On Friday, January 14th at 7:00 pm.

(Ellsworth, ME) The Best of Ottawa Animation International Festival tour includes 15 films selected from the annual event held in September 2010. The 2010 International tour selections include such extraordinary films as: David O’Reilly’s grand prize-winning The External World; the pulsating metamorphic madness of Andreas Hykade’s Love & Theft; Dustin Grella’s deeply moving and brilliantly executed award-winning film Prayers for Peace; the mesmerizing crowd-favourite Sinna Mann (Angry Man) by Anita Killi; the snap crackling goodness of Masaki Okuda’s Kuchao (A Gum Boy); and Joseph Pierce’s twisted narrative short, A Family Portrait.

For more information, please visit The Grand website.

On Monday, January 17 at 7:00 pm at Frontier Cafe and Gallery.

(Brunswick, ME) On Martin Luther King Day, the famous actress Vinie Burrows will present excerpts from her highly regarded program "Walk together Children."

In her program "Walk together Children," Vinie Burrows uses prose, poems, and songs to relive the African American experiences of struggle for survival and equality. Her material derives from slave narratives, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, and others. Burrows will also recite and perform on themes relating to current struggle for world peace. She will end her program by engaging the audience in discussion.

Ms. Burrows has performed on and off Broadway, on radio and television. Her acting journey has taken her throughout the world, often for presentations of one-woman shows highlighting the lives of Black women in Africa, in civil rights struggles, and in the American theater. The New York Times praises Vinie Burrows as "a magnificent performer." Reviewer Clive Barnes regards her as "one of the reigning divas of the Black theater." She has appeared with Helen Hayes, Ossie Davis, Claude Rains, Will Geer, Mary Martin, and other notables.

Vinie Burrows, a stalwart of "Grandmothers for Peace," serves in the United Nations as Permanent Representative for the Women's International Democratic Federation. A political activist for decades, she's spoken at rallies for racial justice, equitable health care, and labor rights, ending up, on occasion, in jail.

For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit the Frontier Cafe website.

(Portland, ME) Presented by the Portland Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, January 30th at 2:30 pm.

One of the most vivid and important works of the Baroque era. Extravagant, with an expressive immediacy, this Passion is as dramatic as the most dynamic operas of the period.

For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit the Portland Symphony Orchestra website.

At the Grand in Ellsworth Thursday, January 27th through Sunday, January 30th.

(Ellsworth, ME) The opera is a parody of the stock melodrama — the villain who carries off the maiden; the priggishly good-mannered poor-but-virtuous-heroine; the hero in disguise, and his faithful old retainer who dreams of their former glory days; the snake in the grass who claims to be following his heart; the wild, mad girl; the swagger of fire-eating patriotism; ghosts coming to life to enforce a curse; and so forth. But as one critic noted, Gilbert turns the moral absolutes of melodrama upside down: Good becomes bad, bad becomes good, and heroes take the easy way out.

For more information on show times or to purchase tickets, please visit The Grand website.