Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold - Page 16

'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.'

It's just about a week now since the Broadway World Audience Choice Awards were announced, and here in Maine, we are happy to report that all the certificates have been sent and the individual winners congratulated.  In Brunswick, the home of Maine State Music Theatre Artistic Director Curt Dale Clark and Managing Director Stephanie Dupal received a special plaque to congratulate the theatre for having swept the Audience Choice awards two years in a row, garnering 10 in 2015 and 11 in 2016 and for having been selected Critic's Choice for the past three seasons.  Among the other companies with multiple winners in 2016 were Portland Players and Portland Stage. A toast to 2016 and on to another great Maine theatre season in 2017!

A two character play in which the actors sit behind a desk and read from letters for eighty minutes poses a series of challenges to any director. What is it then that makes Brian P. Allen's new production of A.R. Gurney's 1989 drama, Love Letters, so completely mesmerizing? Not only is Gurney's writing poetic and poignant, but the production, which opened at Portland's Good Theater this past week starring Kathleen Kimball and Brian Allen (his role later assumed by Tony Reilly and then Steve Underwood), is so perfectly calibrated, so subtly interiorized that it resembles a fine chamber music performance.

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.

I continue my series of mini video profiles of Maine theatre artists with this portrait of actor, dancer, singer, director, and choreographer, Raymond Marc Dumont.  A lewiston/Auburn native and an AEA and SDC professional, 'Ray' has worked extensively in Maine and is closely associated with companies such as Maine State Music Theatre, Mad Horse Theatre, Portland Players, and Lyric Music Theater.

Bangor's Penobscot Theatre Company is devoting the month of December to a jaunty, spirited production of the Lionel Bart musical, Oliver!. Directed/choreographed by Allison Bibicoff, production is clearly a labor of love, employing (for this theatre) a moderately large cast and the best of the company's current resources. The result is energetic and entertaining with moments of engaging drama.

Portland's Good Theater performs its annual musical revue, Broadway at the Good Theater this weekend bringing warmth, cheer, and an array of musical treats to mark the holiday season. Conceived, written, and directed by Brian P. Allen, this year's two hours of song and dance was devoted to the musicals of the 1970s.

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.

Following the first installment of my Theatre Miniature series - a profile of Curt Dale Clark - this second mini-video takes a look at the indefatigable Executive and Artistic Director of Portland's Good Theater, Brian P. Allen.

'New theatre work is important because it is more likely to reflect what is actually going on in the world; it can speak to global happenings and events and find ways to digest them and cope with them.' Artistic Director of Maine State Music Theatre Curt Dale Clark is talking about his recent visit to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) Conference and Festival of New Musicals in New York on October 24-28, 2016. Clark, who has been a NAMT Board member for the past two years and currently co-chair of the membership committee, is proud that his theatre company, MSMT, has been a founding member of the organization since its inception thirty-six years ago, and praises 'our continued efforts on its behalf that help cement the relationship between the two not-for-profits.'

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.

During the first act of Christopher Durang's Tony award-winning 2013 play, Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike, the characters muse that 'if everyone were on anti-depressants, there would be no Chekhov.' Happily for Portland theatre goers, it seems that none of the six colorful, endearing, eccentric personages in Durang's contemporary comedy appears to be on any medication. Rather they squabble and moan and rant about their lives in absurdly clever and humorous dialogue as they struggle to find some happiness in the human bonds which connect them.

When the now embattled Wells Fargo recently ran a series of ads suggesting that young people grow up and 'out of careers in the arts' and into 'mature choices of professions like the sciences and business,' the implications of the spots seriously irritated and alarmed most of us in the theatre community. A dancer yesterday, an engineer today….what message is that sending to our young people, many of whom are already deprived of arts education in their schools? It was then that the idea occurred to me and our Broadway World editors that a series of short video profiles asking successful theatre people why they had chosen a life in performance and what the rewards have been for them might be just the antidote.

Biddeford's City Theater opened its season with a warm, wistful comedy about love and intergenerational relationships in a New Jersey Italian-American family. Joe Di Pietro's 1998 Over the River and Through the Woods is a funny, touching, and often penetrating memoir about ageless conflicts between old and young and the inevitable changes that come in relationships with the changing times. In the City Theater of Biddeford's production, these completely relatable memories come to life with vivid truthfulness.

Ogunquit Playhouse's revival this season of last year's popular success, MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, continues to add luster to this thoroughly enjoyable juke box musical about the historic meeting at Sun Records of four of rock n' roll legends, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The show using music by these icons of pop music with a book by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux ensnares its audience in what the Jerry Lee Lewis character aptly terms the "devil's music" - capturing the full revolutionary force of early Rock and the originality of these musicians.

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.

Portland Players opened its 86th season with an intense production of the Ivan Menchell-Don Black-Frank Wildhorn musical, Bonnie and Clyde, about the legendary Depression-era American outlaws. The 2009 musical theatre retelling of the short and violent lives of this pair, who robbed banks and left scores of dead victims in their wake as they evaded the law in a misguided quest for notoriety, puts a romantic spin on their legend at the same time that it does not side step the grittier aspects of this tale.

The Theater at Monmouth brings its season of French themed plays to a mirthful close with Marc Camoletti's1960s jet-setting bedroom farce Boeing Boeing. The entirely predictable, but nonetheless hilarious comedy about a swinging Paris bachelor and his three stewardess fiances is performed with energy and elan by the excellent company of actors in a briskly paced staging by Dawn McAdams.

One of the most popular movie musicals adapted for the stage, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has enjoyed several notable regional productions in the past few seasons, and the Ogunquit Playhouse's current staging demonstrates once again the nostalgic appeal of this sweet and folksy romantic tale set in America's pioneer days. The Kasha/Landay/Mercer/DePaul/Hirschhorn 1954 movie musical based on a Stephen Vincent Benet story, though it proved a disappointment when first adapted for the musical theatre stage in 1982, seems in the turbulent first decades of the 21st century to have struck chords in audiences who may hunger for the innocence and vibrant energy at its core.