MAINE THEATER REVIEWS

South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre Company ended its season with a poignant and ambitious production of the Tony-award-winning musical, Grey Gardens. A musical is a bit of a departure for the small theatre company and its tiny black box space, but they acquitted themselves with both substance and ap...

In an Ogunquit Playhouse season that will launch regional premieres of Billy Elliot, The Witches of Eastwick, The Addams Family and performances of an all time favorite, Mary Poppins, the season opener of Grease is a musical lightweight....

Lewiston's Public Theatre ended its 2013-2014 season with Ron Hutchinson's slapstick sendup about the script writing of Gone with the Wind, Moonlight and Magnolias. Premiered in 2004, the play imagines the tense week in which the legendary producer, David O. Selznick, effectively kidnaps his new wri...

Portland Stage closes its 2013-2014 season with a sharp production of Evan Smith's saucy, yet serious comedy, The Savannah Disputation, as play which examines the foibles of faith and the thorny issues of religious dogma. Smith's 2009 play, set in his native Savannah, recounts the story of two ag...

With the snow finally off the ground, birds returning home, and the beaches beckoning, it is once again summertime in Maine. With the major professional companies ending their seasons in late May, Maine's numerous summer theatres soon go into full swing with an exciting lineup of summer theatre. Her...

Portland's Good Theater closed its season with a highly original and poetic premiere of Stephen Underwood's multi-media performance piece, Underwater Guy. Underwood's play uses video, music, lights, scenery, and a single actor/narrator to recount the protagonist's lifelong obsession with diving, und...

With its new production of Cinderella, the Maine State Ballet, one of only a handful of professional classical dance organizations in the state, proved the saying that 'everything is beautiful at the ballet.' Linda MacArthur Miele's staging of the Prokofiev classic played to sold out houses, compris...

Portland Stage's production of Nina Raine's 2010 play,Tribes, offers a thoughtful exploration of the bonds forged by communication. The play, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London and later Off-Broadway, is a scathingly funny, warm look at a dysfunctional family and their interaction ...

Noel Coward's 1930 romantic comedy is a perennial pleasure, but one which requires an impeccable sense of period style and elan. The stylish new production at Portland Players rises to this challenge with an elegant, witty, well-paced rendition of this sendup of warring couples inextricably bound by...

The tiny Mad Horse Theater in South Portland, Maine, has proved once again that it is capable of and committed to producing provocative, exciting, even difficult plays and doing just that with consummate style! Its latest endeavor, a gut-wrenching production of Lyle Kessler's 1983 Drama League Award...

In presenting the world premiere of Tom Coash's play, Veils, the winner of the 2012 Clauder Competition for New England playwrights, Portland Stage has introduced audiences to a brave new work which addresses the thorny crosscurrents of cultural identity. The company, as always, has mounted this mov...

Lyric Music Theater has mounted a dazzling new hit to brighten the waning days of winter. Under the direction of Raymond Marc Dumont, the venerable South Portland community theatre has put together an energetic, sophisticated, and compelling production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods that is, ...

In undertaking Bernard Pomerance's 1977 play, The Elephant Man, the Studio Theatre of Bath delivers a remarkably thoughtful performance of the poignant period drama. The play, well known from its London and New York runs and subsequent film and television versions, fares surprisingly well when re...

Lewiston's Public Theatre has mounted a stylish, wistful, zany production of Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still, a bittersweet comedy that looks at the absurd side of dysfunction. The play, which had its premiere at New York's Roundabout Theatre, tells the intertwined stories of two families who ha...

Portland Stage's stylish and stirring production of Words by Ira Gershwin and the Great American Songbook offers fascinating insight into the alchemy of a song. Joseph Vass' 2013 play examines the professional life and art of "the other Gershwin," George's brother, his lyricist, and the creator of ...

In 1961 at the 41st Street Theatre in New York City, African-American poet-playwright Langston Hughes premiered a work called Black Nativity, a collection of gospel songs punctuated by Hughes's own verse narrating the birth of Jesus. After a very short run, the only souvenir of that historic event w...

Portland Stage Studio Theatre's Christmas reprise of David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries is eighty-five minutes of rollicking, wicked good fun (as Mainers like to say!). This is due not only to Sedaris' mordant comic style, but also to the chameleon brilliance of Dustin Tucker as Elf Crumpet....

The Portland Players choice of Rogers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music for their holiday season is a joyous one for cast and audience alike. The production directed by Joshua Chard with a cast of primarily young players radiates a warmth and sincerity which makes up for any of its defects....

The Good Theater's (Portland, ME) New England premiere of A.R. Gurney's latest play, The Grand Manner, is a wistful, droll, and stylish production of this charming, nostalgic paean to theatre on the Great White Way in 1948. The play, which originally opened at New York's Lincoln Center Theatre in 20...

The Portland Stage production of Canadian playwright Morris Panych's black comedy, Vigil, is a provocative and challenging mounting of an often off-putting play. That the company once again has the courage to undertake a work that has had mixed success in the U.S. and clearly pushes the limits of da...

Maine's Shakespeare Theater at Monmouth staged a vigorous, youthful adaptation of Shakespeare's 'joyous comedy,' Twelfth Night, this weekend at the historic Cumston Hall. The production will tour communities and schools in Maine as a apart of an NEA grant....

Portland's (Maine) Good Theater opened its 2013-2014 season with an incisive production of Bruce Norris' 2011 Pultizer Prize winning drama, Clybourne Park. The play, inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, explores the issues of subtle, yet pervasive racism in a Chicago neighborhood, f...

'Blues are a way of understanding,' Ma Rainey tells her band in the second act of August Wilson's 1984 play set in a 1920s recording studio in Jim Crow era Chicago. And, indeed, Wilson uses music as a means of making sense of the African-American experience in a world scarred by racism and violence....

?The Ogunquit Playhouse's revival of the legendary Bernstein-Sondheim-Laurents-Robbins classic, West Side Story, which opened September 5th pulsates with muscular energy and wrenching pathos. It is a production which makes the essence of the original creators palpable at the same time that it takes ...

The Lewiston-Auburn Community Little Theatre, one of Maine's oldest community theatres, is closing its 2012-2013 season with a madcap production of Monty Python's Spamalot. The energetic ensemble directed by John Blanchette and Richard Martin romps through the zany script and songs with elan....