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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 5, 2024 9:21 am
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A scene from "Queen of Katwe."
How does a young girl from Uganda go from beginning chess player to champion? Disney’s Queen of Katwe documents the journey from one to the other as well as the struggles and triumphs in between. The 2016 film was the first entry in this month’s “Free Film Fridays: From Stage to Screen: Celebrating Black Yale School of Drama Alumni” at the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 2, 2024 9:17 am
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Gregory Crewdson
Untitled (from the series Beneath the Roses).
Gregory Crewdson’s arresting photograph is nearly five feet tall and eight feet across, large enough for a viewer to get completely engrossed in the details. The scene at its most basic is simple enough: A man standing by a river bank, shirtless; a makeshift shack behind him, lit from the inside; beyond a stand of trees, a row of houses.
But the mood, the lighting, and the details all set the wheels for any number of stories in motion. Does the man live in the shack? Or does someone else? Or does anyone? Do the people who live in the houses know someone’s down there by the river, or is the man truly isolated? And what has brought him to the water’s edge at night? Is he lost in contemplation? Is he waiting for someone else to arrive? Or, perhaps, is he watching intently as something’s happening, maybe on the opposite shore, maybe in the water itself? Maybe this is actually a scene of ferocious action, only just out of frame.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 30, 2024 9:00 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
The Haints.
Are you the type of music fan who wishes there were more shows that started before 8 p.m., but wants the feel of a late Friday or Saturday night out? Are Sunday brunches too early for you, but you also don’t want to stay out too late? Three Sheets has something perfect for you the last Sunday of every month: a matinee that promises you an onslaught of punk music that is at just the right time for the late-to-rise-on-the-weekend, early-to-bed-for-work-on-Monday crowd.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 26, 2024 9:34 am
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Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove.
The return of Yale students to campus for spring semester means a new class schedule for them, but it also means a new spring screening schedule for the Yale Film Archive, one that is free and open not only to those students, but to the general public.
This week the first two films of their “Treasures from the Yale Archive” series — Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Tuesday and Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday — were screened to full rooms of film fans in all of their 35 mm glory. And according to managing archivist Brian Meacham, this is only the beginning. The Treasures series is one of three film series the Archive presents each semester.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 25, 2024 4:21 pm
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Contributed Photo
Sarah Kane.
The plays of British playwright Sarah Kane (1971 – 99) are notoriously difficult — for staging, and for what they put an audience through. The warning distributed by the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, for the production of Cleansed, running through Jan. 26 at the University Theater, reads: “Cleansed contains nudity; graphic simulations of sexual and physical violence, sexual intimacy, suicide, incest, death, and drug use; as well as coarse language. These actions are enacted by and on Black people. This production also contains loud sounds, extended gunfire, live flame, fog, bright lights, and strobe lighting effects.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2024 9:15 am
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Howard El-Yasin
Blue Velvet Suitcase.
Blue Velvet Suitcase is simple: a wooden chair, a small suitcase, a shirt from a uniform, neatly folded. It’s unassuming enough that it almost — almost — invites the viewer to sit in the chair. But the text printed on the facing wall tells us we’re looking at so much more.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Jan 23, 2024 3:31 pm
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Alder Rodriguez makes a dent in homelessness.
Alder Carmen Rodriguez donned a hard hat and struck a sledgehammer into a wall — and urged her counterparts in other cities to break down metaphorical walls as well to support the “cold, wet, and hungry.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 22, 2024 9:44 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Jeff Fuller and Friends.
Jazz can be found practically every night of the week in New Haven: at cigar bars, alongside pizza, and amidst videos and DVDs, among other places. For a jazz fan who wishes to partake of live music even during the day, Elm City Market has brought back its popular weekly jazz brunch on Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., which means not only do you get tunes, but you can have a meal (or a muffin or a mug of coffee or both) as well.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 18, 2024 9:05 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
A third of the way through the latest concert in the Kallos Chamber Music Series — held Wednesday evening at the New Haven Lawn Club — cellist Daniel Hamin Go had a little insider’s tip. “In order for this to be the best concert you’ve ever been to, this is what you have to do. During the intermission, which will begin in about 16 minutes, there is lots of wine!” The audience laughed. “And some good food. I highly recommend you either get drunk or you stuff yourself, because then we will sound amazing.” The audience laughed again. It was a fitting encapsulation of the tone of the evening, in which the music was serious but the mood informal and festive, making for a night of serious fun.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 16, 2024 9:42 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Slam host Ngoma.
