Louise Mandrell Theater The Miracle Theater | |
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 Smoky Mountain Opry Theater in 2012 | |
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| Address | 2046 Parkway Pigeon Forge, Tennessee United States |
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| Coordinates | 35°49′28″N83°34′43″W / 35.824565°N 83.578584°W |
| Owner | World Choice Investments, LLC |
| Type | Theater |
| Capacity | 1,400 [1] |
| Opened | 1997 |
The Smoky Mountain Opry Theater (formerly known as The Miracle Theater and Louise Mandrell Theater) is a theater established in 1997 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, United States.
In Fall 1997, the theater was opened as stage for country singer Louise Mandrell. [2] In 2005, the theater was purchased by The Fee Hedrick Family Entertainment Group, while Mandrell performed her last show on New Year's Eve that same year. [3] After a $15 million installation, [4] the theater was reopened as "The Miracle Theater" on April 13, 2006. [5] Its main play, "The Miracle" was performed from its opening in 2006 [5] to its closing on October 22, 2011. [6] The musical was about the life of Jesus Christ. [4] The musical consisted of live animals, sword-fights, and wire-harnessing angels [7] and was composed by David Legg and written by Linda Nell Cooper. [5] Other shows that were performed at the Miracle Theater included the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. [8] In September 2007, the Miracle Theater received national attention when it spent about $90,000 on a USA Today advertisement, which indirectly criticized Kathy Griffin's Primetime Emmy Award acceptance speech. [9] On November 7, 2011, the theater re-opened as "Smoky Mountain Opry Theater" with a "Christmas at the Opry" show. [10] A variety show was also added in the beginning of the 2012 season. [11] At the end of 2018, World Choice Investments, the owner of Dolly Parton's Stampede, purchased Fee Hedrick Entertainment (and therefore the Smoky Mountain Opry) for an undisclosed amount. [12]
In May 2020, spokesperson Pete Owens announced that the theater would be closed during the entire season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [13] As of January 2023, the theater remains closed.
Sevier County is a county of the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 census, the population was 98,380. Its county seat and largest city is Sevierville. Sevier County comprises the Sevierville, TN Micropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Knoxville-Morristown-Sevierville, TN Combined Statistical Area.
Gatlinburg is a mountain resort city in Sevier County, Tennessee. It is located 39 miles (63 km) southeast of Knoxville and had a population of 3,944 at the 2010 Census and a U.S. Census population of 3,577 in 2020. It is a popular vacation resort, as it rests on the border of Great Smoky Mountains National Park along U.S. Route 441, which connects to Cherokee, North Carolina, on the southeast side of the national park. Prior to incorporation, the town was known as White Oak Flats, or just simply White Oak.
Pigeon Forge is a mountain resort city in Sevier County, Tennessee. As of the 2020 census, the city had a total population of 6,343. Situated just 5 miles (8 km) north of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Pigeon Forge is a tourist destination that caters primarily to Southern culture and country music fans. The city's attractions include Dollywood and Dollywood's Splash Country as well as numerous gift shops, outlet malls, amusement rides, and musical theaters.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a sung-through musical with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on the character of Joseph from the Bible's Book of Genesis. This was the first Lloyd Webber and Rice musical to be performed publicly; their first collaboration, The Likes of Us, written in 1965, was not performed until 2005. Its family-friendly retelling of Joseph, familiar themes, and catchy music have resulted in numerous stagings. According to the owner of the copyright, the Really Useful Group, by 2008 more than 20,000 schools and amateur theatre groups had staged productions.
Dollywood is a theme park that is jointly owned by Herschend Family Entertainment and country singer-songwriter Dolly Parton through her entertainment company, Dolly Parton Productions. It is located in the Knoxville metropolitan area in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near the gateway to The Great Smoky Mountains. Hosting nearly 3 million guests in a typical season from mid-March to the Christmas holidays, Dollywood is the biggest ticketed tourist attraction in Tennessee. It has won many international awards.
Roy Claxton Acuff was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music", Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful. In 1952, Hank Williams told Ralph Gleason, "He's the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn't worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God."
The Foothills Parkway is a national parkway which traverses the foothills of the northern Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, located in the southeastern United States. The 72.1-mile (114 km) parkway will connect U.S. Route 129 along the Little Tennessee River in the west with Interstate 40 (I-40) along the Pigeon River in the east.
