Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold - Page 20

After the impossibly long winter, summer is finally coming to Maine shores, woods, and towns. And along with summer outdoors fun, comes the return of summer theatre. Maine is blessed to have a wide selected of professional and community playhouses from which to choose. Here is but a small sampling:

South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre Company closes its 2014-2015 season with a gripping rendition of Jon Robin Baitz's 2011 drama, Other Desert Cities. The play explores the painful bonds and conflicts in a family whose relationships have are strained by differences in political thinking, by the loss of their oldest son, and by their daughter's desire to recount the truth as she sees it. The drama, set largely in 2004 in the bellicose post 9/11 America of George W. Bush, is about the fine line between acting and reality, the dark depths of deception, and the devastating, yet healing consequences of discovering the truth.

Maine State Music Theatre Finds Its Talent for Summer 2015 When the audience thinks of casting for a Broadway musical, they conjure up the image of a darkened auditorium, an artist onstage peering into the glare and hearing Zach's voice from out of the void with its curt dismissal, 'Thank you.' Since its smash opening on Broadway in 1975 A Chorus Line has come to embody in poetic terms the uphill struggles of countless artists who toil every day on stage and off in pursuit of the metier they love. The rituals of auditioning and casting calls are integral to the life of an actor or theatre director, and each year they are played out in countless theatres large and small across the country, a crucial part of the puzzle that goes into shaping a successful season.

Portland Stage closes its season with the world premiere of award-winning Maine novelist, Monica Wood's touching first play, Papermaker. Set during the papermill strike of 1989 in the fictional town of Abbott Falls, Maine, the work probes the perceptions, conflicts, and interactions of individuals on both sides of the painful controversy. Handling material already familiar to her readers from her memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, Wood brings to the stage a compassionate grasp of character, a poetic sense of metaphor, and just enough sharp wit and turn of phrase to add spice to this all-too-human drama about ordinary folks whose lives and identities are turned upside down by the bitter labor dispute.

Lyric Music Theater of South Portland presents a rollicking production of Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, enlivened by the excellent performances of its leads, the cheeky choreography of Victoria Perreault, and the fast-paced direction of Mary Meserve and John Blanchette.

Portland's Good Theater brings its “lucky” thirteenth season to a close with a delightful original musical revue, Happy Days Are here Again: Streisand's 60s Songbook, dedicated to the legendary Barbra Streisand. Written and directed by Brian P. Allen and starring Lesley McKinnell, the seventy-five minute songfest takes the audience along on Streisand's journey from Brooklyn schoolgirl to Broadway, film, and recording star.

For its spring production Maine State Ballet presents a stylishly swashbuckling account of Le Corsaire, vividly choreographed by Linda MacArthur Miele (after Petipa) and elegantly designed by Gail Csoboth. The more than thirty-five principals, soloists, and corps de ballet, drawn from area professionals and talented young dancers in the company school form a cohesive troupe, who seem to have grown in polish and precision over the past few years and who are not afraid to tackle the demands of this large scale Romantic ballet.

Portland Players has mounted a sensitive and thought-provoking production of Tom Griffin's 1988 play, Boys Next Door, about four colorful residents of a group communal home and their social worker. Griffin's work deals perceptively and sympathetically with the limitations and hopes of his characters, their skewed realities and their often hilarious interactions. In the person of Jack, the burned-out, yet compassionate counselor, the playwright is able to help the audience gain insight into the world of these mentally challenged adults and to appreciate their humanity.

South Portland's Madhorse Theatre has mounted the world premiere of Callie Kimball's Alligator Road, an incisive and insightful drama about family relationships, race, and the meaning of personal freedom. The play was first read at Madhorse's By Local Series last year, and the company has helped this talented young Maine playwright to bring this topical and timeless play to the stage.

Portland's Good Theater's fourth play of the season is the Maine premiere of Sharr White's The Other Place, a compelling and compassionate exploration of trauma, illusion, and dementia. Directed with quiet, yet hair-raising intensity by Brian P. Allen and starring the remarkable Denise Poirier, the production keeps the audience invested and involved from start to finish.

South Portland's Madhorse Theatre Company has chosen to mount Kimberly Akimbo, an edgy, quirky, wrenching comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire, as their second offering of the season. The five-character tale of a teenager's coming to terms with a strange disease that has caused her to age prematurely, with her damaged and dysfunctional New Jersey family, and with the pangs of first love is etched with colorful characters and occasionally brilliant dialogue and is given a sensitive production by director Nathan Speckman.

