Tag: Evergreen Theatre

Categories
Art We Recommend We Recommend

The Long Goodbye

The opera debuted in September 2022. (Photo: John Sklba)

Grief, as it often does, struck Emily Rooker with a need to create, to shape something from the remnants of love and loss left behind. At first, in 2017, this need brought her to songwriting as her Aunt Annie was in the hospital with acute liver failure. Soon after, Rooker helped care for her grandfather in his final stages of pancreatic cancer. “It was just a really difficult time,” she says, “and I was writing a lot about grief, not just around [physical] death but death of former versions of yourself and your life as things change.

“When people die there’s this profound sense of love that you didn’t get to give them — for me, at least, almost a sense of regret of things you didn’t say. So writing the songs was a way of expressing that and hoping that in some spiritual plane, those [songs] get to them.”

In total, over the course of the next year and a half, Rooker wrote 17 songs, which she later recorded after the pandemic with the help of her husband/band director Nate Smith and sound engineer Kenny Carlsen. “We were having a hard time figuring out what the genre was, and how we would tell people what it was,” she says. “It was conceptual, and we were inspired by dramatic theatrical music. A friend of mine was like, ‘It kind of reminds me of a rock opera.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, great idea.’” And thus began the next iteration of her project: The Long Goodbye: A Rock Opera.

In July of 2022, Rooker launched a Kickstarter for $15,000 to fund the show that would follow the narrative of her album. By September, with a cast and crew assembled from friends and friends of friends with various artistic practices from pole-dancing to acoustic guitar and synth, The Long Goodbye made its debut. “It was honestly just a kind of a chaotic scramble,” Rooker says. “Several members of the cast helped with the choreography or helped with makeup, so it was really a product of so many people working so hard to get it to come together. Not only were we rehearsing the numbers, we were creating the numbers.”

Photo: Andrea Morales

Within the performance of song, movement, and other visual elements, Rooker’s three selves — the Present Self, the Young Self, and the Wicked Self — reflect on their past and attempt to make sense of one another and the grief, loss, and change they face. Though the story is very much autobiographical, it carries universal themes, Rooker says, with audiences claiming a sense of catharsis after the show’s debut.

Even so, Rooker isn’t finished with the opera. “It’s this big body of work, and each time it evolves, it’s even better,” she says. “So I don’t think we’re quite at the end of what we can squeeze from this yet. Even this time around, now that we’re running rehearsals again, we’ve had time to like look more deeply at some of the characters and even wholly redoing some of the choreography, just making some revisions to make the show even tighter and even better.”

The Long Goodbye’s next performances will run Friday-Saturday, January 13th-14th, at 8 p.m. with a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. More information and tickets can be found at emilyrooker.com. Rooker’s album of the same name is available for streaming.

The Long Goodbye: A Rock Opera, Evergreen Theatre, Friday-Sunday, January 13-15, $30-$40.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Friends of George’s Hosts The Gay Ole Opry

The Gay Ole Opry features Allysun Wunderland. (Photo: Courtesy Friends of George’s)

Halloween 1969, Memphis had its first drag show at what is now the Evergreen Theatre. At the time, dressing in clothing of the opposite sex was illegal, but on Halloween, you could get away with dressing however you wanted. So on that night, no one was attacked or arrested for participating in or attending the drag show — a fact that emboldened the Memphis LGBTQ+ community to continue putting on drag shows even with the threat of raids. That same year, George Wilson purchased his bar, where drag shows began happening regularly and continued until it closed in 1990.

Often referred to as Queen Mother of Memphis Gay Bars and the Showplace of the South, George’s was a staple in the LGBTQ+ community, so in 2010 to honor the 20th anniversary of its closure, a group of former patrons and performers put together a reunion show in true George’s style and tradition. More than 1,800 guests attended, and the group, known as Friends of George’s, became energized, says board member Ty Phillips. “We had no real immediate plans to continue, but we all felt the strong sense that we should continue producing events, and so we continued doing that and ultimately branded ourselves into more of a theater company.”

Now, after a pandemic-related hiatus, the group is bringing back its annual Dragnificent Variety Show, this time with a twang. “In the past we’ve done themes like decades,” says Phillips. “This year we’ve gone country with The Gay Ole Opry. … It’s a combination of drag performances, production numbers, and original skits that we’ve written and produced. We’ve got a game show, some running gags. A lot of it is rooted in Hee Haw humor if you remember that show from back in the day.”

The show, taking place at the LGBTQ+ landmark Evergreen Theatre, will run July 29th-31st and August 4th-6th. Ticket sales for The Gay Ole Opry will benefit CHOICES – Memphis Center for Reproductive Health. Tickets can be purchased at friendsofgeorges.org/gay-ole-opry.

