For its third 2022 main stage production, Maine State Music Theatre has mounted a brilliant, beautiful, authentic, and heartwarming staging of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s epistolary novel, THE COLOR PURPLE. This epic story chronicles the journeys of its complex characters through hardship and pain to hope and healing. Inspirational and uplifting, it is a tale of resilience, redemption, and love, that speaks with powerful universality, and in this stunning production, directed by E. Faye Butler, it becomes one of those unforgettable, transformative moments in the theatre.
Maine State Music Theatre’s second main stage production, perennial favorite, JOSEPH & THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, takes the Pickard stage by storm, exploding with color, energy, and sheer irrepressible joy. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s early collaboration based on the Book of Genesis has as its central metaphor the coat of many colors, and like that kaleidoscopic garment, the show itself is a rich, eclectic tapestry that weaves together musical and choreographic genres, ancient and modern sensibilities, and perhaps best of all in this production – a diverse and deeply talented cast that is beautiful to behold.