Review: Brilliant and Beautiful: MSMT Stands Tall with THE COLOR PURPLE
For its third 2022 main stage production, Maine State Music Theatre has mounted a brilliant, beautiful, authentic, and heartwarming staging of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s epistolary novel, THE COLOR PURPLE. This epic story chronicles the journeys of its complex characters through hardship and pain to hope and healing. Inspirational and uplifting, it is a tale of resilience, redemption, and love, that speaks with powerful universality, and in this stunning production, directed by E. Faye Butler, it becomes one of those unforgettable, transformative moments in the theatre.
BWW Review: MSMT'S Opulent BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Offers Pure Enchantment
With what is arguably the largest production in Maine State Music Theatre's history, the company brings a level of opulence, sophistication, and magic to the Pickard stage that makes this production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast a fitting jewel in the Diamond Jubilee Crown. It is no secret that the company has used every single ounce of its resources (and overcome a number of unforeseen obstacles along the way) to create this magnificent production, but the result has been entirely worth the effort. This beloved fairytale dazzlingly comes to life in all its heartfelt beauty.
BWW Review: Spectacular EVITA Takes MSMT Stage by Storm
Twenty-five years after it was last presented at the Pickard Theater, Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice's masterpiece has returned in triumph to Maine State Music Theatre in a stunning new production directed and choreographed by Marc Robin. Boasting the largest cast in the company's history (46), this Evita is gripping and epic, at the same time that it is touchingly intimate and magnificently detailed. The size of the endeavor is both literal and figurative, for MSMT's Evita succeeds not only in its grand sweep, but also in the magnitude of its intangible assets - unsparing honesty, intensity, and emotional depth.
2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Awards - Last Week to Vote!
Happy Holidays! It's the last week to vote for the 2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Regional Awards! Check out the latest live stats as of December 18. Nominations were reader-submitted and after the nomination period ended, BroadwayWorld's local editors proofed the list for eligibility and errors. Voting runs through December 31!
2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Awards Update - Andrew Lyndaker Big Lead!
Time is running out to vote for the 2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Regional Awards! Check out the latest live stats as of December 18. Nominations were reader-submitted and after the nomination period ended, BroadwayWorld's local editors proofed the list for eligibility and errors. Voting runs through December 31!
2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Awards Update - Stephen Shore, Nat Zegree Lead!
Voting has opened for the 2015 BroadwayWorld Maine Regional Awards! Check out the latest live stats as of November 27th. Nominations were reader-submitted and after the nomination period ended, BroadwayWorld's local editors proofed the list for eligibility and errors. Voting runs through December 31.
BWW Reviews: MSMT's YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Brings Down the House
Maine State Music Theatre marshaled all its resources for the finale of its 2015 season with a stunning production of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, filled with rollicking humor, brilliant dancing, and dazzling design effects that had the opening night audience on their feet cheering not only at curtain calls, but also during the course of the show. Directed and choreographed by Marc Robin, the cast of starry principals and equally gifted ensemble gave Brooks' signature off-beat humor a vibrancy and wit that had the intimate Pickard Theatre pulsating with joyous energy.
BWW Reviews: Grand and Glorious CHAMBERLAIN Stirs the Heart
Maine State Music Theatre's second production of the season, a revival of the Knapp-Alper 1996 musical Chamberlain A Civil War Romance, proves to be a grand and glorious theatrical experience, an endeavor of epic proportions that delivers spectacle, emotion, and inspiration in equal measure.
Spanning more than fifty years in the life of Brunswick's legendary Civil War hero, Maine governor, and Bowdoin college president, Joshua L. Chamberlain, and focusing on his relationship with his passionate, mercurial wife, Fannie Adams, the musical, in this brilliantly executed new production, directed and choreographed by Marc Robin, offers both epic sweep and touching intimacy. Large in musical and dramatic scale, lavish in production values, and cast with a first rate ensemble of singing-actors, Chamberlain dazzles the ear and eye and warms the heart.