The Dragnificent Variety Show: The Gay Ole Opry, The Evergreen Theatre, July 29-31 and August 4-6, $27.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Paranormal Pop-Up: The Parting at Evergreen Theatre

CREDIT: Lost In Found

This Thursday through Saturday, local theater group Lost in Found invites the public to Evergreen Theatre to explore their Paranormal Popup, a visually appealing and immersive experience that will put guests through past tragedies that occurred at the theater while encountering the “macabre and menacing inhabitants” that lurk throughout the building.

According to legend, a mysterious sinkhole developed at the location following the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811, bringing about strange apparitions and creatures. Although the glitzy and glamorous Ritz movie theater was built on top of the sinkhole, that did not stop the inhabitants from haunting and tormenting anyone in their way.

Lost In Found

The Parting brings theatrical terror to the Evergreen Theatre.

“Whatever’s coming out from the sinkhole in the basement, we’re not sure what it is,” says Julia Hinson, a staff member of Lost in Found.

Guests will be able to investigate these strange beings while walking throughout different areas of the theater and seeing different stories of events that took place.

“In one of the dressing rooms, you’ll see an actress from the 1980s as she’s about to go on stage, and she’s having some struggles,” says Hinson.

She didn’t want to give too much of the story away, however, so people will have to go and see for themselves.

Lost in Found’s mission is to bring a unique approach to performance while highlighting the beauty of history.

“Our biggest goal is to look around Memphis for spaces that need some life or want some life,” says Hinson. “We are interested in highlighting Memphis history, even if it has a little twist to it, just to get people involved in their city and creating community.”

The Parting, Evergreen Theatre, Thursday, October 17th, through Saturday, October 19th, showings at 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m., 10 p.m., $30.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Addicted to Capote? Cloud9 and Mark Chambers tell Tru Stories

Things are seldom about the things they seem to be about. Take Tru, for example. This solo performance by the mighty and all-powerful Mark Chambers, would appear to be a dramatic portrait of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s author, Truman Capote, but it’s not really. While Capote is clearly the subject, this brief, intimate and fantly gonzo encounter, brought to us courtesy of Cloud9 Theatre, is a fully developed play about the slippery multifaceted nature of addiction.

Tru introduces us to a man keenly aware of expiration dates. He’s planning a comeback built on weight loss, plastic surgery, and fine hats to hide an expansive forehead where shaggy locks had hung. This is Capote at his lowest; he was more famous for being famous than for the extraordinary sentences he used to spin out of dust and memory and diamonds and horror. Now he’s just a drunk and an A-list gossip who’s been delisted for telling tales and naming (a few) names.

Tru’s still giving Tiffany for Christmas, but he’s getting flowers in aluminum buckets. Hard candy for a naughty boy who’s grown accustomed to spending his nights at Studio 54 and his days with folks able to produce $50-million, “ready money.” He knows there’s meaning here, but chooses to drink it away, chasing booze with pot and pills.

The real addiction, though, is celebrity. It’s no good for Capote the writer and artist , but he craves it. He wants it for himself and he wants to be near it. In Tru, celebrity is the lens through which Capote’s addictions are most clearly viewed. If the play’s primary struggle isn’t about this, transcending the tropes of Capote’s own fame, what’s left is mere tribute artistry. 

Ann Marie Hall (seated) and Mark Chambers in The Mystery of Irma Vep

Thankfully, Mark Chambers is every inch the actor I remember from our overlapping time in Memphis. He is no mere mimic. He’s revived this show four times now, and it’s evident in this revival at The Evergreen Theatre, that he is very comfortable in Capote’s uncomfortable skin. Tru could still stand fine tuning to tease out narrative threads, connect the dots of conflict and addiction, and make it drama-forward, but all the raw material is all there, and hardly insufficient.

Chambers, who longtime Memphis theater fans may remember as the sweet transvestite in two separate Playhouse on the Square productions of The Rocky Horror Show, is a professional member of Actor’s Equity. But it’s probably more important to point out that Cloud9 is community theater. I don’t say that to trigger memories of Waiting for Guffman, but as a reminder that this, and other companies exist to correct for institutional deficiencies. Cloud9, for example, helps to account for the limited number of great roles available to older actors in Memphis. That’s exactly how community theater should work and Chambers has often described Tru as “a good show for this time in [his] life.” I don’t disagree and won’t complain a bit about how Cloud9 does its thing, but as I watched Chambers do his thing, I kept thinking there would be a lot more great roles available to older actors if more people thought Dr. Frank-N-Furter would still be a good part for him, “at this time in life.”

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

On stage: Lettice & Lovage and Marriage to an Older Woman.