'All our stories this year will be about families or individuals who are broken, but they come back to make the best of it - to survive. That is our job as human beings, and if our shows can give somebody the strength and courage to do just that, then we in the theatre are doing our jobs.' Curt Dale Clark, Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre, is waxing eloquent about the company's plans for the 2015 summer season, the fifty-seventh for the company, and his second in the leadership position. Together with his partner, Managing Director, Stephanie Dupal, Clark outlines their plans for what they hope will be a worthy encore to last year's spectacularly successful season.

Maine's Midcoast Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Rohan Smith presented a program of American composers, which included the rarely heard Symphony in E Minor by Amy Beach and music from George Chadwick's Symphonic Sketches, together with Ferde Grofe's well-known Grand Canyon Suite at Topsham's Orion Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, January 25, 2014. And while the audience most likely delighted in the last of these compositions, it was the Chadwick and Beach which gave the afternoon its primary merit.

The American Irish Repertory Ensemble is bringing a colorful, lighthearted celebration of Christmas to the Studio Theatre at Portland Stage. The company presented staged versions of beloved Irish folktales, Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales and Susan and Tony Reilly's A Wren's Tale, told in song, verse, and in the Celtic dance of the StIllson School of Irish Dance troupe. The veteran actors and cast of charming children brought a warmth and naturalness to the 'feel-good' evening.

Portland's Good Theater celebrated Christmas with a delightfully conceived and stylishly performed musical revue, Broadway at the Good Theater, created and directed by Brian P. Allen. Devoted to the music of the 60s and showcasing both Broadway show tunes and other iconic popular melodies, this almost forty-song evening flows seamlessly through the diverse music of the decade. Allen's selection of numbers reads like an index to the masterpieces of that tumultuous decade, and yet, he is astute in selecting some of the lesser-known production numbers together with the undeniable blockbusters. Moreover, he knows how to weave them together subtly to chronicle an era, and he provides musical staging that is characterful, but just right for the context.

Once again 2014 was a year to revel in the diversity and accomplishments of the theatrical scene in Maine. The summer and winter seasons yielded a nice balance between adventurous programming and classics. Here is my personal list for 2014, grouped by theatre company and show. 1. MAINE STATE MUSIC THEATRE once again receives my vote for the finest company in the region. Their 2014 season offered four dazzling main stage productions, including the remarkable revival of Chamberlain: A Civil War Romance, a daring and moving music theatre piece, beautifully realized by director-choreographer Marc Robin together with stars James Patterson and Kathy Voytko.

In this season of ubiquitous productions of A Christmas Carol, a production of Lionel Bart's Oliver! comes as a welcome Dickensian alternative. South Portland's Lyric Music Theater has mounted a very respectable revival of Bart's 1960 musical based on Oliver Twist. A curious but catchy melange of dark drama and vaudeville, Oliver! survives in its trio of principal characters, Fagin, Nancy, and Sykes, and the memorable music Bart has written for them.

Portland Stage's second production of the season, Stephen Temperley's witty and poignant memoire about Florence Foster Jenkins, Souvenir, whisks the audience back and forth between hilarity and heartache. The two-character drama told from the perspective of Mme. Jenkins' longsuffering accompanist, Cosme McMoon, traces the collaboration between the pianist and New York socialite and would-be opera diva, Florence Foster Jenkins, who delighted audiences -for all the wrong reasons - with her colorful recitals from 1932-1944.

For its fall offering, the New England Regional Theatre Company mounted an ambitious and stirring production of Man of La Mancha at the Orion Performing Arts Center in Topsham, Maine. The sixteen-person cast and twelve-musician ensemble invested this touching revival with passion and intelligence. Directed by John Willey, the 1965 Dale Wasserman-Mitch Leigh-Joe Darrion musical based on Miguel de Cervantes' epic novel, Don Quixote still burns with intensity, idealism, and a much-needed antidote in a chaotic modern world - the courage and hope to 'fight for the right' and follow the quest. Willey strikes the right balance between comedy and drama, and he handles the musical's framing device - that of Cervantes recounting his tale in a prison of the Inquisition - with visual and theatrical aplomb. He keeps the entire cast on stage for the duration and uses the exceptionally wide Orion space inventively, so that the action flows naturally and his musical staging is completely organic. Moreover, he elicits from his actors a fervent luminosity that proves inspiring.

Portland's Good Theater has mounted the Maine premiere of Jeffrey Thatcher's wacky, wickedly funny comedy, Mrs. Mannerly, a two-character spoof of the obsession with politeness, manners, and surface polish which often disguises truths. Set in the 1960s in Steubenville, OH, Hatcher tells the tale of a character (bearing his own name) who takes on the challenge of trying to achieve a perfect score in the etiquette class of the fearsome Mrs. Mannerly, long a town institution. Jeffrey's quest leads him to crack the facade of Mrs. Mannerly's presentation and past, and in so doing to discover that inner and outer reality frequently have little in common.