BWW Review: Portland Stage Celebrates 50th Season with Monica Wood's SAINT DAD
Portland Stage opens its fiftieth season with a warm, witty, insightful new play by one of Maine’s most original voices, Monica Wood, in a stylish production directed by Sally Wood. Portland Stage’s commitment to new work has been an enduring one, and surely one of the theatre’s brightest new endeavors has been to nurture the playwrighting talents of Monica Wood. Her latest work, SAINT DAD, is a polished and poignant play about the intersection of people from two very different worlds brought together by the sale of a family camp in rural Maine and the journey they take individually and collectively to reach some transformative epiphanies.
BWW Review: IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Brings Sweet Nostalgia to Portland Stage
In remounting playwright Joe Landry's live radio play version of the beloved classic IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, Portland Stage serves up a family friendly show filled with all the sweetness and nostalgia that make the holidays memorable. The production, directed and designed by Anita Stewart, tells the tale of George Bailey with warmth and humor, underscoring effectively the messages of kindness, gratitude, and integrity without ever becoming saccharine.
Portland Stage Remounts IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE: A LIVE RADIO PLAY
Back by popular demand, this family-friendly, holiday classic returns to the Portland Stage 's Mainstage after its 2017 opening. In addition to returning Director and Set Designer Anita Stewart, Portland Stage's current Executive and Artistic Director, the production also sees the return of several members from the 2017 cast, including Dustin Tucker and Courtney Moors, members of the Actors' Equity Association. Music Director Shane Van Vliet, Costume Designer Kathleen P. Brown, and Lighting Designer Gregg Carville also return for this holiday remount.
BWW Review: Fats Waller and the Music of the Harlem Renaissance Rock in MSMT/Portland Stage's AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'
For the next month Portland Stage will be transformed into the Fats Waller Harlem Club where five performers and four musicians rock the stage each night recreating the sounds and sensations of the Harlem Renaissance era in music. The spectacular, soul-gripping show is AIN'T MISBEHAVIN', the musical dedicated to the work of the legendary Fats Waller, presented in a powerful co-production by Maine State Music Theatre and Portland Stage at the Portland venue. Directed by E. Faye Butler and choreographed by Kenny Ingram, this fourth collaboration between these two leading Maine theatres is an entertaining, moving, and enlightening theatrical experience.
BWW Review: Portland Stage Opens 45th Season with BEN BUTLER
Marking its 45th season Portland Stage opened with Richard Strand's 2014 drama about the Union General Benjamin Butler's unintentional, but heartwarming sheltering of fugitive slaves during his command of Fort Monroe, Virginia, at the start of the Civil War. In a well-cast, elegantly produced staging the company offers a quirky, witty, often whimsical look at four characters who cross ideological swords and skirmish for high stakes not on the battleground but with a war of words, cleverly turned logic, solipsisms, and wittybadinage - all of which result in a remarkable turn of events that defies stereotypes, race, and convention.
BWW Review: Timeless Laughter: Dan Goggin's NUNSENSE Delights in Portland
It is so seemingly simple and yet so irresistibly infectious. The thirty-five year-old show envelops the audience in a haze of nostalgia and a cocoon of laughter that makes for a delicious theatrical evening. And in this delightfully fresh, colorful, exuberant, and touching co-production presented by Maine State Music Theatre and Portland Stage, Dan Goggin's original Nunsense story makes clear why this musical has remained a timeless phenomenon
BWW Review: As Time Goes By: THE ALL NIGHT STRUT Revives Music and Memories
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.
BWW Review: Sprightly and Sparkling Moliere's LEARNED LADIES at TAM
Four hundred and forty-five years later French playwright Moliere still bubbles with joyous, effervescent, sometimes mordant wit, and it is just this sparkle that Theater at Monmouth's new production of The Learned Ladies serves up in generous, exuberant fashion in an elegantly translated (uncredited), briskly performed, hugely witty comedy of manners about the affectations of a group of philosophy-loving women and the gender politics of their world.
BWW Review Storytellers, Musicmakers, Dreamers: McCourt's THE IRISH Captivates in Portland
'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.
BWW Review: Commedia dell'Arte Meets Political Farce at Portland Stage
Portland Stage closes its season with Dario Fo's 1974 play, They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay!, in the playwright's signature style of provocative socialist politics and broad Commedia dell'Arte farce. Translated from the Italian by Jon Laskin and Michael Aquilante, the Portland production adds an Americanized layer of iconic comedy characters and references to shows such as the Honeymooners. The overall effect alternates between moments of hilarity and wearisome intervals, though one can only admire the virtuoso performances of the entire cast and director Ron Botting's crisp, energetic production.
BWW Reviews: Hilarity and Heartache Vie in SOUVENIR
Portland Stage's second production of the season, Stephen Temperley's witty and poignant memoire about Florence Foster Jenkins, Souvenir, whisks the audience back and forth between hilarity and heartache. The two-character drama told from the perspective of Mme. Jenkins' longsuffering accompanist, Cosme McMoon, traces the collaboration between the pianist and New York socialite and would-be opera diva, Florence Foster Jenkins, who delighted audiences -for all the wrong reasons - with her colorful recitals from 1932-1944.
BWW Reviews: Portland Stage Cries the Blues in MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM
'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 Portland Stage's new production, which opens its 2013-2014 season, is a tautly directed, intensely acted interpretation of Wilson's meditation on what it is like to be black in a white man's world. The play, which uses the a quasi-musical blues structure of long, seemingly improvised solos interspersed with short rhythmic exchanges of dialogue, builds slowly and tensely to its chilling climax. Along the way, it penetrates the recesses of the musicians' hearts, their troubled pasts and their tenuous presents. And it examines the high cost of 'making it' in white America, where, for all their artistic talent and success, these determined entertainers remain faceless and invisible. Delivering Wilson's prose with an engaging blend of humor and pathos, the Portland Stage Company's cast scales the poetic heights of the playwright's genius.