The cowardly Westboro Baptist Church hatemonger nutballs who were threatening to picket Seacoast Rep's performance of The Laramie Project last week never showed up, turning what might have been an ugly protest/counter-protest into the opposite of what the "God (and we intolerant bigots) hates fags" group was hoping for.

On the godhatesfags.com website, a Westboro Baptist Church action protesting the performance of The Laramie Project at Seacoast Rep in Portsmouth is slated for next week. It's unclear whether this protest will actually happen; WBC has threatened protests around here before, but has never delivered. Nevertheless, worth being aware of.

Those of you reading this week's "8 Days A Week" column can be excused for wondering if you had time-warped into the past this week. We erroneously wrote that The Real McGonagall at Portland Stage Company's studio theater had been canceled because of the illness of the actor. IT HAS NOT BEEN CANCELED.

Our office did time-warp - it wasn't you.

Mad Horse Theater Company has extended the run of Six Degrees of Separation (reviewed here by Megan Grumbling), adding another weekend of runs from Thursday, October 28, to Saturday, October 30 - plus a Sunday evening show on October 24 at 7 pm.

Also, the Dark Night series has moved from Lucid Stage to the Old Port Playhouse for its final two shows, tonight and tomorrow night, at a new time - 8 pm.

The Mad Horse Theatre Company crew are bringing Justin Tanner's Voice Lessons to the Old Port Playhouse on Friday and Saturday, for a short-notice two-night run.

Voice Lessons, directed by Brent Askari and featuring James Herrera, Katherine Davis, and Christine Louise Marshall, was recently performed by Mad Horse as part of their Dark Night series, so now if you missed it, you can see Mad Horse's company debut on the OPP stage.

Recently, Megan Grumbling wrote about Creek Man: The Unforgettable True Story of the Accordion-Playing Merman, a play written and performed by its subject, Gary Sredzienski, known in Seacoast-land as "Creek Man."

Harbor Light Stage, which produced the play, has announced there's another run of the show, this time not in York, but in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at Strawbery Banke, the local-history museum and arts center.

The SouthPortlander reports that Mad Horse Theatre Company, who are performing Alan Bennett's The History Boys for a few more days (read Megan Grumbling's review here), agreed with the South Portland City Council last night to rent the former Hutchins School on Mosher Street (barely a block from Lyric Music Theatre in what we might as well start calling South Portland's "Theater District").

On Friday evening, I meandered over to Lyric Music Theatre in South Portland to catch opening night of Cabaret. (The Portland Phoenix's own Deirdre Fulton plays a nightclub dancer and, memorably, the gorilla; contributor Dan Clark also appears as the thuggish nightclub owner and a sex-crazed sailor. We will leave all suppositions, innuendos, and other commentaries to our readers.