Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold - Page 15

I continue my series of mini video profiles of Maine theatre artists with this portrait of actor, dancer, singer, director, and choreographer, Raymond Marc Dumont.  A lewiston/Auburn native and an AEA and SDC professional, 'Ray' has worked extensively in Maine and is closely associated with companies such as Maine State Music Theatre, Mad Horse Theatre, Portland Players, and Lyric Music Theater.

Bangor's Penobscot Theatre Company is devoting the month of December to a jaunty, spirited production of the Lionel Bart musical, Oliver!. Directed/choreographed by Allison Bibicoff, production is clearly a labor of love, employing (for this theatre) a moderately large cast and the best of the company's current resources. The result is energetic and entertaining with moments of engaging drama.

Portland's Good Theater performs its annual musical revue, Broadway at the Good Theater this weekend bringing warmth, cheer, and an array of musical treats to mark the holiday season. Conceived, written, and directed by Brian P. Allen, this year's two hours of song and dance was devoted to the musicals of the 1970s.

Having had the privilege to serve as Broadway World's Maine Editor for more than three years now, I can say with pride that the state, though remote as it may seem from the epicenter of the theatre world, Broadway, is blessed to be home to so many thriving theatre companies who produce exciting, vibrant seasons. As I compiled my list for 2016 with many familiar names, I was also struck by the extraordinary consistency of excellence these companies maintain. Here are my personal choices of the best in Maine, grouped by theatre and show.

Following the first installment of my Theatre Miniature series - a profile of Curt Dale Clark - this second mini-video takes a look at the indefatigable Executive and Artistic Director of Portland's Good Theater, Brian P. Allen.

'New theatre work is important because it is more likely to reflect what is actually going on in the world; it can speak to global happenings and events and find ways to digest them and cope with them.' Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre Curt Dale Clark is talking about his recent visit to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) Conference and Festival of New Musicals in New York on October 24-28, 2016. Clark, who has been a NAMT Board member for the past two years and currently co-chair of the membership committee, is proud that his theatre company, MSMT, has been a founding member of the organization since its inception thirty-six years ago, and praises 'our continued efforts on its behalf that help cement the relationship between the two not-for-profits.'

Nilo Cruz's latest work, Sotto Voce (2014), is a delicate, haunting, poetic memory play that whispers and lulls its way into the hidden recesses of memory, as it slowly, gently, but heartrendingly reveals the characters' past lives, hopes, and dreams. Portland Stage's production directed by Liz Diamond is richly evocative and pitch perfect in tone and execution.

During the first act of Christopher Durang's Tony award-winning 2013 play, Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike, the characters muse that 'if everyone were on anti-depressants, there would be no Chekhov.' Happily for Portland theatre goers, it seems that none of the six colorful, endearing, eccentric personages in Durang's contemporary comedy appears to be on any medication. Rather they squabble and moan and rant about their lives in absurdly clever and humorous dialogue as they struggle to find some happiness in the human bonds which connect them.

When the now embattled Wells Fargo recently ran a series of ads suggesting that young people grow up and 'out of careers in the arts' and into 'mature choices of professions like the sciences and business,' the implications of the spots seriously irritated and alarmed most of us in the theatre community. A dancer yesterday, an engineer today….what message is that sending to our young people, many of whom are already deprived of arts education in their schools? It was then that the idea occurred to me and our Broadway World editors that a series of short video profiles asking successful theatre people why they had chosen a life in performance and what the rewards have been for them might be just the antidote.

Biddeford's City Theater opened its season with a warm, wistful comedy about love and intergenerational relationships in a New Jersey Italian-American family. Joe Di Pietro's 1998 Over the River and Through the Woods is a funny, touching, and often penetrating memoir about ageless conflicts between old and young and the inevitable changes that come in relationships with the changing times. In the City Theater of Biddeford's production, these completely relatable memories come to life with vivid truthfulness.

Ogunquit Playhouse's revival this season of last year's popular success, MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, continues to add luster to this thoroughly enjoyable juke box musical about the historic meeting at Sun Records of four of rock n' roll legends, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The show using music by these icons of pop music with a book by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux ensnares its audience in what the Jerry Lee Lewis character aptly terms the "devil's music" - capturing the full revolutionary force of early Rock and the originality of these musicians.

Portland Stage opens its 2016-2017 season with a quietly poignant production of A. R. Gurney's Later Life, the 1993 drama which explores the emotional choices and self-assessments that face people in their retirement years. The four-character piece is subdued, even reticent, and it speaks with the kind of understated wistfulness of so many of Gurney's plays.

Portland Players opened its 86th season with an intense production of the Ivan Menchell-Don Black-Frank Wildhorn musical, Bonnie and Clyde, about the legendary Depression-era American outlaws. The 2009 musical theatre retelling of the short and violent lives of this pair, who robbed banks and left scores of dead victims in their wake as they evaded the law in a misguided quest for notoriety, puts a romantic spin on their legend at the same time that it does not side step the grittier aspects of this tale.

