The Arts Center of Cannon County will host a special collaboration with the St. Clair Senior Center this July as Guys & Dolls Sr. edition opens on July 24.
Cast members, all of whom are over 60 and many of whom are part of the Seniors Acting Up drama group, will present their interpretation of the classic musical, bringing to stage the colorful gamblers, hustlers, socialites and gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s from author Damon Runyon.
Seniors Acting Up troupe participant and Guys & Dolls Sr. actor Jim Trasport says that the work of acting, singing and memorizing lines can serve as good mental exercise for seniors and benefit their minds.
“It’s challenging, it’s work,” he said, “but it’s very rewarding, to see the audiences’ faces after it’s over.”
All of the cast members are over 60, with the oldest player in the show over the age of 90.
“Some of these people, it’s a check off of their bucket list. They have never appeared onstage,” Trasport said. “Here I am, going to be 79 in July, and this is something that I can do that gives me a purpose, that gives enjoyment to people.”
Trasport, who got his start in acting a few years back with a role in A Good Old-Fashioned Big Family Christmas at the Mills-Pate Arts Center, has since jumped right into the local theatrical arts community.
For him, portraying the character of Sky Masterson in Guys & Dolls has been particularly meaningful and personal.
“Sky is a compulsive gambler,” Trasport says. “My dad was a compulsive gambler; I see a similarity there.
“It runs in the family,” the actor continues. “My great-grandfather, back in Italy, had an inkling to gamble. He gambled his name away, essentially, and to get a new start moved the family to America.”
Trasport says that, in the street slang used in the play, he even hears some parallels to the language his father would use in South Florida in the 1950s, describing a world of horse races and dice games.
“My dad would talk like that—‘the heat’s going to be there, we can’t have the craps game there’,” he says. “When I was born, he wasn’t even there. He was in a craps game.”
Where a romantic interest draws Sky Masterson away from his gambling habits, though, Trasport says that his father’s salvation changed the course of his and his family’s lives.
As far as the 2026 production, Trasport says he is quite excited about the unique collaboration between the Arts Center of Cannon County and Murfreesboro’s St. Clair Senior Center.
The Arts Center’s staff approached the Senior Center about the collaboration at the end of 2025 in hopes of teaming up in 2026. The Arts Center of Cannon County is supplying everything for the show other than the cast, serving as show producer and providing the director, the costumes and the venue, and even running the rehearsals at St. Clair.
Guys & Dolls Sr., a 60-minute version of the classic show featuring a cast of all local senior citizens, plays at the Arts Center of Cannon County (1424 John Bragg Hwy., Woodbury) at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, July 24, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 26.
Find tickets and more information, by calling 615-563-2787 (ARTS) or visiting artscenterofcc.com.
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Photos by Tom Beckwith
