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Jamil Ragland |
Feb 14, 2025 9:33 am
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Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. (Memphis) and Postell Pringle (Wolf) in August Wilson's Two Trains Running.
Two Trains Running Hartford Stage Hartford February 6, 2025
Two Trains Running belongs to August Wilson’s ten-play cycle describing African American life in each decade of the 20th century. It takes place in Pittsburgh, as restaurant owner Memphis fights to get a fair price for his business as the city attempts to redevelop the area.
The lede of the play is buried under racial and social discussions of the era.
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Jamil Ragland |
Feb 6, 2025 7:05 am
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Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.
Peter Pan Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts Hartford Feb. 4, 2025
Peter Pan is one of my all-time favorite stories across pretty much every adaptation I’ve seen. The Broadway musical playing at the Bushnell this week ranks as one of the best adaptations, and breathes new life into the timeless story.
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Adam Wassilchalk |
Jan 31, 2025 3:55 pm
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Silin Chen
Now Yale Cabaret show is "a moving meditation on grief, language, and how to navigate the disasters that befall us."
Grandmother/Bathtub Yale Cabaret Through Saturday night
“It’s the safest place to be!” Grandmother declares of the bathtub, where she has been for an indeterminate amount of time. Neither I nor Nat, her grandchild, can convincingly source or verify her claim. Regardless, it’s as good a place as any for the two of them to grieve the catastrophes of the past and steel themselves for the catastrophes of the future in this world premiere of Brian Dang’s play, part of the Yale Cabaret’s 57th season.
For a few weeks, New Haveners will be able to go downtown and travel to New York City’s 1927 San Juan Hill, where a pair of star-crossed lovers suffer the consequences of heightened tensions between Black Americans and Caribbean immigrants.
A year ago, as 2023 wound down to its last hours, Joel Jacobson, 83 years old at the time, set out in his Toyota sedan from his East Rock condo for a holiday dinner at Adriana’s, on Grand Avenue.
Going to this popular Italian restaurant had been a household tradition, but this visit, he knew, would be different.
5 demolished buildings to be repurposed as brick mural, on ground floor of new Yale drama building at Crown & York.
Yale won a key city approval for its plans to construct a new seven-story drama school and Yale Repertory Theater building — at a downtown corner where the university intends to demolish five existing buildings, and then incorporate the brick wreckage into a new mural.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 10, 2024 8:47 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
Whitney White in Macbeth in Stride.
When we first meet Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s best-known and often-staged tragedies, she seems designed to steal the show. Her speeches are riveting, her emotions keyed up and powerful. When her husband Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis promoted to Thane of Cawdor, arrives home, she delivers more drama, prodding his dithering into regicide, and even shows him how it should be done when it comes to implicating the two guards that Macbeth and his Lady have drugged.
All this Whitney White — in her show Macbeth in Stride, now playing for one week only at Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 14 — delivers with musing commentary. Then comes a coronation that looks like it could be featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Murderous.” After that triumph, what next for our ambitious queen? As White, who wrote the show and performs the lead (called “Woman”) in the piece, flatly states: “She gets to host a dinner party.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 9, 2024 9:37 am
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Julius Thomas III and Alicia Kaori in She Loves Me.
Two people who have fallen in love through anonymous letters are dealing with one another in person much more than they know — and at first, care to know. Someone else is two-timing it between a co-worker and the boss’s wife. Another man is figuring out just how much he wants, or does not want, to meddle in all this, and another ambitious young man is just trying to get ahead. It’s all happening in the confines of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest — and in Long Wharf’s production of She Loves Me, which had its Broadway premiere in 1963, that perfume shop is current located, quite impressively, in the transformed gym of a former middle school.
Yale's proposed dramatic arts building, circa 2029 ...
... to be located at York and Crown.
All the world’s a stage — for Yale, which plans to construct a new seven-story, 188,000 square-foot building for its drama school and the Yale Repertory Theater, to be located at the northwest corner of Crown and York streets.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 18, 2024 7:30 am
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Lioness dancers as part of The Lion King
The Lion King Bushnell Center for Performing Arts Hartford Nove. 14, 2024
The Lion King has returned to the Bushnell Center for performing arts for the first time in years. If you have the ability, go see it. It’s a triumph of staging and storytelling for all ages of the family.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 13, 2024 10:58 am
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Abdullah Ibrahim.
Jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim waited at the piano, listening intently, while his bandmates, Cleave Guyton on flute and Noah Jackson on bass, finished a quietly acrobatic rendering of a Duke Ellington classic that was also a nod to Ibrahim’s past. Guyton and Jackson finished, and left the stage. Then Ibrahim began, slowly, deliberately, with exquisite touch and gorgeous dynamic control, the product of decades of playing. He took his time working through his theme, and as the large audience at the Shubert Tuesday was struck silent, seemed to stop time itself.
Ibrahim’s performance — organized jointly between the Shubert and the Schwarzman Center — was part of a string of performances carrying the venerable College Street theater through the end of the year.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2024 8:57 am
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NHTC Photos
Ralph Buonocore.
