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Brian Slattery |
Aug 23, 2018 7:35 am
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The road to Kennies Earl Kreative House — an all-purpose creative space for photography, music production, theater, and workshops on Shelton Avenue — started in Earl’s stepfather’s apartment about 15 years ago, when Earl, still in college, got a synthesizer and started to use it.
His stepfather, Earl recalled, “thought I was making too much noise.”
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Christopher Peak |
Aug 21, 2018 1:14 pm
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Christopher Peak Photo
Amistad Academy’s Isaiah Germain, Joseph Jackson and Carlos Torres, back from summer programs.
After two months constructing the set for the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Edgerton Park, Carlos Torres said with unabashed pride, that he became “a huge theater nerd.”
Through Achievement First Amistad High School’s summer internship program, which paired him with Elm Shakespeare Co., Torres learned to use obscure power tools, scanned iambic pentameter, splotched paint onto half of his wardrobe and found a passion for working behind the scenes in theater.
Sam Plattus, director of Cabaret — playing now at Lyric Hall in Westville until July 15 — met us, his guests, with warmth and enthusiasm on our way into the auditorium. We found the stage filled with the cast in their attire, quiet chatter and knowing smirks abounding as they managed their preparations. Just after a hush settled over the whole room, Plattus walked to the foot of the apron.
“Today there were protests all across the country. … It was really important to the whole cast that they were happening,” Plattus said. “I’ve learned, working on this show, that we live in a very fragile world. It looks more fragile by the day. It’s the responsibility of all of us together to make sure that the world doesn’t break.”
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Jason Fitzgerald |
Jun 15, 2018 10:03 am
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Arts & Ideas
If the giggles and gasps I heard Thursday night from both adults and young children — often in unison — in Yale’s University Theatre is any indication, A Billion Nights on Earth is that rare thing: an evening of theatre for children that is not children’s theatre. Rather than a brightly colored cartoon story with enough double entendres to keep the parents awake, creator and director Thaddeus Phillips has taken the braver step of reminding us adults that we are at our best when we are like our children. Although the evening he has crafted lasts a scant hour and holds a trifle of a plot, it is designed, like a vivid dream, to linger long after it ends.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 14, 2018 8:01 am
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Cantrell Cheeks as Chai, with director Katie Sparer.
For teenager Chai’s birthday, his girlfriend Caryn is getting him something unusual: a new name.
She knows Chai doesn’t like his name, his full name, so behind his back she does some crowdfunding and raises the money — over $2,000 — to legally make the change.
One thing, though: Chai doesn’t know what to change it to. Another thing: Caryn doesn’t even know why Chai doesn’t like his name, or what it will do to his small nuclear family if he tries to change it.
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Thomas Breen |
Jun 13, 2018 7:56 am
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Gordon Edelstein
An iconic local theater was led for over a decade by a “big personality” whose personal charisma and artistic success made him “too big to be held accountable” for his rampant sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 13, 2018 7:54 am
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Eddy.
Cliff Bradshaw (Nate Houran) has just interrupted his love interest, Sally Bowles (Jay Eddy), canoodling with another man. She storms offstage and Cliff moves to follow her. He’s stopped by Ernst (Jeremy Funke), who wants to make a deal with him. Cliff wants no part of it. Ernst is a little confused, but not thrown off his game.
“I know you need the money,” he says, “so it must be something else. Ah — that Jew at the party?”
That’s when Cliff hits Ernst, landing a punch right in his stomach.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 5, 2018 2:51 pm
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Elizabeth Nearing Photo
Azhar Ahmed.
Azhar Ahmed fled the war in Sudan in 2004. For a decade she lived with her husband in Cairo, working as a teacher and applying for refugee status in the United States. In June 2015 she and her husband finally arrived in New Haven. Her son was born six months ago, in a friend’s house.
“You have to start from the beginning,” she said, of her experience of arriving in the United States.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2018 7:48 am
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Campbell and Duff.
On the stage of Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School on Tuesday, Isabella Violante Fletcher, Jayliz Freeney, Nehima Bell, and Chidimma Nzekwe —better known as Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Moth in their costumes — were chanting about animals.
“Spotted snakes with double tongues, thorny hedgehogs be not seen. Newts and bloodworms do no wrong. Come not near our fairy queen.” They sang it to the tune of Brahms’s famous lullaby. In the middle of them was Zyana Campbell, or Titania, who sank slowly into slumber. One of the fairies stood guard, until Martin Duff as Oberon shooed her away.
