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MEGAN GRUMBLING

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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

Review: Types play to the max in My Gay Son's Wedding

Comic relief
It's a testament to our cultural progress, perhaps, that most of the troubles surrounding Eric's imminent wedding have little to do with the fact that he's marrying a man.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | June 22, 2011

Maine's quirky summer stage season

History + mystery
Summertime and a lush arboreal landscape is an unexpected setting for Samuel Beckett's flinty Waiting for Godot , and this reviewer is already stirred.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | June 15, 2011

Review: Dramatic Rep's ambitious Gross Indecency

Wilde's trials
In the center of Gross Indecency 's simple, book-laden set sits a single green carnation in a crystal vase.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | June 10, 2011

Review: Harbor Light's lyrical, poignant Love Song

Just say 'Yes'
Beane (Chris Curtis) is a kooky, moody recluse, who peers through peepholes, lives alone, and eats all his meals out of one tin cup.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 25, 2011

Stopping by a stark Genet show

Dramatis personae
When it is Claire's turn to be Madame, she paints her lips and cheeks a garish crimson. She preens, pouts, flounces, demands to be dressed in her white gown with the spangles.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 25, 2011

Review: Hedwig and her Angry Inch visit SPACE

Beautiful anger
A captivating, flippant, and shockingly wigged chanteuse will be holding court at SPACE Gallery over the weekend.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 18, 2011

Review: Acorn camps, vamps in Shakespeare's Cymbeline

Poetic fetish
When the servant Pisania (April Singley) enters to herald the opening iambs of Cymbeline , her Elizabethan diction is bracingly offset by her skintight black vinyl and fishnets.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 12, 2011

Local musical sends up gay-hating, gay culture

Theatrical exposures
Reverend Jonathan Fisher (Michael Tobin), founder of Straight and Narrow, an evangelical congregation meant to "cure" homosexuals, has a problem.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 12, 2011

Review: Mad Horse's Spring Awakening, a 19th-century play with 21st-century actors

Youthful vigor
Images of white plum blossoms surge over both the back wall and the floor of the Spring Awakening set.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 12, 2011

Review: Pontine explores Hawthorne's ancestral thriller

Spirit world
Perhaps nowhere in America is the past as tangible a presence as it is in New England.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 04, 2011

Review: Acorn's Maine Playwrights Festival marks a decade

Ten new plays
For 10 years now, Acorn Productions has provided an annual platform for both new and established Maine playwrights to see their work enacted by live bodies under hot lights.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 20, 2011

Review: An émigré's struggle with his baggage, in AIRE's Brendan

When the pipes aren't calling
America, enthuses Irish émigré Brendan (Michael Dix Thomas), is the smell of coffee and gasoline.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 06, 2011

Get a glimpse of Open Waters' Farms and Fables project

Planting seeds for the future
Last summer, four theater artists experienced a rather different kind of arts residency: They spent months on three local farms, planting, weeding, and talking with farm workers.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 06, 2011

Review: Surviving the vivid depravity of Killer Joe

Brutal honesty
Owing money to the wrong dudes, young Texas fuck-up and minor drug dealer Chris Smith (Christopher Reiling) hatches a fundraising plan: Hire a hit-man to take out the estranged Smith matriarch — that is, his mom — then collect on her insurance to save his impecunious ass.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 30, 2011

Review: Good Theater's hilarious Farce

Rooms of laughs
You can tell a lot about a couple by their bedroom, says proper English matron Delia (Cathy Counts) to her husband Ernest (Bob McCormack).

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 30, 2011

Review: PSC winningly turns the Wright brothers upside-down in Center of Gravity

Into the distance
The set of Portland Stage Company's Center of Gravity is a spacious, elegant network of cables, a ladder, and a ramp.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 16, 2011

Review: Dramatic Repertory Company ponders deep subjects in Blue/Orange

Inside the shrinks
The set is black and white — dark modern chairs and table against a pale grid of a screen, like a vertical drop-ceiling.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 09, 2011

Review: Lyric Music Theater's Rent celebrates culture

Entertaining activists
A great affection remains among audiences for Rent , Jonathan Larson's 1994 rock opera based on Puccini's La Bohème — it has toured the world several times over, and is slated for an Off-Broadway revival this summer.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 03, 2011

Review: Orphans become family at Seacoast Rep

Going it alone
For years, Philip (Michael Propster) has lived shut up in a sordid North Philadelphia apartment and in the vacuum of his older brother Treat's tyranny. Motivated by equal parts love, fear, fraternal jockeying, and his own repressed sense of loss, Treat (Kent Burnham) has kept Philip away from the world and frozen in a state of suspended childhood.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 23, 2011

Review: Good Theater's solid Moonlight and Magnolias

Southern follies
A lot of folks still consider the 1939 film Gone With the Wind to be the best loved and most iconic American movie of all time — and that's the primary concern of Ron Hutchinson's Moonlight and Magnolias , a comedic romp about the monumental difficulties of making Margaret Mitchell's humongous best-seller into a decent film.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 16, 2011

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