by | Aug 17, 2016 12:37 pm | Comments (0)
Mike Franzman Photo
Stephanie Jean Lane as Helena, Anthony Peeples as Demetrius, and Steven Godoy as Lysander.
“Can you shriek, please, when he touches you on the head?”
“Your ‘eeeeeeik’ has got to be higher when he gooses you.”
“Can you roll the ‘r” in ‘Rude, hard-handed men?”
And “if you don’t have an urgency to your speaking, we are not urgent, as an audience. You’ve got to need to say it.”
by | Aug 9, 2016 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Alessandro Rumie Photos
Powderly as Hippolytus and Stahlman as Phaedra.
By the time Hippolytus (Niall Powderly) has wiped two snot and semen-coated fingers on a questionably clean sock, settled into a bed-cum-bathtub filled with trash, adjusted his Burger King crown, and pulled a supersized bag of Skittles to his chest, one thing has become abundantly clear. This is probably not the prince — or the royal family that grudgingly orbits him — with whom you became familiar somewhere between Classics 101 and a seminar on French theater.
Nope. Definitely not. This Hippolytus sneezes, pinches and rubs his unwashed genitals, finds another sock, sniffles, eats more Skittles. Doesn’t wash his hands for any of it. From the wings, there’s the faint, earthy hum of French playwright Racine turning in his grave, Seneca and the Stoics not far behind him.
by | Jul 6, 2016 7:49 am | Comments (1)
Christopher Thompson Photos
Roy (Marie Botha).
Three-fourths of the way into Antarctica! Which Is To Say Nowhere at the Yale Summer Cabaret, a decked-out Rena (Ricardo Dávila, in drag) explains to the audience what she perceives as the American way. One, she declares, weaving through the theater with her head cocked high: You have the über-wealthy one percent, who are so afraid of losing their footing with rising taxes that they force those below them to work harder, then harder still, without a reasonable rise in pay or social stature.
Two: there’s a shrinking middle class, working their asses off for the aforementioned über-wealthy.
Three: There are the poor, who can work and work but never quite rise above their circumstances because the system is so deeply rigged against them.
by | Jun 27, 2016 7:24 am | Comments (0)
As New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) Maestro William Boughton drew the first airy strains of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from the symphony, a flick of his fingers catching in the light, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye that he hadn’t seen before when running through the piece.
At center stage, another maestro had appeared, scanning the stage for possible boxes and crates on which to balance before a swelling, giggling audience. Already there had been a contortionist, pretzeling herself high above the stage, a great wheel in which a figure spun and balanced wildly. Perhaps, Boughton and the symphony had thought, that was enough excitement for the evening. But there he stood, arms outstretched, feet sure, as he began a series of balances that had the audience — if not also the musicians — at the edge of its seats.
by | Jun 23, 2016 7:19 am | Comments (0)
Lisa Keshisheva Photo
Annalise Lawson and Annie Hägg.
The cherry orchard must sit at stage right, tucked back into a corner. Across from it, Nina Zarechnaya can daydream on the damp grass beside a lake, where the moon flickers and she falls into bouts of deep thought. Moscow University will remain offstage. A birch grove will hang from the rafters; a hospital around center stage. A headstone, marked by brown bread and slowly-evaporating vodka, close to the audience. And the railroad must skirt the edges of town, hugging just one side of it like a locomotive bookend.
by | Jun 23, 2016 7:00 am | Comments (0)
Courtesy Arts & Ideas
If someone handed you a sum of money — no strings attached — what would you do with it? You might know right away. But what if you had to get a group of other people to agree on how the money should be spent? Would you argue for a certain beneficiary? Would you let others call the shots? Would it depend on how much money?
by | Jun 17, 2016 7:01 am | Comments (0)
Courtesy Steel Hammer
Berryman in Steel Hammer.
Truth: John Henry was a steel-driving man. He was a cotton-picking man. He was jailed for no good reason. He worked every single day he had on this earth. He was 22 when he died. He was 35 when he died. He was 50 when he died, and weighed 220 pounds. 225 pounds. Over 300 pounds. His wife was Polly Ann. Mary Ann. Julie Ann. Sary Ann. Sally Ann.
There were many versions of him, one more powerful than the next, and all of them have some degree of truth.
by | Jun 14, 2016 3:02 pm | Comments (0)
Dressed in a form-fitting Annie Shirt and dark jeans, DJ Bucciarelli took 168 York Street Cafe‘s courtyard-turned-stage as Jack, flashing a devious grin at the audience before bringing the mic to his mouth.
