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Lucy Gellman |
Jul 17, 2017 8:02 am
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Kiki Lucia at this weekend’s “Dragapalooza” fundraiser.
Climbing the 168 York Street stage, Kiki Lucia pulled at a noose hanging low around her neck, looking out at the audience with long-lashed, saucer-sized doe eyes. She jerked backward. The noose loosened, and she broke free.
Kiki Lucia ripped open her blouse, exposing a heaving chest and two bright, sweat-slicked nipples, along with a message written in black: Trans rights now.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 16, 2017 7:32 am
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Christopher Duggan Photo
Black Girl.
Black Girl: Linguistic Play — running for one more night at the University Theater on York Street as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — began Thursday with the bass, just Robin Bramlett and her instrument, laying down big notes. Pianist Scott Patterson joined her, laying down sweeping cascades of melody.
A lone dancer appeared on stage, exuding childhood, the sense of freedom, of not being sure what to do with her limbs and not caring. She tapped in her sneakers. She did the running man. And at last, she began kicking up chalk dust. It rose around her, still dust, but in the light, it looked a little like steam, too, or like smoke.
For just a minute, it seemed as though the dancer was tapping across the surface of a hot skillet. Like if she stopped moving, she’d be cooked. So the dancer’s exuberance had danger in it. Her joy was an end in itself. But maybe it was necessary for her survival, too.
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Christopher Peak |
Jun 15, 2017 3:57 pm
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Students imitate Diana Ross’s “Stop! In the Name of Love,” with the cast.
Becoming a professional theater actor is not all laughing, singing and dancing in the street, according to the performer who played the Vandellas’ lead singer Martha Reeves in the traveling tour of Motown: The Musical.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 15, 2017 7:36 am
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Washington and the cast of (Be)longing in rehearsal.
On a recent evening, the cast of (Be)longing — an oratorio about the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings that draws from hip hop and opera and runs at Long Wharf Theatre as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas this Saturday and Sunday — was assembled in a rehearsal space in Hendrie Hall on Elm Street. Over a series of long pitches held by a group of singers, Hanifa Washington, assuming the role of mediator, maybe therapist, was asking the people in the room what freaks them out.
“Confrontation!” said one cast member. “Confrontation freaks me out,” the chorus sang in unison, in four ascending notes.
An increasingly poorly kept secret is the growing prowess of its long-standing Shakespeare reading groups, which have led to The Mauro-Sheridan Shakespeare players’ annual production of a Bard play.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jun 6, 2017 4:36 pm
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Elizabeth Green Photos
The battle of the … sexes?
At the Yale Cabaret’s tiny basement theater on Park Street, something mystical was unfolding. A scarved, glitter-clad and turbaned soothsayer worked their hands around a glowing glass globe, looking into the future. In wide fishnets, shiny booty shorts and a pink tank top, Charmian begged for her fortune.
“Good now, some excellent fortune! Let me be married / to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all: / let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry / may do homage: find me to marry me with Octavius / Caesar, and companion me with my mistress,” she cackled.
“You shall outlive the lady whom you serve,” said the soothsayer in a singsong, wispy voice.
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Donald Brown |
Jun 1, 2017 10:16 am
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seated: Artistic Directors Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri; standing (l to r): Trent Anderson, General Manager; Dashiell Menard, Production Manager; Leandro Zanetti, Managing Director
“A classic,” Mark Twain once said, “is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” We assume we already know what the work says and don’t want to bother with it. But in the theater, a classic work simply won’t go away. It gets done again and again, in a kind of afterlife of endless revival. But why?
Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri, the artistic directors of this year’s Yale Summer Cabaret and both rising third-year directors at the Yale School of Drama, have devised a summer season that examines the status of theater classics. The season runs from June 2 to August 13 and is called “Canon Balle.” It celebrates classics, but may also be considered an offensive against those who want their classics untouched by contemporary interests. Think, for starters, Antony and Cleopatra in drag.
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Allan Appel |
May 19, 2017 2:16 pm
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Artist Stewart outside her studio.
Sarah Stewart turns out oil-on-linen paintings in the factory complex that once turned out erector sets for the nation — and now New Haven’s zoning rules are catching up with the economic transformation there.
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Brian Slattery |
May 18, 2017 3:01 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
The cast.
On the way home from seeing The Most Beautiful Room in New York, my wife Steph actually said this: “As a lifelong lover of musicals, I resented this. It is everything that people who hate musicals say they hate about musicals.”
What happens in a good production of a musical when the musical itself isn’t good? Beautiful Room gave us a chance to find out.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2017 2:43 pm
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A steady rain couldn’t keep people away from ArtWalk, held in Westville Saturday afternoon. Though the neighborhood’s central streets were missing the usual crowds during the annual event, Edgewood Park stayed lively, and indoor activities in the artists’ studios in West River Arts and Lyric Hall on Whalley Avenue ensured ArtWalk kept its tradition of celebrating the arts — for 20 years and running — alive.
