Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold - Page 24

In presenting the world premiere of Tom Coash's play, Veils, the winner of the 2012 Clauder Competition for New England playwrights, Portland Stage has introduced audiences to a brave new work which addresses the thorny crosscurrents of cultural identity. The company, as always, has mounted this moving piece about two college students at the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolution in Cairo with bold conviction.

Lyric Music Theater has mounted a dazzling new hit to brighten the waning days of winter. Under the direction of Raymond Marc Dumont, the venerable South Portland community theatre has put together an energetic, sophisticated, and compelling production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods that is, quite simply, one of the season's best efforts on any stage!

In undertaking Bernard Pomerance's 1977 play, The Elephant Man, the Studio Theatre of Bath delivers a remarkably thoughtful performance of the poignant period drama. The play, well known from its London and New York runs and subsequent film and television versions, fares surprisingly well when returned to its roots in a small venue -(the New York premiere was at the York Theatre in St. Peter's Church) - and to a gritty, old-fashioned ambiance. Using the black box Curtis Room of Bath's Chocolate Church Arts Center, the company creates the dingy, often repressive world of late Victorian London, a world caught in the throes of ideological struggle between science and faith, Darwinism and Christian morality. Pomerance raises serious questions about the existence of a Creator, who would permit such overwhelming suffering, and without offering the consolation of an answer, he is still able to have his tragic hero, John Merrick, affirm that 'the mind is the standard of the man.'

Lewiston's Public Theatre has mounted a stylish, wistful, zany production of Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still, a bittersweet comedy that looks at the absurd side of dysfunction. The play, which had its premiere at New York's Roundabout Theatre, tells the intertwined stories of two families who have been immobilized by loss and their struggle to emerge from depression and move forward with their lives. Narrated by the daughter Sherry, whose recently acquired job as an art therapist gives her the impetus to shake her gloom, the play draws an ironic contrast between Sherry's newfound optimism and the darker realities of the other characters. Ever lurking in the background is the metaphorical - and actual - threat of a tiger escaped from the zoo - the nameless fear that paralyzes action until at last confronted toward the end of the play.

Portland Stage's stylish and stirring production of Words by Ira Gershwin and the Great American Songbook offers fascinating insight into the alchemy of a song. Joseph Vass' 2013 play examines the professional life and art of "the other Gershwin," George's brother, his lyricist, and the creator of hundreds of popular standards, which have come to be part of The Great American Songbook.

Here in Portland, Maine, in the last two months a young actor has been creating a sensation in two tour de force performances of two vastly different comedies. Thirty-four year-old Dustin Tucker, who now makes his home in Maine's largest city, is having what many would consider a breakout year - starring first in Morris Panych's dark theatre of the absurd, Vigil, and then reprising his hilarious turn as David Sedaris' Elf Crumpet in the Santaland Diaries, both at Portland Stage.

Despite its location far, far north, and its relatively sparse population compared to cultural capitals, Maine boasts a rich regional theatre climate. There are quite a few thriving, adventurous, permanent professional companies, as well as an excellent contingent of community theatres. This year offered a wealth of exciting choices. Here is my personal list for 2013, grouped by theatre company and show:

In 1961 at the 41st Street Theatre in New York City, African-American poet-playwright Langston Hughes premiered a work called Black Nativity, a collection of gospel songs punctuated by Hughes's own verse narrating the birth of Jesus. After a very short run, the only souvenir of that historic event was a rare LP recording. More than a half century later, Maine musicologist Aaron Robinson has collaborated with Bowdoin College conductor and choral director Anthony Antolini to mount a revised version of Hughes' original work. Entitled Black Nativity In Concert - A Gospel Celebration, Robinson has utilized Hughes' original texts, adding a few plus some Biblical verse, as well. For the musical settings he relied on transcribing the recording and arranging several songs himself. Performed yesterday by the seventy-five person Bowdoin Chorus, conducted by Antolini, with Roy Partridge as narrator, Jennifer McIvor on piano, and Sean Fleming on the Hammond organ, the concert in Studzkinski Recital Hall drew an overflowing crowd, many of whom were relegated to watching on lobby monitors.

Portland Stage Studio Theatre's Christmas reprise of David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries is eighty-five minutes of rollicking, wicked good fun (as Mainers like to say!). This is due not only to Sedaris' mordant comic style, but also to the chameleon brilliance of Dustin Tucker as Elf Crumpet.

The Portland Players choice of Rogers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music for their holiday season is a joyous one for cast and audience alike. The production directed by Joshua Chard with a cast of primarily young players radiates a warmth and sincerity which makes up for any of its defects.

