Arts

Celebrating the insignificant with Fun-A-Day

Daily doings
What happens when you dedicate time every day for a month to one creative endeavor?

By: ANNIE LARMON | February 10, 2011

Portland Ovations + Bates Dance Festival = Doug Varone choreography

A new work
In an unfavorable economic climate, what do choreographers need? They must have exceptional talent and skill, of course.

By: JUNE VAIL | February 09, 2011

Review: Actors are concert pianists too, in PSC's 2 Pianos 4 Hands

Two roles
A good bout of slapstick goes on between tuxedoed pianists Ted (Tom Frey) and Richard (Jeffrey Rockwell) before they finally flip back their tails and get into Bach's Concerto in D Minor :

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 09, 2011

Mirrors and reflection at the ICA at MECA

The real + the imaginary
It was long before Lacan that the mirror metaphor became the foundation of Western subjectivity.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | February 01, 2011

Review: Theater Project's Pride and Prejudice stays authentically powerful

Classical strength
Jane Austen's classic 19th-century novel of manners and morals, Pride and Prejudice , has undergone a truly weird range of reinterpretations. But the classics also deserve a little unalloyed love.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 01, 2011

Review: Mad Horse takes Albee's The Goat to the edge

There but for the grace of God
Famous architect Martin (James Herrera), his wife Stevie (Christine Louise Marshall), and their gay teenage son Billy (Benedetto Robinson) are a highly and self-consciously cultured family.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 27, 2011

USM takes on another politically themed art show

More inmate work
The muse can arrive anywhere. After the protracted confusion of his arrest and trial, it's no surprise Antonio Guerrero emphasizes clarity in his work.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | January 27, 2011

Review: Dark nights with The Play About the Baby

Testing love
On the weeknights when The Goat is off and Lucid Stage would otherwise be dark, Mad Horse is doubling everyone's Albee pleasure, if that's quite the right word for what this master playwright's work evinces.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 26, 2011

Review: Caroline Leavitt's family Pictures

Photo finish
Love, family, and the moments that change lives forever — these are the potent ingredients that Caroline Leavitt stirs up again and again in her fiction.

By: JULIA HANNA | January 27, 2011

A Rackstraw Downes retrospective at the PMA

Conceptual reality
The first thing you notice about the Rackstraw Downes exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art is how abstract these paintings are.

By: KEN GREENLEAF | January 19, 2011

Review: A composer’s jealousy drives Amadeus at NHTP

Sacred bargain
Early in his youth, an Italian named Antonio Salieri (the outstanding Blair Hundertmark) knelt in church, looked up, and saw a certain God: "An old, candle-smoked God with a mulberry robe, staring out at the world with a dealer's eyes."

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 19, 2011

Looking deeply into the everyday with aa//ee's Broadsheet

Targeting ‘To Go’
The Dixie cup is the first object investigated in aa//ee's inaugural issue of Broadsheet , a quarterly newsletter exploring the historical narratives behind mundane objects of industrial design.

By: ANNIE LARMON | January 19, 2011

Daniel Meiklejohn contemplates the female form

Variations on a theme
There is unlikely any subject more explored in the art-history continuum than the female form.

By: ANNIE LARMON | January 18, 2011

Preview: The sweltering, classically elegant Blood Wedding

Lorca's murderous Spaniards visit SPACE
Just about a year ago, an irrepressible new grassroots theater ensemble in Portland surged to the stage with the gloriously unabashed boorishness of Ubu Roi , a gem of French proto-Absurdism.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 19, 2011

Hip-hop history

Dan Charnas's story is bigger than the music
Dan Charnas is aware that some disgruntled rap purists may eschew his epic tome on planet hip-hop's animated cast of titanic dick swingers.

By: CHRIS FARAONE | January 11, 2011

Review: ''American Gothic'' painter Grant Wood gets to leave the closet

American gay
Who was Grant Wood? Millions of Americans know him as the artist who painted American Gothic — and that's about it. But since his death, from pancreatic cancer, in 1942, he's become the poster boy for the right and the whipping boy of the left.

By: JEFFREY GANTZ | January 07, 2011

Robert Shetterly on his series of admirable Americans

Painting the truth
At a ceremony scheduled for noon on Friday, Brooksville painter Robert Shetterly will unveil a portrait of former Maine legislator and civil-rights leader Gerald Talbot in the Lewis Gallery of the Portland Public Library.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | January 04, 2011

Review: A Streetcar Named Desire at the Players' Ring

The Williams masterwork, in Portsmouth
Fairly or not, my most immediate association with A Streetcar Named Desire tends to be Brando and his inimitable mournful bellow.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 05, 2011

Odd year ahead for museums and galleries

2011 brings the Biennial and much more
Remember, for every droopy tarp stalactite that makes it into a museum lobby installation, there are dozens of similar (and similarly impressive) creatures that never leave a studio wall.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | December 29, 2010

Mad Horse must-see

Plus Blood Wedding, and other big shows of 2010
At the top of my 2011 must-see theater list is the remainder of MAD HORSE 's 25th season, a mouth-watering line-up of provocative scripts by some modern masters of the craft.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | December 29, 2010

Good Theater's marathon production, and other theatre highlights of 2010

August was tops
In my local orbits among both actors and theater-goers, one play of 2010 continues to be regularly hailed in conversation: GOOD THEATER 's momentous production of August: Osage County , a profane and exceptionally funny foray into Middle American generational pathos.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | December 22, 2010