What happens when a bit of harmless Mary Queen of Scots cosplay results in a near beheading? To find that out, you’ll need to reserve tickets for Lettice and Lovage, an intensely British comedy that was first staged in 1987 but feels like it might have been written with modern Memphis in mind. If you’re the sort of person who’s ever signed a petition to save the Nineteenth Century Club, or carried a sign to protest parking on the Overton Park Greensward, or gotten verklempt because some solid piece of architecture was demolished to make room for a Family Dollar, the jokes will resonate. To make things even more Memphis-esque, there’s a magnificent ritualized #wigsnatch near the end of act two.

Lettice and Lovage playwright Peter Shaffer is best known for weighty dramas like Equus and Amadeus, but the man could flat write a gag. If Lettice seems like a trifle compared to his more frequently produced tragedies, it’s a funny trifle, and more than a little wise. The New Moon Theatre Company’s current production may be austere, but it’s “enlarged, enlivened, and enlightened” in every way by a pair of finely tuned performances from Sarah Brown and Anita “Jo” Lenhart. Their meandering scenes are a real treat for theatergoers with a taste for quirk.

Brown plays Lettice Douffet, a tour guide with a flair for the dramatic, a lust for the life less “mere,” and a terrible reputation for straying from history’s facts whenever the facts are too damn boring to repeat in front of a live audience. Lettice’s gross historical embellishments bring her into conflict with Lenhart’s Lotte Schoen, an administrator for the historical preservation society who seems buttoned up but is truthfully on the verge of complete radicalization.

Shaffer’s comedy of little old ladies planning acts of violent terrorism is bottom-heavy and wears out its welcome somewhere in the middle of an ample third act. Brown and Lenhart are so full of life and fun to watch it doesn’t matter.

Marriage to an Older Woman isn’t “must-see” theater. John Fritz’s obscure-for-a-reason play introduces us to Babs, a 73-year-old free spirit who upsets her daughter by marrying a wealthy but uptight 60-year-old stranger on a cruise ship. It’s situation comedy that plays like the never-aired pilot to a failed Love Boat spin-off. It’s not unwatchable, but it’s not a strong “hello” for Memphis’ newest theater company, Cloud 9.

Marriage to an Older Woman was originally produced in Memphis by Playwrights Forum and is fondly remembered in some circles due to strong performances by a pair of actresses who are no longer with us: Dorothy Blackwood and Laurie Cook McIntosh. Cloud 9’s cast is capable, but it’s not Blackwood/McIntosh capable, and the material isn’t strong enough to merit revival.

It’s been said — and rightly, I think — that you shouldn’t produce a gun on stage unless somebody’s going to use it. Something similar might be said about the half-dozen ukuleles and other musical props decorating the set of Marriage to an Older Woman, a play that, as near as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with ukuleles or music of any kind. Nevertheless, various instruments hang on the wall and lurk in corners, waiting for somebody to pick them up and make noise. The play has even less to do with Marty Robbins, the great country crooner whose face is conspicuously displayed on the back wall like the picture of Tom Wingfield’s absentee father in The Glass Menagerie. Just as the presence of a firearm might create a sense of impending danger, these kinds of props create a different kind of anticipation that competes with the script for attention. Unfortunately, the promise of song and some textual connection to the famous El Paso balladeer is more intriguing than anything that ever happens in the play. It’s an itch that’s never scratched in a show where even the longest scene transitions occur in silent blackouts.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Playhouse’s The Gospel at Colonus; New Moon’s The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

CREDIT: By Chris Neely. Courtesy of Playhouse on the Square.

I remember being so intimidated by Gospel at Colonus‘ co-creator Lee Breuer. The relentlessly experimental director and playwright conducted his improv workshop like a drill sergeant, barking out the names of famous painters and sculptors from the sidelines. He’d say, “El Greco,” and we’d adjust our improvs to reflect the painter’s stylistic flourishes. Then, as the room transformed into a colorful passion play, he’d change the scene to something by Goya or Bosch or Diego Rivera. And we, his students, would all change our missions accordingly. This was never a test of our acting or improv skills, of course. It was a cultural literacy exam. And, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, Breuer wasn’t especially interested in good acting, in the conventional sense. He was looking for translators.

Playhouse on the Square’s explosive production of The Gospel at Colonus may seem like a clever (if culturally sketchy) adaptation of the least-studied play from Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. More accurately, it’s a translation aiming to reclaim the ecstatic nature of early theater and root out the meaning of things that are difficult to convey with words. Using a range of classic gospel styles and full-throated pulpit storytelling, The Gospel at Colonus invites audiences to participate in a blind king’s transformation from accursed sinner to acclaimed hero in his final hours. It’s easy to mistake this for a comparative exercise, mingling Greek and Christian myth. It is simpler than that. It’s the appropriation of a script we all know (church), in the service of a script we don’t know, because A) theater’s meaning has changed and B) Oedipus at Colonus is eclipsed by Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Literate congregants may also recognize allusions to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame folded into a stew that is vibrantly existential.

