by | Mar 30, 2016 6:05 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
The peas inside the spray cans rattled as Seven, JC, and Dose shook them.
“Jase, you finish. Your handstyle is cleaner,” Seven said.
“No, homie, this is all you tonight. This is what you’ve been dreaming about,” JC replied. “Make it legible, though, so the people can read it.”
by | Mar 30, 2016 5:37 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Pippin cast members Zasha Rodriguez, Nomble’ Tanner, & Gabby Christofor hoof it in an opening number.
When the entire student and teacher body can suggest a play they’d like to see performed; when all the students, no matter what the major or grade, can audition for parts and crew; and when, for the very first time, the director selected to helm the play is not even in the theater department, well, that’s the very definition of an “all-school” play.
Continue reading ‘“Pippin” at Co-Op High Is Dark And (B)Right’
by | Mar 29, 2016 4:11 pm | Comments (6)
Paul Bass Photo
Aleskie with WNPR’s John Dankosky and Catie Talarski and A&I’s Alex Ripp at last year’s lineup announcement.
When Mary Lou Aleskie took over the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in September 2005, she didn’t know that much about New Haven. She’d moved to the Elm City from San Diego for the position, so everything was new to her. Neighborhoods sprang up, full of possibility, performance venues popped out of the woodwork. She was greeted by a local arts scene that, for a city of just over 130,000 people, was more “jam-packed” than she ever could have anticipated.
Aleskie hasn’t stopped trying to nail down the rhythm of New Haven, or satiate its hunger for local and international arts. Over 11 years, she has seen — and enacted — considerable change, taking the community into account whenever possible.
As she prepared to announce on Tuesday the festival’s year 21 programming, the Independent had the chance to talk about how Arts & Ideas has changed, what truly involving community looks like, and what new steps have her excited looking ahead to summer 2016 and beyond.
by | Mar 28, 2016 7:52 am | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Resident dramaturg Christine Scarfuto.
When the world premiere of Samuel Hunter’s Lewiston hits Stage 2 at Long Wharf Theatre on April 6, stage manager Chuck Turner will be hoping for one thing: that no one in the audience knows who he is by the end of the night.
Or, if the play is really flawless, by the end of the run.
by | Mar 28, 2016 7:51 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery photo
Cormier.
It was standing room only by the time writer, performance poet, and musician Ken Cormier stood up at the mike, kicking off the last night of the Wobbling Roof Revue, organized by musicians Paul Belbusti and Lys Guillorn at Never Ending Books on State Street.
The event Friday night featured an eclectic lineup of performers from New Haven and elsewhere for a variety show that stayed true to the phrase — and kept a rapt audience in the seats — from beginning to end.
by | Mar 18, 2016 12:49 am | Comments (1)
“Hamilton” (top); Clark (bottom).
Twenty New Haven seniors headed for the Big Apple to see the hottest show on Broadway. Thanks to Frances “Bitsie” Clark, they already knew the songs.
by | Mar 17, 2016 12:02 pm | Comments (2)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Dejesus, Bazinet and Allison Hardy as Edna, Velma and Motormouth.
Looking outward from a small, just-bright-enough circle of light, Edna Turnblad steeled herself for an onslaught of epithets, defiantly holding a sign that read “Hungry for Justice” while a lily-white crowd encircled her, white teeth glistening like fangs in the stage light. To her left, Motormouth Maybelle joined in, hoisting a placard that read “End Segregation Now!” The two looked at each other briefly, as Velma von Tussle tried to pry her way through them. “I am big, blonde, and beautiful,” they took turns announcing. A policeman approached, raised his club, and leaned in.
With ancillary posters bearing slogans such as “Victory Will Be Ours,” “Equality for Everyone,” and “Black Is Beautiful,” the scene could have been a Black Lives Matter protest in New Haven. Or a revolutionary-minded commotion outside of a Donald Trump rally, where the presidential candidate has proposed a new wave of religious segregation.
Instead, it was the end of Act I of Hairspray, the film-turned-Broadway musical that catapulted to fame in 2002 with a story about an earlier civil rights era, in its final moments of Cross Drama’s dress rehearsal.
