Tag: Theater of the American South
In “A Tuff Shuffle,” Charlotte’s Danny Mullen Takes the TAS Audience Backstage with Louis Armstrong
On tap in Danny Mullen’s “A Tuff Shuffle” is home-made gumbo, cooked up by Louis Armstrong himself on his dressing-room hotplate, and an intimate but wide-ranging and remarkably frank and fearless PG-13-rated autobiographical monologue, punctuated with brief but bracing reprises of Armstrong’s greatest (vocal) hits, such as “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”; “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”; “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”; “What a Wonderful World”; and “Hello, Dolly!”
No Way to Treat a Lady: The Violence is Over the Top in the TAS Production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”
Tennessee Williams meant for Stanley be a crude, lower-class, but upward-aspiring American ethnic of Polish descent and for his and Stella’s apartment to be a pressure cooker, but I seriously doubt if he meant for Stanley to explode into physical violence — smashing crockery, manhandling Stella, throttling and eventually raping Blanche — as often as he does in the current Theater of the American South presentation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Indeed, the violence that Hurricane Stanley inflicts on his sister-in-law and wife and their meager possessions necessitates lengthy scene changes that dissipate dramatic tension.
TAS’ 2012 Season Includes “A Streetcar Named Desire” and a Solo About Louis Armstrong
The 2012 season of the Theater of the American South, a professional theater founded in 2006, will include Tennessee Williams’ 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “A Tuff Shuffle: Backstage with Louis Armstrong,” a critically acclaimed one-man show written and performed by Danny Mullen. “A Tuff Shuffle” will play May 10-27 in the Lauren Kennedy and Alan Campbell Theatre at Barton College in Wilson, NC; and “A Streetcar Named Desire” will play May 11-27 in the Edna Boykin Cultural Center in downtown Wilson.
Four Civil War Re-enactors, a Park Ranger, and a Souvenir Seller Meet in Doris Baizley’s Offbeat Comedy/Drama “Shiloh Rules” in Wilson
“The play is larger than it first appears,” claims director Katja Hill. “We meet six remarkable women who are involved in different ways in a re-enactment of the Battle of Shiloh …. [‘Shiloh Rules’] is set in 2011, but all the characters go back in time to 1862 through a re-enactment that becomes terrifyingly real.”
“The Civil War in Song & Legend” Stars Bill Schustik
“The Civil War in Song & Legend,” written and performed by acclaimed American troubadour Bill Schustik, offers a highly entertaining musical reconstruction of what many Southerners still call the War of Northern Aggression.