Reprinted form Nashville Arts Magazine - see link

“I have more directing credits under my belt the past five years than acting credits,” says Barry Scott.

That’s saying something, given that Scott is arguably Nashville’s finest actor and clearly Music City’s highest-profiled theatrical performer nationally. Those stentorian promotions you hear coming out of the television during ESPN’s NBA broadcasts are just one of Scott’s numerous gigs

September 08, 2006
By Evans Donnell

NASHVILLE — Veteran actor, playwright, and director Barry Scott loves to compete. But whether on the football fields he graced as a young man or on the stage today, his focus, he says, isn't on just winning. It's on making himself and his community stronger.

"I think I pursue arts in the same way I pursued sports," says the 51-year-old Scott, sitting in a conference room near the theatre he manages at Tennessee State University. "Through my father and mother I learned that sportsmanship was more important than winning the game. I think I chose theatre as I chose sports — it gave me the chance to express myself."

And certainly Scott has done a lot of expressing. For one thing, he manages the Tennessee State University Performing Arts Center's Cox/Lewis Theater. His lengthy résumé also includes work as a producer, teacher, motivational speaker, and voiceover artist. He's also a community activist who was chosen Nashvillian of the Year in 1993 by a panel of city leaders. Fourteen years ago, Scott founded the American Negro Playwright Theatre (ANPT), which has produced such works as A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and Looking Over the President's Shoulder, a play about Alonzo Fields, the first African American chief butler of the White House, directed by Emmy-winner Robert Guillaume.

Gang life draws fresh blood from 'Romeo and Juliet'

BY FIONA SOLTES

FOR THE TENNESSEAN

Barry Scott's heart is filled with the pure passion of

As a result, the theater veteran, in a new production beginning July 24, hopes to present Shakespeare's classic tragedy as a call for peace, redemption and deliverance.

Setting the piece among the Crips and Bloods of African-American street gangs but keeping the original language, Scott moves the tale of the lovers doomed by consequence from bawdy teenage comedy to heart-stirring romance. He allows "some liberty" so the work will "really smack of being in the ghetto," but all the same, it's only "fun up to a point."

BEST ACTOR: BARRY SCOTT  - Scott is an often heralded local talent with serious stage presence and a big distinctive voice. His leading performance as Boy Willie in Tennessee Repertory Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson was equal to the enormity of the role.  — MARTIN BRADY, The Nashville Scene

Symphony and actor Barry Scott honor Abraham Lincoln

For the penultimate event in its Regions Community Concerts series, the Nashville Symphony performs a tribute to Abraham Lincoln with a program of works devoted to the Great Emancipator, including Jaromir Weinberger’s The Lincoln Symphony and Vincent Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address.

Leonard Slatkin will conduct, and actor Barry Scott will serve as narrator on the Persichetti. The program will be recorded for future release by the Naxos label.

MLK Jr. presenter urges attendees to act on their beliefs

By RICHARD NILSEN, The Leader-Herald

JOHNSTOWN — Barry Scott’s dream is to keep the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. alive.

In his tribute to the slain reformer Wednesday at Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Scott said the battle for the minds of youths has changed from one of racial prejudice to a need for diversity of expression and ideas.

“What do you think? What do you feel? What do you believe?” were the questions Scott put to the audience in the college theater. After saying he most wanted to be a better son and a better father, Scott related how early prejudice against himself and his family in his hometown of Nashville, Tenn., led to the emulation of King’s methods of counteracting prejudice. He said his father brought a film of King’s “I have a dream” speech to their home after King was assassinated, and he watched it over and over until he had it memorized.