MAINE THEATER REVIEWS

As its mainstage season draws to a close, Maine State Music Theatre presented the second of its offerings for young audiences, Shrek Jr.,The Musical in an ambitiously staged interpretation of the 2008 David Lindsay-Abaire-Jeanine Tesori musical version of the Disneyworks film that packed Brunswick's...

Maine State Ballet's latest production of Coppelia is marked by a lovely wistfulness and lyricism and bolstered by fine choreography and impressive dancing. While not as glittering as the company's two previous offerings (Cinderella and Le Corsaire), this Coppelia is, nonetheless, a captivating and ...

Maine State Music Theatre marshaled all its resources for the finale of its 2015 season with a stunning production of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, filled with rollicking humor, brilliant dancing, and dazzling design effects that had the opening night audience on their feet cheering not only at cu...

Check out the new review for this great theater, and get yourself to the barn!...

In this 2015 season of 'Magic, Murder, and Mayhem' Maine's Theater at Monmouth serves up a gripping adaptation of Henry James' familiar tale of psychological Gothic horror, The Turn of the Screw. The novella tells the story of a governess' battle to wrench her two young charges from the grasp of spi...

Great theater happening Maine! Check out the Review on broadwayworld.com...

Under new artistic leadership this summer after fifty years of visionary music making from festival founder, Lewis Kaplan, the Bowdoin International Music festival continues its tradition of world-class chamber and instrumental music led now by Phillip and David Ying. The Yings, together with their ...

Who doesn't love Meredith Willson's classic musical, Music Man, with its thrilling score, its witty humor, its irresistible combination of bravura and unabashed romanticism?. Generations have grown up on movie versions and memories of the big Broadway productions. So when a company undertakes a revi...

VICTOR/VICTORIA's gender-bending exploration of sexual identity and orientation may have seemed fresh, even daring, in 1982, but by the time it hit Broadway in 1995 it was already a bit tame. Today in a 20th anniversary production at Maine's Ogunquit Playhouse, it feels downright quaint when compare...

In the first act of the Menken/Slater/Steinkellner musical comedy, Sister Act, the heroine, Sister Mary Clarence (aka Deloris Van Cartier) tells Mother Superior that song should come from the soul to raise the rafters. Maine State Music Theatre's second season offering does just that with a dazzling...

'Fame/I'm gonna live forever/I'm gonna learn how to fly. . . .'So sings the company of young aspiring actors in the Steve Margoshes/Jacques Levy 1984 musical, FAME, and, indeed, one finds the description appropriate for the talented cast which Maine State Music Theatre has assembled for its annual i...

The Full Monty, which opened Maine State Music Theatre's fifty-seventh season, has all the makings of a new hit for the company! The rollicking, sometimes raucous story of unemployed Buffalo steel workers who create a male strip act to make money has characters to embrace and identify with, clever a...

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...

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.' S...

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 o...

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 Blan...

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-fi...

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 professio...

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...

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 thi...

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 ...

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, wit...

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...

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...