The wee hours of Sunday morning had just commenced, and he had a serous message for the bar’s packed house, there to hear a selection from GRINDR: The Opera — An Unauthorized Parody.
by | Jun 13, 2016 7:57 am | Comments (0)
Manuel Harlan Photos
The cast.
When the lights come up on the U.S. premiere of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, on at the Yale Repertory Theatre through June 25 as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, it’s not exactly clear when the play’s promised raucousness is going to kick in.
Hands clasp. Starched skirts are straightened one final time. Ironed blouses glow bone-white from the stage. The first notes of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes,” sung in seamless harmony, float out across the audience. A pin could drop in the pregnant silence between verses.
by | Jun 10, 2016 9:50 am | Comments (1)
Gianni as Gianni; Ghee as Lola.
As the actors at New Haven’s latest Broadway touring show left the stage, two stories of self-discovery emerged on a deep red splash of carpet inside the Shubert Theater’s capacious auditorium.
One, a tale of sexual identity and revelation from a senior at Co-Op High School, came quickly, words spinning it into being before an audience.
The other, an unfolding narrative of clandestine drag performances and a father’s hesitant acceptance, revealed itself slowly in short, polite sentences and laughter-tinged personal anecdote from an actor who had just left the stage.
by | Jun 2, 2016 7:17 am | Comments (2)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Luis Dejesus, Heather Bazinet, and Allison Hardy as Edna, Velma and Motormouth in Hairspray.
At the Halo Awards, celebrating the best in Connecticut’s high school theater, Wilbur Cross High School received 14 nominations for its March production of the loud, brash, socially charged, and subversively smart musical Hairspray — and took home two awards.
by | May 20, 2016 7:01 am | Comments (0)
What’s your favorite sin? Or, to put it another way, what’s the sin you find hardest to resist?
This year’s Yale Summer Cabaret team — Elizabeth Dinkova and Jesse Rasmussen, co-artistic directors, and Emily Reeder, producing director — has enlisted all seven deadly sins in the Summer Cab’s schedule.
by | May 13, 2016 7:20 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is hunched over a table in a dirty cabaret when he discovers absinthe. It comes to him in the form of a dancer. She is borne aloft by several men so effortlessly, and her own movements are so fluid, that she appears to be half-flying, half-swimming through the air, bathed in green light. The music, born of the bal musette but reaching all the way to the present day, swells and swoons.
When Toulouse-Lautrec succumbs, so do we.
by | May 9, 2016 7:11 am | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Kimbro.
Taking in the sounds of Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps and Arms & Voices as a mist began to fall over Whalley Avenue, pint-sized Westvillian Ava Kimbro and her mom Marjorie made a decision: stick it out, at least until Ava could get a big, blooming flower painted on her face. After all, this was their third Westville Artwalk, and they weren’t going to be that easily deterred. They inched toward the front of the line, where face artist Lauren Wilson was hard at work with her palettes, brushes, and stencils.
Continue reading ‘Despite Drizzle, Artwalk Spreads Spring Cheer’
by | May 6, 2016 7:03 am | Comments (2)
Courtesy NHTC
The cast: Chenot, Shaboo, Nicoll-Bifford, and Kulp.
If there is a mathematical proof sitting on a picnic table, and a young woman says she wrote it, and no one believes her because she is a young woman, and cannot possibly be as in control of her actions as she thinks she is … what is the probability of her statement actually being true?
by | May 5, 2016 6:30 am | Comments (0)
A play about what happens when two married men — one an architect, the other his assistant (whose wife is pregnant) — realize they are in love. A play about middle-aged siblings having to tell their sister, institutionalized with Down syndrome, about the death of their last remaining parent. A play that looks at how black lives matter at three points in history: a slave plantation in 1822, a classroom in 2016, and a spaceship in 2300.
Continue reading ‘Carlotta Festival Goes Back — And To The Future’
by | May 4, 2016 7:31 am | Comments (0)
WNHH’s studio was filled with song and poetry and theatrical performance as a 36-hour “Great Give” radiothon/webcast entered its second phase.
by | May 2, 2016 7:15 am | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Smith.
Jasmine Smith had a story to tell. But she didn’t want the audience to stop at listening to her voice.
by | Apr 15, 2016 7:23 am | Comments (0)
Jamia Jones, Hamden High senior.
High school senior Jamia Jones found it “nerve-racking” to stand at the open mic to begin her spoken-word piece on the floor of the Long Wharf Theatre main stage at the second annual Moments and Minutes Festival.
by | Apr 14, 2016 7:15 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Randy Danson and Martin Moran.
