2009-10 theater season offers spectacular performances

The Lipscomb University Theater Department continues to grow and expand, offering new and exciting opportunities for the 2009-10 season including a student-written children’s play for the holidays, an outdoor spring Shakespeare festival and an American classic featuring well-known Lipscomb alumni. These new productions, added to the successful new crowd-pleasers of last year – a blockbuster musical and the dinner theater format – will make for an entertaining school year.

 

As the theater department prepares for this upcoming season, Fernandez hopes students not involved in the theatre department will recognize just how much fun it can be. “We hope students can’t help but pay attention to this exciting new season and realize just what a great, affordable option we are for the college experience,” he said.

 

 

 

 

Beau Jest, the hilarious play by James Sherman, will kick off the season with a bang, as the featured Fall Dinner Theater production directed by Deborah Holloway. The comedy focuses on the mixed-up love life and familial relationship of Sarah Goldman, a Jewish kindergarten teacher, who is obsessed with pleasing her parents. Sarah hires an actor to pretend to be the perfect Jewish man, in this play full of mistaken identities, family obstacles and comedy.

 

“We were looking for a contemporary comedy that was light, comfortable and something that everyone would enjoy,” said Holloway, an instructor at Lipscomb University. Beau Jest was selected to offset the more dramatic Death of a Salesman in the spring dinner theatre and to provide both students and the Lipscomb community an opportunity to see the theater department’s range of talent, she said.

 

“The play is going to be shown for three weekends with one of them during Family Weekend, meaning many guests will be on campus and it is a great opportunity to really entertain them,” said Holloway.

 

The show will run Sept. 18-19, Sept. 25-26 and Family Weekend, Oct. 2-3 in Shamblin Theatre. The Alumni Association will serve dinner and families and students can purchase tickets for both.

 

 

 

 

For Lipscomb’s fall production, Theater Director Mike Fernandez has selected one of Broadway’s most beloved musicals, Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. It is the hilarious musical tale of two New York City couples betting on love, despite the odds against them. Guys and Dolls revolves around Nathan Detroit, who bets fellow gambler Sky Masterson he can't make the next girl he sees fall in love with him. The stage is set for a hilarious evening of complications when the next girl he sees happens to be Miss Sarah Brown, a pure-at-heart Salvation Army reformer. Guys and Dolls won the Tony Award for Best Musical and was made into a feature film in 1955 starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra.

 

Fernandez is excited to showcase Guys and Dolls on campus and has recruited a professional choreographer for the production.

 

“A professional choreographer from New York City is going to choreograph the show for us, and it really shows just how important and seriously the Lipscomb Theater Department is being taken,” says Fernandez. “We have so many goals and dreams for the department and the university has really responded well.”

 

The musical will run Nov. 5-8 in Collins Alumni Auditorium and will be directed by Fernandez.

 

 

 

 

 

This year, Holloway and Lipscomb senior Becca Bennie have written a play for the annual children’s production to run during the week of Lipscomb’s annual Christmas celebration Lighting of the Green, scheduled for Dec. 1. Wolf Calls and Pig Tales is an original piece that tells two different perspectives of the traditional children’s tale about the three little pigs.

 

“We are excited to say that the play will run for two to three mornings where local school groups can come and see the play,” Holloway said.

 

Wolf Calls and Pig Tales will show during the first week of December in Collins Alumni Auditorium and tickets cost $5.

 

“The Theater Program has tripled in just one year’s time giving us plenty of amazing students to audition,” said Holloway. “It is so exciting to see this growth and we are proud to say that there will be 14 new theater majors in the fall.”

 

“We have experienced such rapid growth because we have been announcing existing events and programs on campus and the kids have really come out of the woodworks and gotten excited,” said Fernandez.

 

 

 

 

When spring comes along and brings Alumni Weekend, Fernandez will showcase the classic American play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller for the Spring Dinner Theater production. It portrays the universal hopes and fears of middle-class America through the main character, Willy Loman, and examines the myth of the American Dream and the shallow promise of happiness through material wealth. Through flashbacks Loman wonders what went wrong and how he can make things up to his family.

 

The dates of the play are still not determined, but the show will run during Lipscomb’s Alumni Weekend in Shamblin Theatre. The play will star two Lipscomb alumni, Jerry Henderson, a former drama director here at Lipscomb, as Willy Loman, and Wesley Paine, director of the Parthenon museum in Nashville, as Linda Loman.

 

“We hope to start a tradition of showing an alumni-featured play every year for Alumni Weekend,” said Fernandez. “With Jerry and Wesley starring in this year’s play, we are definitely stepping in the right direction towards that goal.”

 

“As we were planning this theater season, we asked ourselves who we are and what we wanted to accomplish with the talent of our students,” said Fernandez. “I believe theater needs to train students in classics, like Miller’s, and also should be challenging as well as fun. We have an opportunity to showcase a play that has deep dark issues that students can learn from and receive a profound message from, while still having a good time on campus.”

 

 

 

To conclude the Lipscomb 2009-10 season, the Spring Student Showcase in Shamblin Theatre will feature a series of short snippets of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

 

“Featuring advanced acting and directing students, the entire showcase is in every way led by students,” said Fernandez. “We hope to put on an entire evening of Shakespeare scenes in the amphitheater on campus; it would be our own little Shakespeare festival.”

 

The Spring Showcase gives theater students the opportunity to add to their professional resumes and to experience directing the second most popular style of production they will come in contact with in the professional theater world, he said.

 

“Shakespeare is the capstone for these directing students,” says Fernandez. “Greek classic style, medieval staging, and avant garde -- these are all part of the educational process, and the showcase is about them showing off what they have learned.”

 

The showcase will run in late April 2010.

 

All auditions for the theater program fall shows have been filled, but auditions are ongoing for spring productions.