by | Dec 12, 2024 8:00 am | Comments (0)
Matthew Murphy Photo
Jamaal Fields-Green as the King of Pop in MJ.
MJ
Bushnell Center for Performing Arts
Hartford
Dec. 11, 2024
If you ever want to judge the quality of a live performance, listen to the way the audience raves about it afterwards.
by | Dec 10, 2024 8:47 am | Comments (0)
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.”
by | Dec 9, 2024 9:37 am | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘Long Wharf Brings Love Home For The Holiday’
by | Dec 2, 2024 8:20 am | Comments (34)
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.
by | Nov 18, 2024 7:30 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Nov 13, 2024 10:58 am | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘Shubert Ending Year With String Of Shows, New Space’
by | Nov 8, 2024 8:57 am | Comments (0)
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.”
Continue reading ‘New Haven Theater Company Explores Two Lives In Letters’
by | Nov 7, 2024 9:35 am | Comments (1)
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.
Continue reading ‘Collective Consciousness Peels Away "The Niceties"’
by | Oct 18, 2024 9:27 am | Comments (0)
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?
Continue reading ‘"Falcon Girls" Portrays Adolescence On The Wing’
by | Oct 1, 2024 8:49 am | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘Yale Cabaret Rises Again For 2024-25 Season’
by | Aug 19, 2024 9:17 am | Comments (2)
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.
Continue reading ‘Elm Shakespeare Kicks Off “Glorious Summer”’
by | Aug 12, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘Magnolia Theatre Company Rides The Cyclone’
by | Jul 29, 2024 9:25 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Jun 24, 2024 9:21 am | Comments (1)
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.
by | Jun 17, 2024 9:11 am | Comments (1)
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.
by | Jun 6, 2024 9:15 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Jun 4, 2024 9:11 am | Comments (1)
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.
Continue reading ‘Broken Umbrella Serves Up Slice Of History’
by | May 13, 2024 8:40 am | Comments (0)
Klein and DeAngelis.
“Hell is other people.” That famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit might be altered, for Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, to “hell is the other people you have to work with.”
by | May 7, 2024 11:05 am | Comments (0)
Dexter Singleton and Austin Dean Ashford.
It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
by | May 6, 2024 7:43 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Zheng and Shih.
“Sometimes the memory is more sad than the forgetting.” Gee (David Shih) is an ailing man, plagued by forgetting, when he says this to a pregnant woman named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) in Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, playing through May 18 at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña.
The scene is 1930s San Francisco, and Yuen is married to Moon Gyet (Hao Feng), who Gee brought from Hoisan, their native county in China, claiming him as his son for immigration — and exploitation — purposes. The textures of memory and forgetting suggest the vast scope of the hardships, fears, lies, and hopes for the future of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from 1909 to 1930 in Suh’s ambitious, episodic play.
by | May 1, 2024 8:10 am | Comments (0)
Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out. “Orpheus,” he warns, “don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers. “Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter. “Who are you?” Eurydice responds. “The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
Continue reading ‘"Hadestown" Keeps Up The Fight At The Shubert’
by | Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm | Comments (0)
Stagger.
A photographer encountering the supernatural. Forty days of rain after the loss of a son. A six-decade love note to Hong Kong. According to playwright Danielle Stagger, the Carlotta Festival of New Plays 2024 — running May 2 to May 10 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street — features three “funky plays” that are “not what you might imagine coming from Yale playwriting.”
Continue reading ‘Carlotta Festival Takes On Love, Grief, And Ghosts’
by | Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am | Comments (0)
Eva Skewes Photo
Stacey Strange, Dani Bobbi Lee, Nicholas Strange.
Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACES ECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
by | Apr 26, 2024 8:45 am | Comments (0)
Goodheart, Tassi, Morosco, Power (clockwise from top left).
Theater artist Terri Power discovered Shakespeare in high school, finding Lady Macbeth “extraordinarily powerful and sexual,” she said. Their teacher asked the class to memorize passages to perform in class. Power dressed in a long black turtleneck and sweater and skirt and delivered a monologue in which Lady Macbeth taunts her spouse: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”
Her teacher sent Power to the principal’s office, where he then argued to the principal that she should be suspended for “revealing her breast.” The principal, looking at Power’s wardrobe, wondered exactly how Power would have done this. The teacher dialed it back: “She said things,” he said.
Continue reading ‘Elm Shakespeare Opens "Brave New Theater"’
by | Mar 29, 2024 9:18 am | Comments (5)
artidea.org
Jazz vocalist Samara Joy, an A&I headliner this year.
Shakespeare in circus, choral fusion, climate activism and optimism talks, making your own empanadas: this eclectic mix of events and more is part of this summer’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which is returning with a full schedule of programming that covers just about anything an arts and culture lover would have a taste for — and maybe something they have never tasted before.