Louise Marsh News

BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON runs at Mad Horse Theatre through October 15, and the critics are weighing in!

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 32nd season with the riotous rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, music & lyrics by Michael Friedman, and book by Alex Timbers.

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 32nd season with the riotous rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, music & lyrics by Michael Friedman, and book by Alex Timbers.

Mad Horse Theatre Company's 32nd season lineup boasts three critically acclaimed plays and an award-winning musical!

Maine State Ballet brings some Spanish spice to summer with a two-week run of Don Quixote, the classic comedic ballet based on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, August 10 through August 19, at Maine State Ballet's Lopez Theater.

Full casting has been announced for the New England premiere of DISASTER! THE MUSICAL; the 1970's disaster-movie musical written by Sirius/XM On Broadway host, Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick (Glee, Ellen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). One of the first mountings of this production since the show's 2016 Broadway run, Cast Aside Productions will be bringing DISASTER! to the Mainstage at Portland Stage Company, July 13-16.

Full casting has been announced for the New England premiere of DISASTER! THE MUSICAL; the 1970's disaster-movie musical written by Sirius/XM On Broadway host, Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick (Glee, Ellen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). One of the first mountings of this production since the show's 2016 Broadway run, Cast Aside Productions will be bringing DISASTER! to the Mainstage at Portland Stage Company, July 13-16.

Full casting has been announced for the New England premiere of DISASTER! THE MUSICAL; the 1970's disaster-movie musical written by Sirius/XM On Broadway host, Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick (Glee, Ellen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). One of the first mountings of this production since the show's 2016 Broadway run, Cast Aside Productions will be bringing DISASTER! to the Mainstage at Portland Stage Company, July 13-16.

Mad Horse Theatre's 2018 has certainly pushed the envelope in repertoire choices, fearlessly programming provocative, often dark, edgy, but always intensely human plays. Its last selection of the season, Anne Washburn's 2012 Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, coming on the heels of The Nether and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, brings this adventurous season to a stirring conclusion.

"This is probably the hardest play I have ever done," director Reba Short confides about her latest assignment, Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play that opens at South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre Company Friday, May 5th. "There are so many moving parts to this play. I have had to call up every class ever took in college and every skill I've ever learned. It's a very complicated work that moves from realism to kabuki like stylization and takes place in three distinct realms and times. I completely understand why [playwright] Anne Washburn called it a 'beast of a play.'"

When you think of post-apocalyptic heroes, Mad Max or Snake Plissken might immediately come to mind. But Bart and Homer Simpson? Ay, caramba!

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 recount this imaginary narrative about the fate of Christ's betrayer and to grapple with huge questions about guilt and salvation, doubt and faith, blame and forgiveness.

'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 drama with sci-fi thriller overtones, directed by Christine Louise Marshall, invites the spectator into a seductive and frightening world of obsession, compulsion, and perverse desire, and yet, by the time the wrenching evening has run its course, both characters and audience have found a measure of catharsis and truth that is its own ray of light.

'It's so wonderful to hear a playwright's voice and think 'I have never heard that said in that way. It's a lovely thing!' The Artistic Director of South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre Company is talking about the theatre's upcoming Maine premiere of Jennifer Haley's dark and riveting drama, The Nether, which opens Thursday, January 19, 2017. Marshall, who has also directed the play and created the props and costumes, is undaunted by the disturbing themes of Jennifer Haley's sci-fi thriller which raises provocative moral issues, because she says, ' Despite the gravity of the situations it deals with, it is a beautiful piece that I find absolutely bewitching.'

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 31st season with the perfect foil to the crazy circus of this year's election! 

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 31st season with the perfect foil to the crazy circus of this year's election! 

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 31st season with the perfect foil to the crazy circus of this year's election! 

Mad Horse Theatre Company opens its 31st season with the perfect foil to the crazy circus of this year's election! 

?The St. James Studio is delighted to once again be a host venue for the EFG London Jazz Festival. Eight events will take place at the St. James over the course of the festival, which will run from Friday 11 to Sunday 20 November 2016.

South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre closed out its season with a prickly and provocative production of Aaron Posner's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull - Stupid F**king Bird - a contemporary "deconstruction" which brilliantly mines the inherent humor as well as the aching ennui of the Russian playwright. Tautly paced by director Christopher Price, the excellent cast gives an immediacy to the play, which Chekhov, himself, actually called a "comedy in four acts."