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David Sepulveda
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May 4, 2017 2:24 pm
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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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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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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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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.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 29, 2017 10:06 am
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Jackson (Sullivan Jones) is a rising surgeon dissatisfied with how he’s treated at work. He knows he’s one of the best on the staff but, as an African-American, he faces demeaning treatment from white superiors who want to keep him down. He’s a good guy though, and operates a clinic on the side for the uninsured.
Brian (Peter O’Connor) is a celebrated sociologist and statistician determined to prove that racism is “hard-wired” in human brains; it’s biological, not sociological, he claims. If true, his findings would sweep aside one of the dearest assumptions of liberal progressives that racial bias is learned and thus can be unlearned. A white man, he is meeting increasing resistance from the authorities in his field. Oh, and his students, not without reason, think he’s an arrogant prick.
Ginny (Ka-Ling Cheung) is a psychologist and researcher who “identifies strongly” as Asian-American, which, we assume, means she doesn’t want to be seen either as white or as an immigrant.
Valerie (Tiffany Nichole Greene) is an African-American actress recently graduated from an MFA program, suffering the indignity of auditions. First it’s for the minor role of Portia in Julius Caesar. Then for a stereotyped “mamie” role in some piece of drivel. She can get prickly whenever someone — even another African-American like Jackson — makes remarks she deems racist.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 24, 2017 7:49 am
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John Wilkes Booth stands in the center of the stage, flanked by the presidential assassins and would-be presidential assassins whofollow him in a thin line of carnage stretching from 1865 to 1981.
“Everybody’s got the right to be happy,” he sings.
The stage and tone are set, half carnival midway, half dinner theater, as these historical figures— Charles Guiteau, who killed James Garfield in 1881; Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley in 1901; Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to kill Franklin Roosevelt in 1933; Samuel Byck, who tried to kill Richard Nixon in 1974; Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who made separate attempts on Gerald Ford’s life in 1975; and John Hinkley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 — mingle together in a theatrical present. A minute or so later, they’re all singing together: “Everyone’s got the right to their dreams.”
There’s a glaring exception to that list, of course. But you know it’s coming.
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Lucy Gellman |
Mar 21, 2017 7:53 am
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Shakespearian actress Valerie Johnson was on a gurney, blood trickling from a gash on her face onto her corset. After sustaining a backstage injury, she’d waited three hours for a medical professional.
When Dr. Jackson Moore showed up, Johnson assumed he was a nurse — because he was black. Moore, in return, assumed she’d been Johnson had been beaten — because she was black, too.
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Lucy Gellman |
Mar 1, 2017 2:35 pm
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Courtesy NHTC
Peter Chenot as Trevor.
It takes a moment to realize that Trevor, sulking and dressed as an overgrown teenager in a T‑shirt and sweats, is actually a 200-pound chimpanzee.
At first, he just seems like the former. He has taken his mother’s car without her permission, and shows no remorse as he drops the keys onto the counter, and sinks into the sofa.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 1, 2017 1:05 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
With immigration a hot political issue, stories about the ways of life of immigrants become more than sentimental evocations of how newly arrived people managed here in the past. Such family histories, as featured in Meghan Kennedy’s new play Napoli, Brooklyn, at the Long Wharf Theatre through March 12, should make us aware of how diverse are the cultural backgrounds covered by the term “American.” That diversity undermines any right of one ethnicity to lay claim to that term more than another. Almost everyone has ancestors who suffered to get here and to stay here, and the American Dream has seemed to promise that this country would find room for all.
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Adam Matlock |
Feb 17, 2017 9:14 am
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In one of several extraordinary moments in Thursday’s performance of Collective Consciousness Theatre’s Stories of a New America — a play being performed this weekend at Fair Haven’s Collective Consciousness Theater — all the members of the cast addressed the audience, talking about the moment of realization about being in a new place — because they “could hear the quiet — no bombs, no bullets, no shelling, no militia.”
It illustrated one extreme of the refugee experience, the type often overlooked in the vigorous debate surrounding current events. By choosing to focus the script on anecdotes and observations like this, the cast and company gave the full house a number of quiet moments, where rigorous political jargon could be forgotten for a moment to make space for empathy.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2017 4:13 pm
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On Wednesday — the day before Long Wharf Theatre’s Feb. 16 opening of Napoli, Brooklyn — the year 1960 invaded the theater’s lobby. There was a rack of clothes straight from the era, a textile time warp amid the lobby’s sleek architecture. Two lamps. A chair. Against the far wall was a cart that had three phones in different colors, all with rotary dials and receivers with cords. Potted plants. A statue of the Virgin Mary.
Inside the theater, a dozen crew members in hard hats were putting the final touches on the set. A backdrop showed a row of brownstones. A huge sign hung from the ceiling that read “Duffy Meats.” Also suspended from the ceiling was a large circular stained-glass window, now off to stage right, but looking like it could be moved to the center any time. An old streetlamp hung over the stage like a sentinel. But for a play that switches scenes often, from an apartment to a butcher shop to a factory to a church, the stage itself was remarkably bare. There was a vintage stove and countertop. A bed with a nightstand. A table and chairs. A wooden door in its frame, on wheels, with no wall around it. It could all be moved, all be repurposed, and it was the culmination of months of planning, conversation, design, and construction.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 13, 2017 8:46 am
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Kate Gonzales Photo
Three metal rings were suspended from the ceiling of the theater. Three women in white robes began in front of them, in a small group; they tumbled, re-formed, became statues. Applause from Saturday night’s full house at ECA’s theater on Audubon Street. Then the women each took a ring and spun in them aloft, dancing in the air. More applause. The woman in the middle descended from her ring and hit the floor.
She turned out to be a contortionist, folding herself in half, into a ring herself.
Even more applause. Then the lights went out. There was a quick scene change, and Sherlock Holmes hit the stage.
Only Athens two and a half millennia ago bears comparison for concentrated theatric genius to Renaissance London. Shakespeare outshines his circle, but even without him that constellation — Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and the rest — accounts for the better part of great plays written by Englishmen.
Grimmest of that sanguinary group was the dramatist captured in one telling couplet:
Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat, With folded arms and melancholy hat.
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Lucy Gellman |
Feb 3, 2017 8:48 am
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Chan recording her story.
The first time Rachel Alderman stepped into a recording booth, took a deep breath, and thought about how the telephone had influenced her life, she worried that she might not have enough to say. She ended up having plenty of stories to record. And luckily, there are plenty of New Haveners to jump on the mic with her.
