to pole, Or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul, The mind’s the standard of the man. — a poem by Isaac Watts frequently quoted in letters by Joseph Merrick A confession: I walked out of the McCoy Theatre’s The Elephant Man desperately wanting to drive to Studio on the…
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Civil War zombie play is a bloody mess — by design.
by Chris Davis
[image-1] Look Away: A Civil War Zombie Tragedy gets off to a powerful start as Lijah, a runaway slave, addresses the audience and describes an impending catastrophe. “The pale rider is coming,” he says with a mounting combination of terror, urgency, and frustration that his warnings aren’t being received with the gravity they deserve. The lights go black. Smoke fills the theater. A rag-tag group makes its way from stage left to stage right, firing their guns at the blood-spattered…
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Memphis debuts on Broadway.
by Bo List
Memphis debuts on Broadway. On October 19th, Beale Street intersected with Broadway in a manner that would permanently short-circuit MapQuest and should make local tourism concerns happy. That’s when Memphis, the musical, opened on New York’s Great White Way. A bold attempt to encompass the spirit of our fair city, Memphis begins in the 1950s with the entrance of young, white music enthusiast Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball) into the blues nightclub owned by Delray (J. Bernard Calloway) and featuring star…
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A sketchy Hank Williams tribute gets a masterful treatment at Circuit Playhouse.
by Chris Davis
Roy Acuff, the grand old man of the Grand Ole Opry, once scolded a stone-drunk Hank Williams for allowing a two-bit brain to cripple his million-dollar talent. Not only was Acuff’s comment an accurate assessment of ol’ Hank’s dipsomaniacal predicament, it makes for a serviceable one-sentence review of the play Hank Williams: Lost Highway, which closes at Circuit Playhouse this weekend. Lost Highway is a dumbed down retelling of the Hank Williams story. But the singing and playing couldn’t be…
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Hattiloo tackles Tennessee.
by Chris Davis
[image-1] By all rights, Hattiloo Theatre’s founding executive Ekundayo Bandele should make a fantastic Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. He’s got a look that fluctuates between easygoing elegance and smoldering intensity. His performance in Topdog/Underdog was a highlight of the 2007/’08 theater season, proving that the gifted writer, designer, and director can come out from behind the curtain and hold his own as an actor. But for some reason, Bandele never seems completely at home in…
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