BY ALAN SHERROD In his Friday evening pre-curtain remarks to the audience for Verdi’s Falstaff, Knoxville Opera General Director Jason Hardy asked for a show of hands of those seeing a KO production for the first time. Surprisingly, what…
Review: River & Rail Theatre Co. Explores Secrets and Truths in ‘Fun Home’
BY ALAN SHERROD Successful works of theatre have a way of holding up a mirror to its viewers, its reflection revealing universal truths that touch each individual with memories and revelations specific to their own lives. That is certainly…
Review: Knoxville Opera Triumphs With ‘The Marriage of Figaro’
BY ALAN SHERROD Knoxville Opera began its life at the Bijou Theatre in 1978 as the Knoxville Civic Opera. Returning to its birthplace this weekend, the company triumphed there to wrap up its 2022-23 season with a production of…
Review: UT Opera Theatre’s ‘Hänsel und Gretel’
BY ALAN SHERROD It felt like it had been forever since the University of Tennessee Opera Theatre had trod the boards at the Bijou Theatre—but the company was back last weekend with a production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und…
Review: William Shaub and Friends Make Sense of Beethoven’s Final String Quartet
BY ALAN SHERROD The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Concertmaster Series with William Shaub has one more performance of “The Late Genius: Beethoven’s Final Days”, Thursday evening, April 6, at 7:00, at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Tickets and Information …
Review: Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Journeys Through Higdon, Copland, Sibelius
BY ALAN SHERROD If you sat back, closed your eyes, and indulged your imagination for just a bit, it was entirely possible that the evening’s music could conjure up a vision of the blue hazy mountains of the Appalachians…
Review: ‘Men on Boats’ at Clarence Brown – Old History, New Perspective
BY ALAN SHERROD On its most basic level, the Jaclyn Backhaus play, Men on Boats, which opened Friday evening in the Lab Theatre of the Clarence Brown, is a retelling of the 1869 exploratory journey made by John Wesley…
Review: MCO’s ‘The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace’ Is Infinitely Charming
BY ALAN SHERROD In its ten years of existence, Marble City Opera has filled a niche in Knoxville’s music scene, a niche for which it seems it was destined. It has also earned a reputation for a mind-boggling variety…
Review: Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ at River & Rail Theatre Company
BY ALAN SHERROD If there is anything that we have learned from television, it is that the American neighborhood bar is more than just a convenient background venue for drama and comedy. It represents a social structure where, in…
Review: Spirits Abound in CBT’s Marvelous ‘Blithe Spirit’
By Alan Sherrod “Anybody can write books, but it takes an artist to make a dry martini that’s dry enough.” —Madame Arcati, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit Pass on the dry martinis like those being served quite generously in Blithe…