Memories of the Children’s Crusade. A vision of alien visitations in the future. Invocations of superheroes. Fist-raising calls for change. These were all part of the 28th annual Z Experience Poetry Slam on Monday, part of the Yale Peabody Museum’s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy of social and environmental justice.
Artist and customer Susan Clinard in Artist & Craftsman on Monday: "It’s one of those last-standing real art stores.”
“It is a disaster for our block. We LOVE this store. I am so angry.” “It’s my life’s blood.” “This is a huge bummer … I’m there weekly with buying materials for my work or for my class at CAW.” “I feel bad for us but also the wonderful staff who have always been so great.”
These were a few of the many outcries from New Haven artists and citizens as news spread yesterday that Artist & Craftsman Supply, at 821 – 825 Chapel St., had announced it would be closing in early March.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2024 8:58 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The Kevin Saint James Band on Wednesday night.
It was 9:30 on Wednesday evening at the Owl Shop on College Street and already the Kevin Saint James Band had relaxed into an easy swing. Plumes of smoke rose in the air, from fans sitting close by, cigars lit. Lou Ianello took a ride on sax across the song’s changes. Steve Donovan followed suit on keys. Victor Ramirez on bass and Derrick Tappin on drums held down the rhythm for the others, until it was Ramirez’s turn. Each had time to express themselves. Each made sure to keep the vibe right. Singer Kevin Saint James then got up on stage, took a seat in the back, and lit a cigarette, like he had all the time in the world.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Dec 22, 2023 12:53 pm
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Nora Grace-Flood photo
Yale claims its "campus custom" is to reserve housing for university "affiliates" – including at 57 Broadway.
Tenant Lewis Nelken’s new landlord sent him unwelcome news this December: He can renew his apartment lease on Broadway for another year, but, after that lease runs out, he has to move. Just because he doesn’t work or study at Yale.
That’s the new rule for living in a stretch of downtown that Yale has continued gobbling up this year.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 14, 2023 8:54 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
Samuel Douglas as Uncle Vanya and Rebeca Robles as Sonya.
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s production of Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece Uncle Vanya — running now at the Iseman Theater on Chapel St. through Dec. 15 — is played before the theater’s usual stadium seating, but the viewers positioned on risers in the wings of the stage will feel themselves more pointedly in the midst of the action. The play, directed by fourth-year directing MFA candidate Sammy Zeisel, was adapted by the much-awarded playwright Annie Baker and experimental director Sam Gold to be staged, at Soho Rep in 2012, with a “you are there in the midst of the action” arrangement, where some spectators sat on the floor or makeshift seats, and the cast was surrounded by the audience.
Yale plans to knock down a three-story downtown commercial-residential building that was built in the late 19th century and that used to be home to the York Street Noodle House.
The Elicker administration and local preservationists oppose that coming demolition — even as they both recognize there’s little they can do to stop it.
Carl Ferris at Ninth Square community meeting: "Feces all over the place" in portable restrooms on the Green. "It all gets blamed on homeless people."
Formerly unhoused activists, Ninth Square business owners, and city officials agree: New Haven needs a downtown public restroom that actually gets cleaned.
Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, who officiated Erika's wedding: "The day of a marriage is one of the happiest days in their lives."
Three weeks after getting married, Erika found herself wondering whether her family was one of at least 78 couples that a city official had reported to federal immigration authorities.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 12, 2023 8:59 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe's production of Henry V.
Cast members of Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe’s production of Henry V burst onto the stage in a rush of sound and energy. “O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” they cried out together.
The famous introduction to probably Shakespeare’s most famous war play, the players reminded those seated in the risers at Educational Center for Arts’ theater, isn’t about war; it’s about imagination, creativity, and the collective act of actors, crew, and audience creating a world together inside a theater.
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Thomas Breen and Jake Dressler |
Dec 11, 2023 1:09 pm
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Thomas Breen / Jake Dressler photos
Rabbi Gershon Borenstein on Monday: "One act of positivity will far outpace ... what one negative act can do"; a protester on Saturday, climbing the menorah with a Palestinian flag.
Elected officials and faith leaders gathered at the spot where a protester climbed a public menorah and planted a Palestinian flag — and warned that such acts, if not called out, can escalate into violent antisemitic action.
A protester climbing the menorah on the Green on Saturday.
About 300 people marched in the streets and rallied on the Green on Saturday in the latest local effort to get elected officials to support Palestinians and a ceasefire amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
During the event, one protester climbed the menorah on the Green and lodged a Palestinian flag between the candle holders — prompting criticism from fellow protesters, and a planned press conference by elected leaders and the Jewish Federation on Monday morning to denounce the act as antisemitic.