Playhouse director Tony Horne knows how to stage a no-holds-barred musical. To that end, The Gospel at Colonus is an exercise in both abandon and restraint. Dance is minimal but choreographer Emma Crystal uses it to generate and amplify tension in ways we don’t normally associate with Broadway. Kathy Haaga’s epically scaled set stops time, dropping the audience in the middle of a classical ruin, as ancient as it is postapocalyptic. It’s a space built for poetry and magic and with the help of music director Julian T. Jones, the cast delivers.

Curtis C. Jackson brings a James Brown-like pleading to old Oedipus. He’s answered in kind by his sister/daughters Antigone and Ismene, gorgeously sung by Claire Kolheim and Rainey Harris. The show belongs to the chorus and when it’s rocking, this chorus can absolutely take you to church.

Ten years after Matthew Shepard’s death, the Tectonic Theater Project — a New York-based theater company best known for creating a docudrama called The Laramie Project — returned to the scene of the crime to re-interview primary sources and take the town’s temperature. From those interviews they created The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. This epilogue, currently on stage at the Evergreen Theatre, explores a phenomenon we’ve come to describe as “trutherism,” and Laramie’s need, as a community, to define itself as something other than the homophobic place where Shepard was killed.

In 2004 ABC’s 20/20 revisited the slaying. The show suggested that both the media and the court had gotten Shepard’s murder all wrong. Shepard’s death was recast as a robbery and drug binge gone bad. Ten Years Later plays out as a deliberate refutation of 20/20‘s shaky revisionism. It shows that nothing changes the reasoning behind the killer’s victim choice and brutality.

There’s not one standout performance in the New Moon Theatre Company’s Ten Years Later. It’s a show about teamwork. This creative team, assembled by director Gene Elliott, works. Both The Laramie Projects are exercises in minimalism in the spirit of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This time, the story moves beyond Shepard and his killers to explore the art of persuasion, bias confirmation, and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And how these stories we tell ourselves about who we are duke it out until there’s only one story left standing.

Strong stuff, beautifully acted.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Acro-Cats at Evergreen Theatre.

Acro-Cats

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But you can teach a cat to play guitar.

Or at least Samantha Martin has managed to. Since 2006, Martin has been training rescued kitties to do tricks for her traveling Acro-Cats show. The 14 fantastic felines in her cat circus have been on a nationwide tour, and they’ll be stopping at the Evergreen Theatre in Memphis for two weekends beginning November 13th.

The cats execute barrel rolls, jump through hoops, push shopping carts, ride skateboards, and more. One of the Acro-Cats is the Guinness Book of World Records holder for the longest leap (six feet!). And the grand finale is a performance by the Rock Cats, complete with cats playing guitar, keyboard, and drums. Oh, and there’s a chicken on cymbals.

Martin says that training cats isn’t as hard as one might think. The Acro-Cats were clicker-trained with treats, the same positive reinforcement method recommended for training dogs.

“In some ways, it’s easier than training dogs. Cats are more agile and can do a lot of different things that dogs may not be able to do. And cats learn really fast. I can train a kitten to do something basic in just a few minutes,” Martin says. “But dogs are more eager to please and will work for various motivators. Cats are more savvy in their negotiations. There needs to be something in it for them. And you can’t do it after mealtime because they just want to take a nap.”

Martin uses the show to promote cat rescue, and she’ll have four kittens up for adoption while the show is in Memphis.

“A woman dumped them off in the middle of the night near the animal control facility [in a town in Illinois], and an officer saw her and charged her with animal cruelty,” Martin says. “Now the kittens are with me until they find a forever home. And we’re teaching them to do some cute things. Hopefully, they’ll find their forever human and home while we’re in Memphis.”

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

George’s Truck Stop and Drag Bar

Described as a “drag comedy musical,” George’s Truck Stop and Drag Bar centers around a truck stop diner where a cast of drag queens have taken refuge after the only drag bar in Krisco County burned to the ground.

The queens attempt to solve the mystery of who set fire the Krankshaft Lounge as they take over the greasy spoon.

There are four scheduled performances at Evergreen Theatre (1705 Poplar) this weekend — 7 and 10 p.m. on both Friday, Feb. 1st and Saturday, Feb. 2nd.

To find out more or buy tickets, go here. There will be a cocktail hour before each show.

Picture_12.png