Although the September opening of the 2025-26 Knoxville Symphony Orchestra season is still more than two months off, those in need of a symphonic fix can take in this Friday’s Annual Independence Day Concert at the World’s Fair Park Amphitheater.…
Review: Marble City Opera Vies With Mother Nature for a Rewarding ‘Pagliacci’
BY ALAN SHERROD Since its founding in 2013, Marble City Opera has followed an intriguing evolutionary track, one that has embraced the concept of site-suggestive staging to offer both a fresh take on operatic classics as well as a…
Preview: Marble City Opera To Present ‘Pagliacci’ in Oak Ridge’s A.K. Bissell Park
Marble City Opera journeys to Oak Ridge for their 2025 springtime offering, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, on Thursday and Saturday, June 5 and 7, at 7:00 PM. The opera company, well known for its outdoor, site-suggestive staging of productions of Carlisle Floyd’s…
Review: Knoxville Opera Offers A Timely ‘Stuck Elevator’
It would be next to impossible to find a more timely subject matter for an opera libretto than Stuck Elevator, Knoxville Opera’s latest production that had four performances this past weekend at the Old City Performing Arts Center. With music by Byron Au Yong and a libretto by Aaron Jafferis, the one-act opera, first performed in 2013, deals both tragically and poignantly with the immigrant experience that confronts us—immigrant or not—on a daily basis in 2025.
Review: KSO Wraps 2024-25 Season with Impressive New Worlds
BY ALAN SHERROD It was almost exactly three years ago that the Knoxville-based drum ensemble Indigenous Vibes first performed with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. They were back for this past weekend’s Masterworks concerts, this time performing the World Premiere…
Review: ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’ at the Tennessee Theatre
BY ALAN SHERROD There should probably be a special category for entertainments like Moulin Rouge! The Musical. To be sure, it is every inch a musical, although minus a fully original score. Its plot toys with opera with fifty…
Review: UT Opera Theatre’s ‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’
When first announced by the University of Tennessee Opera Theatre, a production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Bijou Theatre seemed like a bold and compelling choice. As it turned out, that choice took big advantage of the company’s current wealth of women’s voices. And, it was a marvelous vehicle for minimal, but inventive staging.
Review: KSO Changes Our Mind About Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ – And That’s Good
If one needed any more evidence as to the raw popularity of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, they had only to wade through the diverse crowd in the Tennessee Theatre lobby and partake of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s performance of it this past weekend.
Review: River & Rail Theatre Company – ‘Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill
BY ALAN SHERROD It’s 1959 and the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is performing at a small, seedy bar in South Philadelphia called Emerson’s Bar and Grill. That is the basis for Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar…
Review: Clarence Brown Theatre’s ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ Roars With Laughter
BY ALAN SHERROD In the Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of The Play That Goes Wrong, the question confronting audiences is not whether they will laugh at the breathlessly farcical goings-on in this parody of British murder mysteries, but whether…