He knelt down and cast his own spell to work some of the mischief that fuels A Midsummer NIght’s Dream — the eighth annual Shakespeare production at Mauro-Sheridan, put together by a deep collaboration among Jodi Schneider of Mauro-Sheridan, the education program at Elm Shakespeare Company, Hopkins School, and most important, a cadre of game, hardworking, and talented fifth- to eighth-graders at Mauro-Sheridan.
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David Sepulveda |
May 14, 2018 2:50 pm
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East Wall
Westville’s festival installation.
DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTOS
Green Goat dairy goats begin their assault.
A second New Haven “Goatville neighborhood” was opened in Edgewood Park during Westville’s 21st annual Artwalk festival.
But this “neighborhood,” a wooded and overgrown corner of the park, has real, live goats that will be performing special community service for several years to come.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2018 12:03 pm
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Megan Chenot Photos
The cast of Rumors.
It’s fitting that Neil Simon’s Rumors — playing May 16 to May 19 at the New Haven Theater Company on Chapel Street — effectively starts with a slamming door. Before that is a brief, frantic conversation between Chris Gorman (Jenny Schuck) and her husband Ken (Peter Chenot). Chris is dressed in an evening gown. Ken has blood on his tuxedo shirt.
“He’s bleeding like crazy,” Ken says.
“Oh my God!” Chris says.
“It’s all over the room,” Ken says. “I don’t know why people decorate in white.”
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Donald Brown |
May 8, 2018 8:34 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Who gets to enact the story of someone else’s suffering? Is it worthwhile to enact situations you have no knowledge of, through belief in some common, shared existential state? Global citizens, denizens of the internet, aren’t we free to access whatever speaks to us?
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Donald Brown |
May 1, 2018 7:14 am
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The daughter of an evangelist must come to terms with her own faith and doubt while traveling on the revival circuit in the Great Plains in Majkin Holmquist’s Tent Revival. The aftermath of a rape is depicted for both the assailant’s mother and the victim in Genne Murphy’s The Girl is Chained. Recidivism within a Philadelphia family occurs in a span from the 1980s’ crack epidemic to today’s opioid crisis in Josh Wilder’s Marty and the Hands that Could.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 30, 2018 12:18 pm
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Elon Trotman.
Jazz heavyweights and artistic emissaries from Africa will mix with New Haven’s finest talent at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas this year. That’s just the way Chad Herzog, co-executive director of the festival and director of programming, wants it, as the festival continues to deal with a tighter state budget by sinking its roots deeper into the Elm City.
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Jason Fitzgerald |
Apr 30, 2018 7:36 am
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Pope, Thomas, Covington, and Crawford.
It’s not only Latice Crawford’s powerhouse vocals, athletic melisma, and seemingly bottomless reserves of soul that are bringing audiences to their feet at the Long Wharf Theatre. The force of her rendition of the gospel classic “His Eye is On the Sparrow” is sustained by its dramatic context.
Crawford is not just singing her heart out; she’s struggling to reach an angry and emotionally closed teenage girl, wounded by violence and betrayal, who can’t imagine that gospel music might have something to say to her. The girl’s reluctant opening to her heritage is the thin but effective plot of Crowns, the musical written and directed by Regina Taylor now being revived in a spirited and talent-riddled production co-presented with the McCarter Theatre.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 27, 2018 8:06 am
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A young man is leaving his home in rural North Carolina, heading for the town of Asheville. He’s stopped in a bookstore before he goes. A young woman works there. There’s something between them that they’ve never really talked about, but they both feel it. He dances out the door.
She reaches out a hand and stops time. Reverses it. The young man sashays back into the bookstore, in reverse. His hat leaps from his head, as if by magic. He’s back where he was, right before he said his goodbye. She stops time again, and sings in that frozen moment, a song full of hope that the young man finds what he’s looking for. She wants the best for him. But she wants him, too, and she doesn’t quite know how to reconcile the two.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 18, 2018 1:27 pm
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Les Miz.
Allan Appel Photo
Pileggi in Shubert lobby beside poster for the current Steve Martin-penned musical Bright Star.