The Great Smoky Mountains Parkway is a highway that travels 23.4 miles (37.7 km) between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Interstate 40 (I-40) in Kodak, Tennessee, in East Tennessee. It serves as the main thoroughfare for Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville, and includes a 4.3-mile (6.9 km) spur of the Foothills Parkway. It is composed of sections of a number of numbered highways, including U.S. Route 441 (US 441) and US 321 and State Route 66 (SR 66) and SR 448.
Thelma Louise Mandrell is an American country music singer. She is the younger sister of fellow country singer Barbara Mandrell, and older sister of actress Irlene Mandrell. Louise had a successful singing career in country music from the 1970s, with a string of hits during the 1980s.
Herschend Family Entertainment (HFE) is a privately owned themed-entertainment company that operates several theme parks and tourist attractions within the United States, and as of 2021, one aquarium in Vancouver, Canada.
The Gatlinburg Bypass is a 3.6-mile-long (5.8 km) bypass road around the resort city of Gatlinburg in Sevier County, Tennessee, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It runs between the Great Smoky Mountains Parkway north of the city to Newfound Gap Road (US 441), the main route through the national park. It is owned and maintained by the National Park Service (NPS) and serves as a bypass around the business district of Gatlinburg for easier access to the national park. It is also considered part of the longer Foothills Parkway, a National Parkway that traverses the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. The road provides overlooks with views of the city of Gatlinburg and the mountains beyond. The Gatlinburg Bypass opened to traffic in 1968.
The Tuacahn Center for the Arts is an arts organization located at the mouth of the Padre Canyon, adjacent to Snow Canyon State Park, in Ivins, Utah. The 42,000-square-foot (3,900 m2) facility was completed in 1995 and includes a 1,920-seat outdoor amphitheater, a 328 seat indoor theater, a black box theater, a dance studio, a costume shop, a scene shop, and the campus of Tuacahn High School for the Arts. The Tuacahn Center for the Arts contributes to the arts by producing two or three performances on its amphitheater stage and offers a spring and fall concert series for the region. They also produce the annual "Christmas in the Canyon" featuring a live-action recreation of the nativity called the "Festival of Lights."
Patrick William Cassidy is an American actor and singer best known for his roles in musical theatre and television.
Plays-in-the-Park is a government-sponsored outdoor amphitheater located in Edison, New Jersey. Middlesex County's Plays-in-the-Park has been in existence since 1963. Generally, three full-scale musical productions run in the summer, from June to August. In the fall, the theater is transformed into a black box where the annual children's show takes place; the indoor children's musical tradition began in 1992. In the winter, Plays-in-the-Park uses the State Theater in New Brunswick, NJ to put on their final show of the season. Plays-in-the-Park has been using the State Theater for their annual production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat since 1994.
Zev Buffman was a Broadway producer who served as president and CEO of Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida. He produced more than 40 Broadway shows. He partnered with Elizabeth Taylor to present her in her Broadway debut, The Little Foxes. Buffman was also the co-founding general partner of the NBA champion basketball team the Miami Heat.
Yama-Con is an annual three-day anime convention with multigenre elements held during November/December at the LeConte Center in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Yama-Con's name comes from the Japanese word for mountain, "Yama."
The Hollywood Wax Museum is a two-story wax museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It features replicas of celebrities in film, television and music. The Tennessee museum was originally located in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Kata Hay is an American country music performer, best known for competing on the 2016 season of The Voice.
The Music of East Tennessee has a rich history, and played a major role in the development of modern country and bluegrass music. Bristol, known as "the birthplace of country music",, and Johnson City, notable for the Johnson City recording sessions, are both towns in the Tri-Cities region of East Tennessee. The music of East Tennessee is defined by country, gospel, and bluegrass artists, and has roots in Appalachian folk music.
The 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires, also known as the Gatlinburg wildfires, were a complex of wildfires which began in late November 2016. Some of the towns most impacted were Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, both near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The fires claimed at least 14 lives, injured 190, and is one of the largest natural disasters in the history of Tennessee.
In the latest in a series of major entertainment features in the Smokies, singer Louise Mandrell plans to open her proposed 1,400-seat theater in the Music Road Entertainment Park at Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in the fall of 1997.
"The Miracle" has three more showings left, scheduled for 8 p.m. today and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Saturday. Fee says the possibilities for new life for "Miracle" include Christmas season matinée shows at Smoky Mountain Opry, the name of both the theater and the new show it will host starting Nov. 4, and even the chance for a traveling production.