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Adam Wassilchalk |
Mar 24, 2025 9:34 am
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Evan Zimmerman Photo
Clue Shubert Theatre March 20
A colorful group of strangers gathers at a mansion. Before long, a body is discovered. Everyone has a motive, a weapon, an opportunity, and a secret. A journey full of misdirection, mishaps, and mayhem culminates in the culprit being revealed.
It’s a tried and true setup for a whodunit mystery. Of all the works in this great genre, I consider Clue, the 1985 film based on the board game of the same name, to be one of the best, and by far the campiest, there is.
It’s my pleasure to report that the stage adaptation of Clue, a national tour that played at the Shubert Theatre this weekend as part of its Broadway Series, was an experience as fun for the whole family and just as accessible and satisfying for devoted fans of the film as it was for anyone lucky enough to be experiencing the fast-paced murder mystery comedy for the first time.
Lise Davidsen as Fidelio, the courageous wife in disguise and role model for standing up to autocrats.
On our drive on toward Milford and the Connecticut Post Mall, I fiddled with the car radio, turning off the drumbeat of distressing news out of the nation’s capital.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 17, 2025 9:52 am
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Sesame Street Live! Say Hello Shubert Theatre March 14, 2025
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? Friday night, it was on College Street. The Shubert Theatre to be exact. It was the place to greet and get playful with the iconic children’s show’s crew of monsters and other lovable birds and beasts in their newest Sesame Street Live! stage production, aptly titled Say Hello. This reporter, a lifelong fan, and her husband made a date to dive back into some core memories while watching a captivated and super cute crowd party with their fuzzy faves.
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Aster Aguilar |
Mar 14, 2025 12:15 pm
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Samuel Douglas and Nomè SiDone in The Inspector.
The Inspector Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel St. Through March 29
When you walk into the Yale Repertory Theatre for its production of The Inspector, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the giant streetlamp. Perched just behind orchestra left, the lamp holds up a vast clothesline above the audience’s heads, connecting to an identical streetlamp deep within the whitewashed facade of the stage. The floor itself is covered in a couple inches of poly-fill snow that you just know is destined to get everywhere.
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Chris Randall |
Mar 10, 2025 10:49 am
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Chris Randall photos
When the apizza is so good, you have to sing about it! Ruben Ortiz, artistic director for Broken Umbrella, serving up both drama and slices.
A Broken Umbrella Theatre kicked off their upcoming production, Family Business: (A)Pizza Play, with a lively and fitting preview party Sunday at downtown’s BAR Pizza. The special event brought together theater lovers, pizza enthusiasts, and supporters of the arts for an afternoon filled with delicious food and engaging performances.
James Bundy, a guiding force of adventurous and cutting-edge theater in New Haven for decades, announced Thursday that he’s stepping down from his post as artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre.
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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.
