BY ALAN SHERROD Theatre-goers have probably all heard the news—the University of Tennessee Department of Theatre and the Clarence Brown Theatre will be saying goodbye to the current incarnation of the Carousel Theatre following its current production of She…
Review: CBT’s ‘People Where They Are’ – A Lesson in Escaping the Gravity of Our Past
By Alan Sherrod In the spring of 1955, much of the Southern U.S. was a simmering kettle of racial segregation, civil rights repression, and worker/workplace abuses—one that was on the verge of boiling over into a full scale struggle…
Review: The Cast of CBT’s ‘Detroit ’67’ Finds Treasure in the Basement
By Alan Sherrod Detroit in the incendiary “long, hot summer of 1967” is the setting for Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67 which opened on Friday evening at Clarence Brown Theatre’s Carousel Theatre. While that summer was defined by racial tensions…
Review: CBT’s ‘Alias Grace’ – A Compelling and Timely Mix of Answers and Questions
By Alan Sherrod It is a bit unfortunate that it takes TV adaptations of literary works to drive mainstream cultural recognition, but apparently that’s the world we live in. As a result, one would be hard pressed to be…
Review: Tennessee Valley Players Go ‘Into The Woods’
The Tennessee Valley Players current production in the Carousel Theatre of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lepine musical, ‘Into the Woods’, is a perfect example of just how this abstraction can work brilliantly with a little imagination.
Review: CBT’s ‘the strangers’
As way of preface, the strangers was commissioned by the Clarence Brown Theatre from playwright Christopher Oscar Peña for performance by eight of the UT Department of Theatre MFA acting candidates. The work was developed over a two year period…
Review – The Desperation of Inaction in Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’
In many ways similar to how “Shakespearean” is an accepted adjective, so is “Chekhovian” in referring to the works of the playwright and short story writer, Anton Chekhov. However, while “Shakespearean” is an expansive reference by virtue of quantity, scale,…
Preview – The Yearnings of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ at Clarence Brown
Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters UT’s Clarence Brown Theatre in the Carousel Theatre Previews: Wednesday and Thursday, September 27 and 28, at 7:30 PM Opening Night: Friday evening, September 29, at 7:30 PM Continues through October 15 (Schedule, information and tickets)…
CBT’s ‘The Busy Body’ – The Force of Necessity
Not entirely by accident, I recently stumbled upon an 1808 printing of Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body (1709) in a volume drawn from productions of that play by the Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres. The printing, coming roughly 100 years after the play was first produced in 1709, drew me in with scholarly fascination.
In the Knoxville Mercury: Review of CBT’s ‘The Santaland Diaries’
In this week’s Knoxville Mercury, read my review of Clarence Brown Theatre’s The Santaland Diaries. Online here. Thanks for reading!