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Donald Brown |
May 10, 2017 12:06 pm
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Joan Marcus Photo
Donohoe and Chalfant.
If someone says a play is “risky,” what does that mean? That it handles a taboo subject, that it goes against political orthodoxy, or that its staging is avant-garde in some way? Amy Herzog’s new play, Mary Jane — at the Yale Repertory Theatre through May 20 and directed by Anne Kauffman — is risky without any of those things being true. It’s risky in its willingness to be unsentimental, unsensational, and sharply observed while dealing with childhood illness and single-mom parenting. The risk is in how straightforward and untheatrical it is, and the satisfaction is in how clearly it fulfills its purpose.
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David Sepulveda
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May 4, 2017 2:24 pm
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DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
Kimberly Squires and Allan Zeller in Kamasutra.
The 13 local professional and non-professional actors performing in “Still Crazy After All These Years!” a new, touring festival of eight one-act plays, may all be AARP-eligible, but their performances deliver a message that busts stereotypes about their age group.
“It’s not all death, senility and arthritis,” said award-winning New Haven playwright, co-director, and co-producer Tom Coash.
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Lucy Gellman |
May 1, 2017 7:28 am
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(Opinion) The 20th anniversary tour of Rent, which played at the Shubert Theatre from Friday to Sunday, showed that — against a lot of odds — the 1997 musical about struggling artists in a vanished New York City still has legs.
Chris Cole and Fran McMullen in Cole’s APNH office.
As the rents in New Haven rose, so did HIV diagnoses among gay men, especially in communities of color.
That rise isn’t happening just in New Haven, learned AIDS Project New Haven (APNH) Director Chris Cole. It’s a national problem, and it’s not showing signs of going away.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 27, 2017 7:20 am
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Gardner and Chenot.
When Peter Chenot saw Chrissy Gardner perform her work, her utter naturalness — an ability to tell a joke mid-performance and then continue or move into the next number effortlessly — convinced him she had also to be on stage in a major part as his Mary Swenson.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 25, 2017 12:11 pm
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Brian Slattery Photo
On a recent afternoon at the West Rock Community Center, Sarah Bowles, Elm Shakespeare Company’s new education program manager, heard the kids in her after-school program talking about bars. She asked them what they meant. They explained: In hip hop, the bars meant the metered sentences that rhymed with each other.
That was like Shakespeare’s language, Bowles told them. “It’s like bars.” And they got it. Soon they were trading lines from Shakespeare with the same ease and flow they brought to their favorite hip hop songs.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 20, 2017 12:01 pm
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Allan Appel Photo
Chan, with one of her puppets, faceless with frozen emotion.
Onnie Chan’s father was a very well-known business and media personality when he died in Hong Kong more than two decades ago.
Chan, only ten years old at the time, was rushed from one public funeral to another with paparazzi trailing her. For further protection, she and her mother left the home she knew for good and Chan became something of a world traveler. She never really connected to what had happened at that turning point in her life.
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David Sepulveda |
Apr 7, 2017 7:29 am
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Arts meeting at Community Foundation.
A roundtable meeting of the Arts Industry Coalition — a group of area arts organizations, arts leaders, and stakeholders organized by The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and hosted by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven in its offices on Audubon Street — discussed what can be done to save the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and what might be done if they are dissolved, as a current budget proposal from the Trump administration suggests they could be.
Imani, left, and Iyanna strut their stuff at Lincoln-Bassett
Wearing their Wonk‑y white and green caps and fuzzy orange gloves, 16 Oompa Loompas, including Imani Patterson Griffin and Iyanna Birch, hit the thespian boards Wednesday afternoon in a rousing run-through of Willy Wonka Jr. at Lincoln-Bassett Community School in Newhallville.
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David Sepulveda |
Apr 4, 2017 12:46 pm
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DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
Kane.
“S‑i-t-z-p-r-o-b‑e. Sitzprobe.”
Edgewood After School Drama Club’s Jaime Kane, who is directing an upcoming stage production of Beauty and the Beast (Jr), spelled it out, explaining, “it’s a theatrical term that means seated rehearsal.”
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 30, 2017 10:25 pm
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Courtesy A&I
Chad Herzog, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’s interim co-executive director and director of programming, stood on the stage in a large room on the first floor of Alexion, on College Street. Before him, artists and filmmakers mingled with bankers and civic leaders. A countdown clock projected on the wall that looked more like something for a sports event — maybe a nod to March Madness? — had just run out. Herzog was on stage to announce A&I’s lineup for 2017.
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Thomas Breen |
Mar 29, 2017 10:08 am
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West, Sellem, and Castro in Milk Like Sugar.
A red lollipop dangling between her fingers like a cigarette, her braids perched like a crown above her leopard-print dress, one teenage girl took a long, searing look at another.
