Steve Underwood News

Maine boasts a vibrant, varied theatrical landscape, is home to a significant local community of fine artists, and plays host each year to artists from New York, Chicago, and all the leading regional theatres in the country. Moreover, Maine can be proud of its sophisticated, loyal, and warm-hearted audiences, who appreciate thoroughly the dedication and creativity that goes into producing professional and community theatre and who are generous with their support and acclaim. I am honored to continue to serve as Broadway World's Maine editor, and I remain excited and energized by the richness of the state's theatre scene. As we come to the end of another year, here are my personal choices of the 2017 best in Maine, grouped by theatre and show.

The sold out house in Portland's Good Theater sat riveted in their seats throughout as the tense, soul-searching drama of J. B. Priestly's An Inspector Calls as its twists and hairpin turns, its emotional revelations and its jarring ending played itself out with a combination of subtlety and punch. Director Brian P. Allen, his cast and creative team have created a mesmerizing theatrical experience that does complete justice to Priestly's passionate and ever-relevant 1945 play.

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.

Sex With Strangers, the recent off-Broadway hit show, kicks off Good Theater's 16th season. Written by Laura Eason, one of the writers on the hit tv series House of Cards, this two character comedy is about the publishing industry and how far someone will go to get ahead. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the stars onstage below!

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.

Sex With Strangers, the recent off-Broadway hit show, kicks off Good Theater's 16th season.  Written by Laura Eason, one of the writers on the hit tv series House of Cards, this two character comedy is about the publishing industry and how far someone will go to get ahead.  

Doc´n Roll Film Festival, the UK´s acclaimed music documentary festival, brings its rich and innovative programming to Hull this week, working with Hull Independent Cinema and supported by the BFI.

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 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.

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.

Good Theater, the professional theater company in residence at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, will kick off its 15th Anniversary Season with the Portland premiere of the 2013 Tony Award winning Best Play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang and directed by Good Theater's Artistic Director, Brian P. Allen  The show will begin on Wednesday October 19 and play for five weeks through Sunday November 20 for a total of 30 performances.

Portland's Good Theater is closing, what has been a highly adventurous and challenging fourteenth season, with a triumphant production of Act One, James Lapine's play based on the autobiography of Moss Hart. This nostalgic, subtly comic, and warmly touching work tells the story of a young Hart, learning to navigate the complex currents of writing a Broadway show in the 1930s. Told by two narrators, Lapine's play brings to life not only the Hart-George S. Kaufmann partnership, but a host of other colorful historical characters who helped to shape this golden age of the stage.