This All-American Resort on a Stunning Lake in Maine Is the Perfect Adult Summer Camp

At an idyllic resort in the wilds of Maine, sumptuous days on the lake turn into evenings filled with bravura performances.

It was the big finale to Act I of A Little Night Music, and all eyes were on the Countess Charlotte Malcolm. She took the spotlight at center stage and filled the room with her rich contralto. Anne Egerman stood upstage, flitting through Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics in her lilting soprano.

This kind of scene was playing out at summer-stock theaters all over the country, with one key difference: a few hours before curtain, when actors in Williamstown or Stockbridge might have been gargling salt water or doing their vocal warm-ups, these two had been in the dining room of Quisisana Resort, refilling the wine glasses of their soon-to-be audience members and being greeted with shouts of “Break a leg!”

Sondheim himself once wrote that “you gotta get a gimmick,” and at Quisisana, which sits on the shore of Kezar Lake in western Maine, the schtick is this: the staffers serving you dinner and making your bed are not merely waiters and housekeepers but also the stars of a rotation of musicals, operas, and performances staged on the property throughout the week. The cast members are largely twentysomethings, many fresh from BFA or MFA programs, while others are Quisi veterans further into their careers. During my visit, in addition to A Little Night Music, they would be performing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; Shrek The Musical; and Snapshots, a Stephen Schwartz musical revue, among others.

For a onetime camp counselor and theater kid like myself, the marriage of summer-camp nostalgia and jazzy tap routines sounded like a dream vacation, so last July, I recruited my Broadway-loving pal Richelle to join me for a weeklong stay. My cottage, a cheerful white-and-green number with wood paneling and a screened-in porch, was one of 42 scattered throughout the stands of white pine. Few are within reach of a cell signal and none have Wi-Fi, so the main lodge acts as a
sort of town square for anyone who needs to send a text, Google a half-forgotten bit of trivia, or kill time with a cocktail until the dinner bell rings.

On our first afternoon, I sat on the lodge porch and took in glimpses of the lake beyond the rhododendrons as Quisi regulars traded small talk, catching up on how much their kids had grown or what productions they’d seen recently, and a roving band of teenagers marveled over an old-fashioned phone booth.

I felt a bit like I’d stumbled into someone else’s family reunion — which wasn’t altogether inaccurate. The resort has been around in its current format for 75 years, and some families have been coming for nearly that long, arriving for the same week every year, staying in the same cabin, and hitting the clay courts with the same doubles partner they’ve had for a decade. Owner Sam Orans is among those veterans — his parents first brought him to Quisisana as a toddler; his mom snapped the place up in 1984 to save it from developers. He, like so many others, grew up here, met his wife here, and raised two kids against a backdrop of music-filled Maine summers. “It’s more than a vacation for a lot of people,” explained his wife and co-owner, Nathalie Orans. “It’s part of their world.”

That familial feeling requires a little adjusting for newcomers used to being cosseted at luxury hotels, but if you can forgo beachside cocktail service and morning lattes you’ll find a warmth and camaraderie that can’t be manufactured. Any high-end hotel can offer a glass of Billecart-Salmon at check-in, but how many of their guests will later buy tickets to the maintenance guy’s debut at Shakespeare in the Park or host the housekeeper when she’s in town auditioning?

A few days in, staring down the heat of a July afternoon, I made my way to the beach. At 36 weeks pregnant, I understood what it must feel like to be a walrus. I slipped into the water — weightless at last — and took in the scene. Two teenage boys sat chatting with their parents, the father strumming a guitar. A group of staffers lounged in the shallows, reading a play aloud and laughing. The plink of a piano wafted in from the Music Hall by the water’s edge, and on a nearby point, the American flag billowed in the breeze. The moment felt like an idealized version of summer, a soft-focus memory that couldn’t possibly have been that idyllic, and yet, here it was.

Our week quickly settled into a comforting rhythm: an assigned table in the dining room, with meals selected from the day’s menu each morning; enough activities on the docket to ensure that we always had options, yet could while away an afternoon reading a book without feeling like we’d squandered precious time. We lolled around on the resort’s two beaches, hopped aboard a pontoon boat for a Kezar Lake history tour, and hauled kayaks out in the early morning when the water was like glass and only the wild yodel of the loons and the gentle splishing of our paddles broke the silence.

And, of course, there was music: nine productions in all, ranging from a chamber quartet to a family-friendly version of Così Fan Tutte, each chock-full of delightful I-know-her! moments when a familiar face came on stage. More intimate concerts are held in the old white-shingled Music Hall; musicals and operas are put on in the Shed, an open-air building with a basic proscenium stage that was built a few years ago to accommodate more ambitious productions, as well as the demands of social distancing. The two stages were simply appointed and the productions weren’t big-budget, but there was an electricity that came from being in an audience of friends, and the performers brought down the house every time.

On our last night, we all gathered in the Music Hall, and I watched two whole rows of adults voluntarily rearrange themselves to give a tiny little girl, no more than five, a front-row seat to the evening’s arias. I keep hearing it takes a village, and Quisisana was the closest I’d seen to a real-life approximation of that — all these people returning to root for young artists, welcome new faces, and watch one another grow up and grow old, one week at a time, summer after summer.

A tenor sang “Nessun Dorma,” and as the music swelled and a chorus of voices joined from the back of the room, I felt my throat catch. When the lights came up, the audience members around me folded their chairs and propped them around the periphery of the room, a last gesture of care for this special place before they all bade it goodbye until next year.

A version of this story first appeared in the June 2023 ssue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "A Song of Summer."

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