THE BARNSTORMERS THEATRE

by Dan Marois - June 15, 2026

Based on Tina Fey's (of Saturday Night Live fame) wildly popular 2004 film, Mean Girls wisely embraces what made the original such a phenomenon while bringing enough energy and personality to succeed on stage. Like many movie adaptations, however, it occasionally struggles to escape comparisons to t...

by Dan Marois - May 11, 2026

Among the heavy hitters of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice catalog, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat doesn’t always carry the same somber weight as Phantom of the Opera or Jesus Christ Superstar. That’s likely because Webber originally penned it at the tender age of 20 as a mode...

by Dan Marois - May 10, 2026

What starts as a casual catch-up among old colleagues spirals into something much heavier, darker, and deeply haunting in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, now playing at the Players’ Ring in Portsmouth. In the famously intimate confines of the Ring—where the actors are often close enough to breat...

by Dan Marois - April 29, 2026

At Seacoast Repertory Theatre, the current production of Altar Boyz plays less like a traditional musical and more like a full-on concert experience—loud, fast, and packed with driving beats and body-bending choreography.t did our critic think of ALTAR BOYZ at Seacoast Repertory Theatre?...

by Dan Marois - April 14, 2026

There is something immediately disarming about “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” It doesn’t arrive with spectacle or grand stakes; there are no sweeping romances or life-or-death consequences. Instead, it gives you a handful of awkward kids, a gymnasium, and a spelling competition....

by Dan Marois - March 15, 2026

There’s one thing that the Seacoast Repertory Theatre knows how to do very well. It’s transforming their intimate, brick-walled space in Portsmouth into a world that feels ten times its actual size. Their current production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—the 2005 musical based on the Steve Martin/...