The Theater at Monmouth brings its season of French themed plays to a mirthful close with Marc Camoletti's1960s jet-setting bedroom farce Boeing Boeing. The entirely predictable, but nonetheless hilarious comedy about a swinging Paris bachelor and his three stewardess fiances is performed with energy and elan by the excellent company of actors in a briskly paced staging by Dawn McAdams.

One of the most popular movie musicals adapted for the stage, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has enjoyed several notable regional productions in the past few seasons, and the Ogunquit Playhouse's current staging demonstrates once again the nostalgic appeal of this sweet and folksy romantic tale set in America's pioneer days. The Kasha/Landay/Mercer/DePaul/Hirschhorn 1954 movie musical based on a Stephen Vincent Benet story, though it proved a disappointment when first adapted for the musical theatre stage in 1982, seems in the turbulent first decades of the 21st century to have struck chords in audiences who may hunger for the innocence and vibrant energy at its core.

The young and young at heart were treated to a day of enchantment at Maine State Music Theatre today, when the company presented four performances of Marc Robin and Curt Dale Clark's delightful musical retelling of Aladdin, directed and choreographed by Raymond Marc Dumont. Presented in a fully staged production, this timeless tale conjures up the magic of wish making, the power of love to transform, and the importance of believing in one's self. In the past few seasons, MSMT has made a concerted effort to expand and enhance their Young Audiences series by offering original musicals based on traditional children's literature and packaged in sophisticated productions with elaborate costumes, imaginative scenery and stagecraft. Moreover, these hour-long performances are entirely created by MSMT's young professional artists- interns, apprentices, and local actors – thereby offering these artists a chance to gain valuable experience.

'We are the storytellers; we are the musicmakers; we are the dreamers of dreams.' With these words the cast of Frank McCourt's The Irish and How They Got That Way brings to a close a spellbinding evening of story and song that has the audience clapping, foot-tapping, weeping, and laughing in one of the most vibrant theatrical experiences in recent memory. The co-production of Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt's 1997 play with music marks a stunningly successful collaboration between Maine State Music Theatre and Portland Stage and promises to be a major hit for its brief four-week engagement. McCourt's one-hundred-minute drama tells the story of several centuries of the Irish experience on both sides of the Atlantic. No mere history lesson, however, as much knowledge as the play does impart, rather The Irish is a poetic, saucy, irreverent, and exquisitely beautiful tapestry of music, language, narrative, peopled with colorful characters and showcased in compelling song and dance.

'It's the music and the storytelling; the storytelling walks a fine line between being universal and silly. There is a lot of humor and a lot of warmth and so many relationships you can connect with. All that coupled with joyful, upbeat, recognizable music - those crazy tunes by those inspired creators - make for magic.' Leading lady Lauren Mufson is explaining what she believes to be the enduring appeal of the joyous ABBA musical, Mamma Mia! In which she is currently playing Donna Sheridan, a role she performed on Broadway and national tour. She is joined by a panel of other artists - actors Ian Knauer (Sam Carmichael), Mylinda Hull (Rosie), Chelsea Williams (Sophie) and stage manager Mark Johnson - all involved with the stunning revival that opened to rave reviews at Maine State Music Theatre on August 11th for the last in the Peek Behind the Curtain series of interviews by Broadway World's Carla Maia Verdino-Sullwold, held at Brunswick's Curtis Memorial Library on August 17th.

When Aladdin, directed and choreographed by Raymond Marc Dumont, opens on August 22, the four performances at Maine State Music Theatre will mark twenty-six years of collaboration and fifteen original shows created by the team of Marc Robin and Curt Dale Clark. These two highly respected artists – Robin, director, choreographer, Artistic Director of the Fulton Theatre and Clark, actor, director, Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre – have devoted a considerable portion of their indefatigable creative energy to composing, writing the books and lyrics for a series of musical fairytales designed to introduce new audiences to the magic, make believe and miracles that theatre can offer to the young and young at heart.

'There are two kinds of people in the world, as ye very well know,' Peter Cormican asserts in a lilting accent, 'those that are Irish and those that want to be.' The English-born actor, son Irish parents - a Protestant mother from Belfast and a Catholic father from Galway - is currently in Maine to make his Maine State Music Theatre/Portland Stage debut in Frank McCourt's play The Irish and How They Got That Way, directed by Marc Robin, which opens in Portland August 19th. The production, a bold new collaboration between two of Maine leading Equity companies, marks an exciting new chapter for both theatres and promises to be one of the season's biggest hits, as it has been in every town its played. Cormican is joined in our conversation by two of the other four principals from the a small cast that also stars Curt Dale Clark [see BWW interview 5/24/16], Charis Leos and Cary Michele Miller, (and features Cameron Wright and Emily Davis, Ernest Sauceda (fiddler) and two other musicians). Both Leos and Miller are MSMT veterans, but new to McCourt's play. 'This is my debut at Portland Stage,' Miller says with anticipation. 'I always look forward to working with Curt and Charis and Marc, and I am enjoying getting to know Peter. And I am always excited to learn new material and new music.'