Anita Stewart News

Portland Stage has announced the kick-off to its 2017-2018 Season with Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill by Lanie Robertson, starring Tracey Conyer Lee. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel will join Anita Stewart, Portland Stage Executive Artistic Director, on the Mainstage for a discussion about her work on Monday, October 2, 2017 at 7 p.m.

Portland Stage has announced the kick-off to its 2017-2018 Season with Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill by Lanie Robertson, starring Tracey Conyer Lee. 

The memories are in the music, and Maine State Music Theatre and Portland Stage's latest co-production struts, sizzles smiles, and sparkles with energy and latent emotion. Classy, funny, lively, touching, vocally and instrumentally beautiful, this tightly constructed revue, The All Night Strut, offers a journey to an era where the world was in turmoil, time moved more slowly, hearts were worn on sleeves, and swing was the thing. Performed in a stylish production with a quartet of stunning soloists and a trio of fine musicians, this soundtrack of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s tells its story in song and dance and offers theatre-goers a wholly satisfying and warmly memorable experience.

"The All Night Strut will transport you to a time when life was happier, and the fun was the music. This show will prove that it is still about the music. The audience will go nuts for the production; they will eat it alive and want more and more of it." Curt Dale Clark knows from whence he speaks. The actor, director, author, and Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre has had the benefit of performing this songbook of the1930s,1940s, and 1950s in four prior productions, and he is confident that Maine audiences are going to love the production. "It is similar to The Irish," he says of last year's award-winning, sold-out collaboration, Frank McCourt's play The Irish and How They Got That Way, "in that the footprint exists for the show. Different actors populate it each time, but the end result is always the same. It is a huge hit!"

Maine State Music Theatre (MSMT) in Brunswick and Portland Stage (PS) in Portland, Maine announce a second partnership and artistic collaboration that will continue to broaden the connection between the two communities and deepen the program offerings for both theatres' audiences.

“The All Night Strut has a songbook to die for! It may not be as riotously funny as The Irish and How They Got Way was,” says Maine State Music Theatre's Artistic Director Curt Dale Clark, but I know from experience that the audience will leave the theatre exhilarated!” Clark, who will co-produce the show with Anita Stewart, Artistic Director of Portland Stage, describes the musical revue as “a collection of vignettes, each of which plays out before the next one begins. It is sort of like an evening of short stories that paints a colorful and poignant picture of 20th century America in the years of the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war.”

Strong work at Portland Stage.

Portland Stage mounts the annual Little Festival of the Unexpected with new play workshops from May 10 through May 13, 2017. Little Festival is a week-long event dedicated to public readings of new American plays. Three playwrights are in residence at Portland Stage throughout the week developing their scripts with input from actors, directors, dramaturgs, and audience members.

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 young couple finds themselves coping with the miscarriage of their child, resonates with a genuineness of dialogue, character and situation.

Maine State Music Theatre (MSMT) in Brunswick and Portland Stage (PS) in Portland announce a second partnership and artistic collaboration that will continue to broaden the connection between the two communities and deepen the program offerings for both theatres' audiences. 

Portland Stage has announced its 2017-18 Mainstage Season!

There was a buzz of excitement in theatres across the country on Wednesday, January 4, as Broadway World Regional Managing Editor Christina Mancuso announced each region's winners in the 2016 Broadway World Audience Choice Awards. Here in Maine within seconds of the postings, congratulations and comments poured in on social media and websites. Hoping to get a measure of the reaction, we contacted all the winners and took a sampling of responses to share with everyone.

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 production serves not only to bring holiday cheer to the company's audiences, but also to advance the theatre's commitment to theatre for children.

Having had the privilege to serve as Broadway World's Maine Editor for more than three years now, I can say with pride that the state, though remote as it may seem from the epicenter of the theatre world, Broadway, is blessed to be home to so many thriving theatre companies who produce exciting, vibrant seasons. As I compiled my list for 2016 with many familiar names, I was also struck by the extraordinary consistency of excellence these companies maintain. Here are my personal choices of the best in Maine, grouped by theatre and show.

Nilo Cruz's latest work, Sotto Voce (2014), is a delicate, haunting, poetic memory play that whispers and lulls its way into the hidden recesses of memory, as it slowly, gently, but heartrendingly reveals the characters' past lives, hopes, and dreams. Portland Stage's production directed by Liz Diamond is richly evocative and pitch perfect in tone and execution.

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 kind of understated wistfulness of so many of Gurney's plays.

'We are the storytellers; we are the musicmakers; we are the dreamers of dreams.' With these words the cast of Frank McCourt's The Irish and How They Got That Way brings to a close a spellbinding evening of story and song that has the audience clapping, foot-tapping, weeping, and laughing in one of the most vibrant theatrical experiences in recent memory. The co-production of Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt's 1997 play with music marks a stunningly successful collaboration between Maine State Music Theatre and Portland Stage and promises to be a major hit for its brief four-week engagement. McCourt's one-hundred-minute drama tells the story of several centuries of the Irish experience on both sides of the Atlantic. No mere history lesson, however, as much knowledge as the play does impart, rather The Irish is a poetic, saucy, irreverent, and exquisitely beautiful tapestry of music, language, narrative, peopled with colorful characters and showcased in compelling song and dance.

'There are two kinds of people in the world, as ye very well know,' Peter Cormican asserts in a lilting accent, 'those that are Irish and those that want to be.' The English-born actor, son Irish parents - a Protestant mother from Belfast and a Catholic father from Galway - is currently in Maine to make his Maine State Music Theatre/Portland Stage debut in Frank McCourt's play The Irish and How They Got That Way, directed by Marc Robin, which opens in Portland August 19th. The production, a bold new collaboration between two of Maine leading Equity companies, marks an exciting new chapter for both theatres and promises to be one of the season's biggest hits, as it has been in every town its played. Cormican is joined in our conversation by two of the other four principals from the a small cast that also stars Curt Dale Clark [see BWW interview 5/24/16], Charis Leos and Cary Michele Miller, (and features Cameron Wright and Emily Davis, Ernest Sauceda (fiddler) and two other musicians). Both Leos and Miller are MSMT veterans, but new to McCourt's play. 'This is my debut at Portland Stage,' Miller says with anticipation. 'I always look forward to working with Curt and Charis and Marc, and I am enjoying getting to know Peter. And I am always excited to learn new material and new music.'

'We are all Irish. Everyone loves the free, spirited, easy come-easy go air of the Irish, and this show makes everyone want to be Irish all the time - not just on St. Patrick's Day.' There is a twinkle in his eye, as Maine State Music Theatre's Artistic Director, Curt Dale Clark, utters those words. Immediately his sentiments are seconded by the show's director/choreographer, Marc Robin, and Portland Stage's Artistic Director, Anita Stewart, all three of whom will be joining forces to create Frank McCourt's play with music, The Irish and How They Got That Way, from August 16- September 4, 2016, at Portland Stage.