All Authors >

MEGAN GRUMBLING

Latest Articles

Acorn bares souls in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Illusions + pretenses
Edward Albee's heavyweight Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a horror story.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 16, 2011

The Originals stage Pinter's Betrayal

Reverse psychology
Harold Pinter's masterwork Betrayal is a story of a British triangle.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 09, 2011

Dramatic Rep digs deep for catharsis

Finding the Tigers within
Today is a good day for twenty-something Sherry (Casey Turner): She's out of bed, over her depression, and starting her first-ever job as an elementary art teacher and art therapist.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 02, 2011

Of Farms and Fables shows beauty, struggle of family farming

Speaking from the fields
From the bean patch, Lily calls her husband Walker: Pests in the beans. Walker is over in the chard patch, which he says looks like Swiss cheese.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 26, 2011

Michael Kimball's desert-island comedy at the West End Studio Theatre

Who needs government?
Cody (G. Matthew Gaskell) has been a serial violator: "'Rack of beer,' 'buxomy,' talking to yourself," accuses Rex (Don Goettler). "That's three laws in three minutes."

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 19, 2011

Mad Horse gets vicious with McDonagh shock-fest

Don't forget the guns
You can't say that Padraic (Dave Currier) is a man without a heart.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 12, 2011

USM’s Bridge leads from safety to tragedy

Shifting ground
"Justice is very important here," intones Mr. Alfieri (Patrick Molloy), an aged Italian-American lawyer and the sorrowful Greek chorus of Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 12, 2011

PSC’s poignant Morini Strad

Fiddle me this
At first, the snide narcissism of aged violin prodigy Erica Morini (Laura Esterman) is an insufferable drag to the 40-something violin restorer, Brian (John G. Preston), whom she's trying to hire.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 05, 2011

Welles + Olivier spar, commiserate at Players’ Ring

Aging dreams
How does a star negotiate a changing age?

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 28, 2011

Freeport Factory makes solid Art

Navel gazing
Anyone who doubts the dangerousness of art anymore need look no further than the canvas in Yasmina Reza's Art to refresh their faith.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 28, 2011

Get thee to the Apohadion for a masterful show

Shell out for Threepenny
The lurching black satire of The Threepenny Opera is a study in grotesques: Monstrous caricatures of amorality and the blade of the bottom line are both repellent and ridiculously entertaining in this 1928 musical condemnation of capitalism.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 21, 2011

The fall season lights up Maine theaters

Epic irreverence
First on my fall list, in both chronology and anticipation, is irreverent Lorem Ipsum's arts-warehouse production of the show I've been hankering after for years: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, whose careening ironies will surely sell out the Apohadion's 40-seat house (September 16-24).

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 14, 2011

Gaslight's Christie play kicks off the fall season

Mystery in the air
With storms flying and the frisson of September in the air, it's beginning to be the season for mysteries, and this weekend you can curl up with a chilly Agatha Christie classic.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 31, 2011

Portland Stage Company looks back — and forward — at working America

Changing times
In 1919, a New York switchboard room of the American Bell Telephone Company is vertiginously perched between eras: The three women working the switchboards are soon to be replaced by automation, big business is getting bigger, gender and ethnicity are flashpoints for emotion, and technology is changing how everybody knows everyone else.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 24, 2011

Monmouth's sharpness shines in Coward's Blithe Spirit

Let the Spirit linger
It wouldn't be summer without a ghost story or two, though the currently one up in Monmouth has nothing to do with campfires and s'mores.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 17, 2011

Freeport’s excellent (and free!) outdoor Shakespeare

Fade to gray
Trickery and dissembling around love have one role or other in just about everything Shakespeare wrote, though he lays it on particularly thick in Twelfth Night .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | August 10, 2011

Review: Musings on MSMT's Xanadu

The gods must be ’80s
For years now, the decade of the 1980s has been enjoying a curiously sustained wave of nostalgia.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 27, 2011

Review: Fenix Theatre's poignant, funny Waiting for Godot

Laughing while it hurts
Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, the tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, might not be everybody's idea of a summertime al fresco romp.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 20, 2011

Review: Outdoor expressionism in Fenix Theatre's Love’s Labour’s Lost

Collision of minds, hearts, and well, more
One of Shakespeare's earliest and lightest-of-the-light works, Love's Labour's Lost , is this year's Shakespearean offering of the Fenix Theatre Company.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 20, 2011

Review: Much Ado in World War 2

Monmouth shifts centuries, to powerful effect
Men return from war, and attentions turn to love: It's a timeless order, and so it is with the witty Sicilians of Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 13, 2011

Review: Going Crazy for Gershwin

A revised, revamped classical musical hits big
Every summer, the Arundel Barn Playhouse continues the classic tradition of Maine summer stock theater, by bringing their leading performers from out of town — often New York City — to put on a series of shows and live in beautiful rural Arundel for the season.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | July 06, 2011

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

5 of 17 (results 324)