Portland Playback Theater

Noonday Concert Series at First Parish Church

Noonday Concert at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church

Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh

Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh
by Joel Gross

May 1 - May 20, 2012

In a dramatic love triangle set amidst the splendor of 18th century Paris, a beautiful, social-climbing portrait painter uses her affair with an idealistic Count to get a commission to paint the naïve young Queen Marie Antoinette. Both learn to love the woman they are exploiting even as their actions encourage the Revolution that will shatter all three of their lives. Illustration by Jamie Hogan.

Jeffrey Foucault at One Longfellow Square

Longtime disciple of the rich and strange music that sings behind the American veil, Jeffrey Foucault has spent the last decade mining the darker seams of country and blues, producing a string of spare and elemental albums of rare power while garnering accolades across the United States and overseas for a tersely elegant brand of songwriting set apart by its haunting imagery and weather-beaten cool.

Foucault started in music in his teens playing his father's acoustic guitar, and doing John Prine songs. A stolen copy of Live and Obscure by Townes Van Zandt led Foucault to immerse himself in Lone Star singer-songwriters like Van Zandt and Guy Clark, as well as the distinctive Midwesterner Greg Brown. By 19, he tried his hand at writing his own songs, and by the time he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in history, he was performing regularly in coffeehouses. He released his self-distributed debut album in 2001, and followed that up in 2004 with Stripping Cane, which did have national distribution. He has been touring extensively, and with Kris Delmhorst and Peter Mulvey also was part of a trio of Bay State singer-songwriters called Red Bird, which released a pleasing recording of acoustic covers of other people's music.

Sea Dogs Home Game