It’s been years since Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met, and in that time, the literary stars of both poets have risen. They have each moved from place to place in the United States and beyond, and chased and acquired romantic partners. They are living lives, on one level, that seem full of realized ambitions. And yet none of that stops Lowell from writing to Bishop, long into their correspondence, that “I seem to spend my life missing you.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 7, 2024 9:35 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Kendall Driffin and Susan Kulp in The Niceties.
Janine, a professor, has some feedback for her student, Zoe. “I’m glad you brought this in early. I can see you’ve done an impressive amount of work on it,” Janine says.
“Yeah, well. I tend to get a little intense about fulfilling requirements,” Zoe says. The tone in the room is still friendly, but something is changing.
“I wish you hadn’t plowed ahead like this — written the full draft without getting comments on the thesis,” Janine says. “I was just excited to lay out the ideas,” Zoe says.
“I’m afraid you’re in for quite a substantial rewrite,” Janine says. “Your argument is … fundamentally unsound.” She turns to the first page. “‘A successful American Revolution was only possible because of the existence of slavery,’” she reads out loud.
Now the mood has changed completely, though Janine doesn’t fully realize it. “Yes,” Zoe said. Janine challenges her, as only a professor at an elite college can: “Yes?” she says, the verbal equivalent. But Zoe, suddenly, is having no more of it. “Yes,” she says.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2024 9:27 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Hilary, a middle-school student, has just moved to Falcon, Colorado. She wears all the wrong clothes, says all the wrong things, and most of the other students are ready to tease her for it, except one, who reminds them to ask themselves what Jesus would do. Socially, things might be looking a little bleak. But Hilary has an improbable secret weapon to get in with one group of girls — a passion for, and deep knowledge of, keeping horses. They start to get to know each other. What happens when the conversation moves from secret weapons to secrets?
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Donald Brown |
Oct 1, 2024 8:49 am
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Artistic Managing Director Sarah Machiko Haber.
The life and death of viral celebrity. Keeping the stories of ancestors alive. Death and rebirth.
The mythological phoenix is famed for rising reborn from its own ashes. Chosen as the title for Yale Cabaret’s 2024 – 25 season, the name is fitting — not only for the themes running through what the Cab is producing this year, but because the Cab is a student-run theater that has “died” and been reborn 55 times before. Each season has new artistic directors and managing directors who, in a manner of speaking, rise from the ashes of their predecessors.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 19, 2024 9:17 am
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Elm Shakespeare Company photo
Elm Shakespeare Company's Richard III.
Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III — running in Edgerton Park now through Sept. 1 — opens on a scene of warfare, complete with smoke, red lighting, and clashing swords. Then it transitions into a party, with swirling ribbons and joyful dancing. The titular Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Lisa Wolpe) feels much more at home in the former scene than in the latter. “Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace / Have no delight to pass away the time,” Richard proclaims bitterly. This is the key to his entire character, and in some senses, the play itself.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 12, 2024 9:20 am
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Magnolia Theatre Company photos
Ocean O’Connor Rosenberg is tearing up the stage with her friends, forming them into a human pyramid. She’s belting out an uptempo song at the top of her lungs. She’s gotten all her friends to support her — literally — but the song she’s singing, if you listen carefully to the lyrics ricocheting by, is actually about how much better she is than they are. Is it fair? Is it mean? Is it even true?
The answers are probably no, yes, and no. But on the other hand, can we really blame O’Connor Rosenberg for wanting to come out on top? She’s literally singing for her life.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 29, 2024 9:25 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
TJ and Antony Sellitto-Budney with puppets.
What do felt, paper, string, feathers, eggs, and odd socks have in common? They can all be made into puppets, and they all came alive on Friday night during the Pinned & Sewtured Puppet Cabaret, hosted at Witch Bitch Thrift.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 9:21 am
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Contributed photo
The 7 Fingers in "Dual Reality."
The 7 Fingers, an acrobatic and theatrical company, was about to begin its performance of Arts & Ideas’ Duel Reality, a circus-like retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when a fight appeared to break out in the audience.
The ushers had split the crowd down the middle and given half the attendees a red wristband while the other half received blue. The problem: two audience members noticed that a third “audience member” was seated in the wrong section, wearing a blue wristband in the red half. They asked him to move. He resisted. Just as the audience started to get nervous that a real physical altercation was occurring, all would-be combatants ran up onto the stage. The show had already begun.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 17, 2024 9:11 am
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Shin Kurokawa Photos
Compagnia de’ Colombari's King Lear.
Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of King Lear at University Theatre — whose first performance was part of Friday night’s big kickoff for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — doesn’t start, so much as the audience blinks and then it’s happening.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 6, 2024 9:15 am
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Curtis Brown Photography
The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 4, 2024 9:11 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
On Monday night, members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre gathered in the theater company’s rehearsal and performance space in Westville to roll the clock back to 1929, close to the origins of New Haven’s apizza culture.
In the scene they rehearsed, Pete Jr. (Otto Fuller) wants to introduce his friend Charles (Jonah Alderman) to the rest of his family: mother Lucrezia (Susan Kulp), Cousin Mike (Matt Gaffney), and Uncle Jimmy (Lou Mangini). Mike and Jimmy, behind the counter, roll out dough and slide apizza in and out of a brick oven. Charles isn’t there just to make friends; he wants a job.
