All Authors >

MEGAN GRUMBLING

Latest Articles

2012’s many theatrical joys

A year in footlights
The past year in Portland theater saw a gain, a loss, and a move: First, summer brought us the first annual PortFringe festival and the inaugural Portland Performing Arts Festival.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | December 19, 2012

Acorn’s Jewish holiday tradition continues

A new Legend
While at this point in the season we are regularly deluged with plays set on or around Christmas, there's not usually a whole lot of holiday fare out there for Jews.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | December 12, 2012

No humbug here

But a good harrumph will do!
The singer Phoebe Snow has a great wry line about our next major secular holiday.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 28, 2012

NHTP’s wistful Godot

Stop making sense
Their tree is a coil of mottled cables tapering into two spindly branches, their mound for sitting on is a dull gray stone, and this terrain is simply lit by two blue and two bare lights.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 20, 2012

World premiere at PSC looks back, forward

Wait for the boom
Middle-aged, affluent Noel (David Adkins) and Anne (Corinna May) have arrived at the "comfortable" stage of marriage.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 14, 2012

Hapgood goes inside the human heart

Quantum of psyche
Here's a gloss on two basic theories about how things get weird at the subatomic level: First, a photon (light particle) is trickily capable of behaving like both a particle and a wave, and whether it acts as one or the other depends principally upon whether or not we are looking.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 07, 2012

A racial duet at Dramatic Rep

Brothers in arms
Their father meant nothing particularly serious when he named his sons, African-American like himself, Lincoln and Booth — in fact, Booth tells his little brother, the names were kind of a joke.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 01, 2012

Inverting, and illuminating, the story of Eurydice

Myth, updated
The memory-darkening waters of the Lethe run in unlikely channels — inside a blue-lit elevator, through a system of pipes and spigots, in the sound of a persistent drip always somewhere just out of sight.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 01, 2012

Ziggurat haunts the woods

Enchanted evening
We gather in the dark and the stray beams of each other's flashlights, on the edge of fields and woods just shy of Merrymeeting Bay.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 24, 2012

Good Theater explores being stuck, and escaping

Understanding poverty
The wood walls are streaky and weathered in the homes of both Margie (Denise Poirier) and Mike (James Noel Hoban).

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 18, 2012

Mad Horse opens new home with classic comedy

Playing at politics
Charles P. Smith (Brent Askari) is in trouble. He has, according to his own closest advisor (Mark Rubin), "fucked up everything he's touched."

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 18, 2012

AIRE’s journey of a Faith Healer

Don’t stop believing
The assonant, guttural names of old Welsh and Scottish villages — Aberarder, Aberayron, Llangranog, Llangurig, Abergorlech — return often to the mouths of the characters in Brian Friel's Faith Healer .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 10, 2012

Wasserstein’s wide range of characters

It takes all kinds
Between the three of them, the sisters Rosensweig cover quite a range of the Meyers-Briggs psychological types.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 03, 2012

Comedy and talent at Lyric

A Golden Age
A ballsy young stock broker, a wealthy young ingénue, an evangelist-turned-nightclub singer, and a gangster and his moll Bonnie — a rich array of American archetypes will encounter each other aboard the S.S. American , in the Cole Porter classic Anything Goes .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 26, 2012

Dead Wessex’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Victoriana’s old clothes
That we have not yet fully outlived the Victorians seems self-evident, given the political right's priggishly austere agenda for women's reproductive health and rights.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 19, 2012

Head back inside for fall’s theater

Leaves fall; curtains rise
My own first show of the season will be this weekend's opening of Tess of the D'Urbervilles , the classic Thomas Hardy tragedy of the ravished Tess, mounted by the newly formed DEAD WESSEX FAIR (September 14-23, at the sadly soon-to-be former Lucid Stage).

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 12, 2012

Playing with modern religion

Road Shows
A Maine playwright, director, and cast of four are taking the Big Apple this month, but before they do, we have the chance to see them right here in Portland: Dominion, a new play by writer and actor Hal Cohen, will premiere next week at Lucid Stage, in advance of its run as part of the Manhattan Repertoire Theater's Fall One-Act Competition.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 12, 2012

MSMT’s fabulous New York, in 42nd Street

A glorious homage
You know how this story goes: Lovely, ambitious, and impossibly nice tap-dancing ingénue arrives in Depression-era New York City to make it on Broadway, and — by a mingling of pluck, luck, and looks — she gets herself cast as a chorus girl.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 22, 2012

Doing the Time Warp at Arundel Barn

Absolute pleasure
The Arundel Barn Playhouse has given its production of The Rocky Horror Show a "PG-14" rating, and attendees are asked by artistic director Adrienne Grant (in both a pre-show speech and a detailed online document that is itself a work of art) to observe a few niceties.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 15, 2012

Carson Kressley in Damn Yankees

The Devil went down to Ogunquit
This year marks the Ogunquit Playhouse's 80th season of breezily sophisticated, classic American musical entertainment.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 08, 2012

Monmouth’s Henry IV is stunning

No Shallow Hal
Shakespeare's Henry IV is considered one of his "histories," as it enacts actual acts and battles of the British king who deposed Richard II.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 01, 2012

<< first ...< prev 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | next >... last >>

2 of 17 (results 325)