The Good Theater's (Portland, ME) New England premiere of A.R. Gurney's latest play, The Grand Manner, is a wistful, droll, and stylish production of this charming, nostalgic paean to theatre on the Great White Way in 1948. The play, which originally opened at New York's Lincoln Center Theatre in 2010, deals with an autobiographical episode, augmented into legend.

The Portland Stage production of Canadian playwright Morris Panych's black comedy, Vigil, is a provocative and challenging mounting of an often off-putting play. That the company once again has the courage to undertake a work that has had mixed success in the U.S. and clearly pushes the limits of dark, macabre humor is a testament to the Maine stage's commitment to innovation and integrity. That said, the afternoon in the theatre is not an easy one, even for an experienced reviewer like myself. But then, of course, Panych does not intend it to be. His play, which tells the story of Kemp, a young man who receives a summons to attend the bedside of his dying Aunt, only to find that she is not yet ready to make that journey. In the months that Kemp and Grace share her tiny, bleak apartment, they come to confront the terrifying and messy process of dying, the agony of loneliness, the scars of Kemp's childhood, and the ultimate meaning of caring and compassion.

Maine's Shakespeare Theater at Monmouth staged a vigorous, youthful adaptation of Shakespeare's 'joyous comedy,' Twelfth Night, this weekend at the historic Cumston Hall. The production will tour communities and schools in Maine as a apart of an NEA grant.

Portland's (Maine) Good Theater opened its 2013-2014 season with an incisive production of Bruce Norris' 2011 Pultizer Prize winning drama, Clybourne Park. The play, inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, explores the issues of subtle, yet pervasive racism in a Chicago neighborhood, first in 1959 and then in 2009. That the characters in each half of the drama have different names and ostensibly different experiences is a bitter illusion. History not only repeats itself, albeit it in a more understated and sophisticated way, but it also painfully demonstrates that prejudice dies hard; even time, education, and improving economics do not erase deeply ingrained fears and intolerance.

'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.

?The Ogunquit Playhouse's revival of the legendary Bernstein-Sondheim-Laurents-Robbins classic, West Side Story, which opened September 5th pulsates with muscular energy and wrenching pathos. It is a production which makes the essence of the original creators palpable at the same time that it takes a fresh, vibrant - and, yes - touchingly relevant look at the material. Moreover, the Ogunquit West Side Story, directed by BT McNicholl and choreographed by Jeffry Denman forges a thrilling bond between stage and audience in the immediacy of the action and emotion.

'The show still has the energy of those brilliant young collaborators toiling on together and shining that diamond,' says BT McNicholl of his latest project, a new production of West Side Story which opens at the Ogunquit Playhouse September 5 and runs through September 28. The Broadway writer-director is thrilled to have the opportunity 'to take a fresh look' at the Bernstein-Sondheim-Laurents-Robbins classic and to bring to it 'our own aesthetic.'

He has directed and choreographed over three hundred shows on American regional theatres stages from Chicago to Philadelphia to Houston, Kansas City, and Phoenix, been nominated for over seventy awards, won sixteen of fifty-three Joseph Jefferson nominations! He is currently the full time Artistic Director of the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, PA, but that will not stop him in the coming season from staging productions not only in Lancaster, but also in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Brunswick, ME, to name but a few gigs already planned. 'Regional theatres are the places that are focusing on art first and commercial aspects second. Regional is where new works begin today and where quality theatre exists. I love the playground of regional theatre,' the Florida born, fifty-two-year-old Marc Robin exclaims with enthusiasm when I am able to catch up with him shortly after the opening of Maine State Music Theatre's highly acclaimed East coast regional premiere of Mary Poppins. Robin, who also staged Dreamgirls and LES MISERABLES in Brunswick this summer, confides, 'I like to be busy. I don't wind down. I always think I am supposed to be doing something. But that's because my work is my passion.'

The Lewiston-Auburn Community Little Theatre, one of Maine's oldest community theatres, is closing its 2012-2013 season with a madcap production of Monty Python's Spamalot. The energetic ensemble directed by John Blanchette and Richard Martin romps through the zany script and songs with elan.

On Sunday, August 4, 2013, in Freeport, Maine, the Freeport Players delivered a lively, riotously funny and highly inventive performance of the suspense comedy, The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow from the John Buchan novel and Alfred Hitchcock film. Using four actors in multiple roles, a minimalist set, and a vintage radio era sound design, the production directed by Portland Stage's dramaturg, Daniel Burson, romped through the script with delightful insouciance.