We’re on a patch of sand next to a local highway outside of Lewiston, Idaho. There’s a wonderfully gaudy, yet nearly defunct fireworks stand to the left of us. It’s right before the Fourth of July, but there isn’t a customer in sight.
Nearby, Alice and Connor, two people old enough to be grandparents, are testing some of their supply. It gives off a few sparks, just sputters and fizzles out.
“It makes me want to move to Canada,” Alice says.
by | Apr 8, 2016 7:19 am | Comments (0)
Elizabeth Green Photos
A still from فریادا.
Posed against a backdrop of newspapers too small for the audience to read, Shadi Ghaheri was trying to introduce herself to Stella Baker. A jumble of words flowed from her mouth into the space between them, where they languished in the silence that followed. Baker was trying to do the same, taking on a bouncy, bell-like tone as she presented her name like an offering, and waited for Ghaheri to acknowledge receipt of it.
by | Apr 4, 2016 7:30 am | Comments (0)
Carol Rosegg Photos
The cast of Cymbeline.
William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline — now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 16 — is a hard play to pin down. It’s almost as if the great playwright, late in his career, started throwing stuff at the stage to see what would stick. Initially, the play got classified as a tragedy, which is preposterous. It ends happily for everyone but the villains, with one of the most delightful final scenes in all of Shakespeare. Then again, if it’s a comedy, it amuses with murder plots, warfare, ghostly apparitions, and a headless corpse.
For some, the play is best identified as romance, which means, essentially, that it can have whatever elements Will wills.
In this production — the first time the Rep has ever staged the play — some new wrinkles have been added. In Shakespeare’s day, men tended to play all the parts, a convention improved upon by allowing women to take part ages ago. The key idea in director Evan Yionoulis’s casting is that gender specificity is old hat, and that Shakespeare, with his heroines often disguised as men, is best served by greater license in assigning roles. Whether a character is designated as male or female puts no constraints on the gender of the actor.
by | Apr 1, 2016 7:45 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Goodheart with props from an ESC Macbeth, in SCSU’s Lyman Center, ESC’s new home base.
As every New Haven Bard-o-phile knows, every August for the past generation, Elm Shakespeare Company (ESC) has given us high-level, exuberant, and pay-anything-you-wish-but-please-contribute-something-really-almost-free Shakespeare in Edgerton Park.
Now ESC founders Jim and Margie Andreassi have passed the company’s leadership baton on to a a single person, Rebecca Goodheart. This is Goodheart’s first season as its producing director, meaning that she wears the hats of both the artistic and business leader of the company. In August, she’ll present A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Tina Packer, the distinguished founder of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. and her own and Jim Andreassi’s mentor
And this Sunday, Packer herself is presenting at the John Lyman Center at Southern Connecticut State University her performance of Women of Will, a dramatic tour of females in Shakespeare’s canon, as a fundraiser and welcome for the beginning of the Goodheart chapter of ESC’s ongoing story.
by | Apr 1, 2016 5:34 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy in Love Letters.
One might think that having two actors — regardless of how much aura they exude — sitting at a table reading letters back and forth would become pretty boring pretty fast. That it doesn’t, or not too much, has to do with the fact that, in Love Letters, playwright A.R. Gurney knows his characters and how to create engaging repartee, even in the medium of the missive.
Gurney’s plays are well known for their eye upon the Northeastern upper crust, much as Woody Allen is known for work inhabited by anxious New York intellectuals. Love Letters, directed by Gordon Edelstein and playing at the Long Wharf Theatre until April 10, stars Mia Farrow, star of more than a handful of Allen movies, and two-time Tony-winning actor Brian Dennehy, last seen at Long Wharf in Krapp’s Last Tape. In the theater world, the popularity of Love Letters stems from the fact that big-name actors often pair up for this two-hander where the leads read rather than speak, as if extempore.
Continue reading ‘Love Letters Brings Back Romance In The Age Of Cellphones’
by | Mar 31, 2016 2:23 pm | Comments (0)
Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos
Alasdair MacRae asks the audience to throw “snow” on cue.
Winter 2010 — the longest, whitest winter Scotland has seen in years — and it’s karaoke night at a pub in Kelso, a quaint and funny town nestled in the Scottish borders where a conference has just taken place.
Center stage, professor Colin Syme is leading the charge on a night of academics gone wild, bumping and grinding with colleagues atop a table as lights pulse in the background and pop music seethes through the speakers. Snowed-in pubgoers laugh and drink and strip on all sides, reveling in this messy, unexpected winter bacchanal.
At the fringes of it, peering miserably into her pint of bitter red ale, is uptight academic Prudencia Hart, feeling every ounce of out of place.