Word: opryland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theme parks may be better known for flume rides and cruise ships for bingo, but from Disney to Opryland to Hersheypark, they are becoming the summer theaters of the '90s: the places where growing numbers of tyro thespians, crooners and tap dancers get their first experience performing before live audiences...
...Cinderella's castle. The giant Disney parks in Florida and California consider everyone who greets the public to be a performer; the ranks of honest-to-Goofy singers, dancers and actors reach into the hundreds and arguably thousands, even if ) some sport Mickey Mouse heads. Nashville's much smaller Opryland, which relies more on entertainment to sell itself than any other park, employs 400-plus performers -- comparable with the combined casts of all the musicals currently on Broadway -- in a dozen shows with a cumulative annual audience of nearly 5 million. Most of these actors, and the bulk of their...
...Gardens park in Williamsburg, Va.: "This is the first taste of the performer's real world. College shows run two or three weekends. Where else, as a young person, can you do a long run like this?" Michael Myers, 22, a Texas Tech marketing graduate turned singer-songwriter, likes Opryland because "you're out there in the full light of day, playing to no tellin' who. They come from all over, and you have to relate right away...
...example, is blind, yet he has the ability to reproduce and create music and is one of the stars of a school group, the Hi Hopes, who have sung to thunderous applause at concerts from Disneyland and Las Vegas to the White House lawn and the stage of Opryland...
This is a mistake unlikely to be made by anyone making a theme-park trek across Tennessee. Start at Opryland. "If you're going to be a theme park in Nashville," says Park Flack Tom Adkinson, "you'd better be about music." But not just country music: Opryland's 120 acres embrace doo-wop and Duke Ellington in as many as a dozen simultaneous stage shows. Then it's 20 miles northeast to Hendersonville and a stop at Twitty City, the monument Country Star Conway Twitty has built to himself, including a guided tour conducted by a giant mechanical Twitty...