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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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CBT Cast Breathes Life Into Uninspired Material in "Amadeus"

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...

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Two Local Productions Explore Sisterhood and Solidarity

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...

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At Clarence Brown, an Unnerving 'Woyzeck'

"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,...

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Clarence Brown Stages a Live Performance of a Fictional Radio Broadcast of...

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,...

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

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,...

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

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...

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CBT Takes on the Old Chestnut 'The Music Man'

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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,...

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

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...

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

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.

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

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...

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Clarence Brown Produces an Energetic 'Kiss Me, Kate'

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....

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

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...

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Clarence Brown Theatre and KSO Collaborate On a Brilliant Production of...

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...

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