Diane Pileggi has spent 22 years working behind the scenes in the back office at the Shubert Theater. Now the historic theater’s accounting supervisor, she cited her favorite show over those two plus decades: Last season’s The Book of Mormon.
And what’s she looking forward to this season? She said she wants to think on it.
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Christopher Peak |
Apr 12, 2018 8:04 am
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Christopher Peak Photos
Gertrude (Audrey Adji) tells Ophelia (Lindsey Cruz) about her mother in Co-Op’s gender-role reversed Capillary Waves.
Ophelia jousts with Hamlet (Charles Sadowski).
Some high schools put on an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet. Cooperative Arts High School is staging an immersive, site-specific, feminist rewrite of Hamlet.
Written by a drama teacher, Capillary Waves shoves Hamlet out of the spotlight and instead centers the story on Ophelia. In Shakespeare’s version, she’s the jilted lover who commits suicide. In Co-Op’s version, she’s the heroine who talks back to men, rescues Hamlet from his uncle’s plots and is ultimately murdered trying to save him.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2018 7:49 am
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On Wednesday night at Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue, Ife Michelle was explaining the plot of Crowns, the upcoming play at Long Wharf Theatre, and how it continued to relate to mentoring in the community today.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 28, 2018 7:38 am
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Grease 2 to Reagan-era rage. Love taboos to iPhones.
To plan this year’s Satellite Festival for the Yale Cabaret, playwright Jeremy O. Harris and dramaturg Amauta Marston-Firmino — both in their second year at the Yale School of Drama — dived first into the Cab’s 50-year history.
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Jason Fitzgerald |
Mar 27, 2018 7:40 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
James Udom and Eboni Flowers.
In the opening scene of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3, a series of characters, all black slaves in Civil War Texas, hold out their palms and extend their thumbs horizontally, squinting at the horizon. Even though standing on dry land, they are navigators, measuring the imminence of the sunrise and their position relative to the north star. The gesture, which becomes a motif, holds a poignant double meaning in Parks’s three-act drama. In the scene, they are measuring the time before one of their number must decide whether to join the Confederate army as his master’s servant or disobey him and face the consequences.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 14, 2018 7:58 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
Forget March Madness. In Connecticut right now, March is Mystery Month. Up at Hartford Stage through March 25, Agatha Christie’s beloved sleuth Hercule Poirot is solving The Murder on the Orient Express, while over in Norwalk until March 18, The 39 Steps, a comedy-mystery based on an espionage thriller, is playing at Music Theatre of Connecticut.
And at Long Wharf Theatre, Baskerville, Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles, runs through March 25. There seems to be statewide agreement that we need fun to divert us from the weather while still getting us out to the theater. And it’s no secret that mystery has draw.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 12, 2018 7:50 am
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Fifteen New Haven high-school students brought playwright August Wilson’s characters to life in an August Wilson Monologue Competition on Friday evening. Before they started, James Bundy, artistic director at the Yale Repertory Theatre, reminded the audience that a little bit of themselves might be in Wilson’s plays.
The self-taught playwright, Bundy said, spent a lot of time just listening to people talk. “The people who are in his plays are people he heard from sitting in coffee shops.” In town, that meant Atticus and especially Book Trader on Chapel Street. If you stop into Book Trader, Bundy said, “You’re sitting where he listened to New Haven.”
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 2, 2018 8:50 am
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Brandon Oliveras and Catherine Sigg.
Two people go to their high school reunion. Could be 15 years, 20 years, since they saw each other last. They strike up a conversation. Start to hit it off. They share a dance. A connection is forming. But they never dated in high school. Didn’t have a crush on each other. As it turns out, they didn’t know each other well at all. Which is why, when they sing to each other, they don’t sing to each other about the good old days.
“I’m glad you didn’t know me in high school,” they sing.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 23, 2018 9:16 am
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Pearce and Moggridge.
A strong wind blew inside the rehearsal space at Long Wharf Theatre, making Dr. Watson and Sir Henry lean into it.
“And hat,” said director Brendon Fox. A member of the crew tossed a hat through the air in front of the characters, who were looking for and found a certain Dr. Mortimer, who might have some information they needed.
“We’re lookin’ for a woman with the initials ‘L.L.’!” Sir Henry shouted into the wind. “What?” Dr. Mortimer shouted back. “We’re looking for a woman!” Watson shouted. “So am I! I’m tired of being single!” Dr. Mortimer shouted.
