MAINE THEATER REVIEWS

The Ogunquit Playhouse opens its 85th season on a romantic Greek island....

Strong work at Portland Stage....

"I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti" feeds the heart and soul of Penobscot Theatre Company....

Some Theatre Company Experiences a 'Spring Awakening'...

There are plenty of reasons to make Maine your summer destination: the breathtaking coastline, beautiful beaches, pristine trails to hike, waterways to sail, and wildlife to observe. But Maine also has a long history of being home to respected summer theatres, and in recent seasons the wealth of pe...

Portland Stage's latest production is an engaging staging of Brenda Withers' new play, String Around My Finger, which had won the 2015 Clauder Competition and then been developed through the theatre's Little Festival of the Unexpected. The four-character play, set entirely in a hospital where a you...

In one of its largest, most ambitious productions in recent seasons, Mad Horse Theatre has mounted a searing account of Stephen Adly Guirgis's riveting drama, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The sixteen-member cast under the direction of Stacey Koloski forms an intense, cohesive ensemble to recou...

Good Theater Artistic Director Brian P. Allen chose to close the season with a lovely, lyrical production of Horton Foote's platy, The Trip to Bountiful, in which Louisa Flaningam's luminous interpretation of Carrie Watts is surely one of the Portland theatre calendar's highlights....

Maine State Ballet opens its spring season with an ambitious full-length production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake that offers a compelling account of the timeless Romantic classic and demonstrates how this Maine company continues to grow artistically. Presented several times in the past decade in short...

Monica Wood's 'Papermaker' hits home at Bangor's Penobscot Theatre....

South Portland's Lyric Music Theater is taking a bold and daring step in presenting the 2006 musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's 1891 provocative play, Spring Awakening. The wrenching musical drama explores with a piercing honesty the lives of teenagers and their adult authority figures locked in...

For those wishing to take a trip back to a simpler era, Biddeford City Theater's production of Pump Boys & Dinettes serves up a wistful, warm slice of nostalgia together with a foot-tapping country musical score that is guaranteed to leave the audience smiling and singing along. The 1980s juke bo...

On Sunday, March 5th, I saw DEAR CHUCK, by Jonathan Dorf at the Winslow Homer Center for the Arts. It was quite an evening!...

Portland Stage's current production, Jonathan Tolins' one-man, bitter-sweet comedy, Buyer & Cellar, offers Maine audiences a chance to revel not only in the protean talents of Dustin Tucker, who gives a compelling, engaging, irresistible ninety-minute virtuosic performance, but also in Tolins' agile...

With its winter production of Joseph Kesselring's classic comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace, Portland Stage's serves up a delightful vintage cocktail - complete with more than one amusing twist. The 1947 play, people with a cast of loveable, zany misfits who cheerfully engage in murder and mayhem retai...

Good Theater's Executive/Artistic Director Brian P. Allen has a remarkable sixth sense about choosing plays whose situations and characters resonate with originality and empathy. The latest production, Molly Smith Metzler's The May Queen, is an engaging portrait of five small town characters who al...

'Bold, beautiful, brilliant' even are perhaps the first adjectives that come to mind to describe Mad Horse Theatre's latest production of Jenifer Haley's provocative play The Nether. And these words are quickly followed by 'difficult, disturbing, and dense.' The eighty-minute dark psychological dram...

When Portland Stage rang down the curtain on its last of the 2016 season performances of Dickens' A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, the company was celebrating a long cherished tradition that has delighted generations of Maine theatre goers since 1996. Directed and designed by Anita Stewart, the p...

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 musi...

John Cariani's play services those seeking a restart....

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...

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 L...

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 k...

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 s...

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 energ...