• Portland Ovations brings a touring version of the musical “Mamma Mia!” to Merrill Auditorium at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday. This show features the music of the pop band ABBA. It’s a story of summer love that unfolds on a Greek island, featuring familiar songs such as […]

LOS ANGELES — When British director Stephen Daldry first met his cast for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” he did not start by asking their thoughts about 9/11, the precipitating event in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel on which the movie is based. He skipped a presentation about how he planned to depict Asperger’s syndrome, the […]

Fiction, history, biography: Books for every reader’s taste are due out this year.

At first glance, “Maine Photographers: Eyes on Asia” at the Addison Woolley Gallery in Portland might seem to have little to do with the state of arts in Maine. Casual viewers could pass it over as exotic and hardly relevant to pragmatic Mainers caught up in hard times. But this is a show curated by […]

A gala reception opens the ‘Maine Photographers: Eyes on Asia’ exhibit.

This week is the 26th anniversary of NASA’s Challenger disaster, which took the lives of New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe and her astronaut companions. Today’s haunting poem describes their ill-fated journey and the technological culture that failed them.   What Positions Do They and We Assume In the Encapsulated Stillness? By John Tagliabue While somewhere in […]