Brian P. Allen News

Good Theater continues its 16th season with J.B. Priestley's award-winning An Inspector Calls, playing now through November 26 at Good Theater's home, the St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress Street, Portland. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below!

Good Theater continues its 16th season with J.B. Priestley's award-winning An Inspector Calls, opening November 1 and playing through November 26 at Good Theater's home, the St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress Street, Portland.

The Good Theater launches its sixteenth season with a beautifully produced, bittersweet, wise, and winsome play by Laura Eason, Sex with Strangers. Despite its suggestive title, the two-character drama is not a steamy expos of passion, but rather a thoughtful exploration of the complicated world of modern relationships, the conflicting demands of attraction and affection with career and creative identity.

Good Theater the professional theater in residence at the St. Lawrence Arts Centers has announced its 16th season opening in the fall of 2017.  This will be the biggest season the company has produced yet.

Actress, singer, comedienne extraordinaire Charis Leos has performed over one hundred roles on more than twenty-eight leading regional theaters across America. Known as a brilliant and endearing character actress with a powerful voice, she has made a name for herself in major roles like Rose in Gypsy, Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, Jolene in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Louise in Always Patsy Cline, and countless more parts that speak to her versatility and charisma. While Leos performs all over the country, Maine holds a special place in her heart.

Director, producer, actor Brian P. Allen is a born raconteur with a wicked sense of humor and his latest version of his hilarious one-man show, Blueberries, Broadway, and Brian, which he performed at the Strand Theater in Rockland and will reprise in Springvale, ME, speaks to Allen's wit, turn of phrase, and deliciously outrageous sense of humor.

There are plenty of reasons to make Maine your summer destination: the breathtaking coastline, beautiful beaches, pristine trails to hike, waterways to sail, and wildlife to observe. But Maine also has a long history of being home to respected summer theatres, and in recent seasons the wealth of performance offerings has not only increased in number, but also in quality. Maine can proudly say that it boasts some of the finest regional theatre companies in the country. Here are my editorial picks among the many possibilities for theatre-lovers.

Good Theater Artistic Director Brian P. Allen chose to close the season with a lovely, lyrical production of Horton Foote's platy, The Trip to Bountiful, in which Louisa Flaningam's luminous interpretation of Carrie Watts is surely one of the Portland theatre calendar's highlights.

Good Theater, the professional theater in residence at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, is pleased to present Horton Foote's multi-award-winning The Trip to Bountiful starring Broadway veteran Louisa Flaningam.  Bountiful opens March 29 and plays through April 30.  

Good Theater the professional theater in residence at the St. Lawrence Arts Centers has announced its 16th season opening in the fall of 2017.  This will be the biggest season the company has produced yet.

Good Theater's Executive/Artistic Director Brian P. Allen has a remarkable sixth sense about choosing plays whose situations and characters resonate with originality and empathy. The latest production, Molly Smith Metzler's The May Queen, is an engaging portrait of five small town characters who all work in the local insurance agency and whose lives and paths remain interconnected because of their shared high school past. Metzler's comedy explores the surface banality of these characters, as it slowly and skillfully makes its way toward revealing some deeper poetic truths.

Good Theater the professional company in residence at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress Street, Portland, will open its next main stage production, THE MAY QUEEN on January 25.  In addition the company will present three performances per week of A.R. Gurney's LOVE LETTERS.  From January 25-February 26, the company will offer 33 days of continuous theater giving nine performances per week.

Love Letters by A.R. Gurney directed by Brian P. Allen, and presented by Good Theater January 29 - February 21. 

A two character play in which the actors sit behind a desk and read from letters for eighty minutes poses a series of challenges to any director. What is it then that makes Brian P. Allen's new production of A.R. Gurney's 1989 drama, Love Letters, so completely mesmerizing? Not only is Gurney's writing poetic and poignant, but the production, which opened at Portland's Good Theater this past week starring Kathleen Kimball and Brian Allen (his role later assumed by Tony Reilly and then Steve Underwood), is so perfectly calibrated, so subtly interiorized that it resembles a fine chamber music performance.

Portland's Good Theater performs its annual musical revue, Broadway at the Good Theater this weekend bringing warmth, cheer, and an array of musical treats to mark the holiday season. Conceived, written, and directed by Brian P. Allen, this year's two hours of song and dance was devoted to the musicals of the 1970s.

Having had the privilege to serve as Broadway World's Maine Editor for more than three years now, I can say with pride that the state, though remote as it may seem from the epicenter of the theatre world, Broadway, is blessed to be home to so many thriving theatre companies who produce exciting, vibrant seasons. As I compiled my list for 2016 with many familiar names, I was also struck by the extraordinary consistency of excellence these companies maintain. Here are my personal choices of the best in Maine, grouped by theatre and show.

The thirteenth edition of the Broadway at Good Theater concerts will be presented November 30 - December 4 for six performances.  This year will be a tribute to Broadway of the 1970s.   

Following the first installment of my Theatre Miniature series - a profile of Curt Dale Clark - this second mini-video takes a look at the indefatigable Executive and Artistic Director of Portland's Good Theater, Brian P. Allen.

During the first act of Christopher Durang's Tony award-winning 2013 play, Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike, the characters muse that 'if everyone were on anti-depressants, there would be no Chekhov.' Happily for Portland theatre goers, it seems that none of the six colorful, endearing, eccentric personages in Durang's contemporary comedy appears to be on any medication. Rather they squabble and moan and rant about their lives in absurdly clever and humorous dialogue as they struggle to find some happiness in the human bonds which connect them.

When the now embattled Wells Fargo recently ran a series of ads suggesting that young people grow up and 'out of careers in the arts' and into 'mature choices of professions like the sciences and business,' the implications of the spots seriously irritated and alarmed most of us in the theatre community. A dancer yesterday, an engineer today….what message is that sending to our young people, many of whom are already deprived of arts education in their schools? It was then that the idea occurred to me and our Broadway World editors that a series of short video profiles asking successful theatre people why they had chosen a life in performance and what the rewards have been for them might be just the antidote.