Continue reading ‘“Hairspray” Clears Up The Acne Of The Soul’
by | Mar 9, 2016 3:56 pm | Comments (7)
Allan Appel Photo
Denease points to an image of Margu, whom she’ll portray in this week’s 175th Amistad decision anniversary.
Portrait of Margu by William Townsend.
In 1839 Margu was was only 9 years old when she was snatched from her home into slavery. She was marched 80 miles to the slave pens off the coast of Sierra Leone, to await the harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba.
In New Haven, she would help make history that our city is celebrating Wednesday, 175 years later after a landmark civil-rights victory.
by | Mar 7, 2016 1:00 pm | Comments (1)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Hennessey.
Props gurus Frank Alberno and Maureen Hennessey faced a serious gastronomic challenge earlier this year at Long Wharf Theatre, as director Jade King Carroll worked through the script for Having Our Say: Stage a convincing “ballet of food” nightly, in which it appeared that the characters were cooking a full meal from start to finish in two hours, with a kitchen that was more set design than full function.
by | Mar 3, 2016 4:01 pm | Comments (0)
Christopher Thompson Photos
When the lights come up on And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens — which is playing at the Yale Cabaret now through Saturday night— something transformative is already taking place.
It’s not just the elaborate set, arranged to reflect queer New Orleans circa 1957.
The specter of Tennessee Williams is everywhere: reclining on the chaise, where he’s dressed in a nothing but a red silk kimono; mixing a cocktail at a well-stocked bar; straight-backed and skinny at a typewriter, a set of flexing, manicured fingers striking the keytop as a ribbon whirs away inside.
I think the strange/the crazed/the queer/will have their holiday this year, Williams writes out, letting the verse bounce and echo in his head. I think for just a little while/there will be pity for the wild.
by | Mar 1, 2016 5:48 pm | Comments (0)
“What’s the difference,” Kelly Wuzzardo asked the Fair Haven schoolkids around her, “between noise and music?”
by | Feb 29, 2016 6:14 pm | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Brenda Pressley and Olivia Cole.
Two old women reminiscing about their lives may not seem the stuff of gripping theater, but then the Delany sisters are not just any old women.
As the voices of oral history behind Having Our Say, a memoir written and published with the aid of Amy Hill Hearth, the Delanys, 104 and 102 when the book was published, created a best-selling sensation in the 1990s. Adapted for the stage by Emily Mann, the show had an extended Broadway run and received several Tony nominations. With the book and the play, you might easily suppose that Bessie and Sadie Delany, who died in 1995 and 1999 respectively, have had their day. And you’d be wrong.
by | Feb 25, 2016 1:14 pm | Comments (0)
Half an hour before seeing Teatro a Mil‘s Escuela͟, written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón, I learned the entire play would be performed in Spanish
I gulped down a mouthful of tomato-pesto pizza and prepared myself to stretch out in a sparsely crowded theatre to digest like a bull sea lion capitalist.
But upon entering the Isemann Theater, where the Yale Repertory’s No Boundaries series was presenting Escuela, to reach the concierge I had to wade through the most diverse theatre crowd I have encountered at a New Haven production. Patrons of every age, race, and gender packed the Isemann on opening night, dressed in berets, peacoats, and logos alike.
Continue reading ‘“Escuela” Might Be School For Sanderistas’
by | Feb 25, 2016 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Peter Chenot as sheriff Will offers to help Megan Chenot as the troubled chanteuse Cherie.
There are lots of bus stops on Chapel Street, but only one where you travel back in time — to the cozy, innocent world of Midwestern America, circa 1956.
Continue reading ‘All Aboard “Bus Stop” at English Building Markets’
by | Feb 16, 2016 2:39 pm | Comments (1)
Kira Baum Photo
Belbusti and Guillorn.
Musicians Paul Belbusti (a.k.a. Mercy Choir) and Lys Guillorn have split a lot of bills together. They even did an EP in 2013 called Trouble, in which Belbusti wrote the music and Guillorn wrote the words for the first song; then, for the second song, they switched roles. So in November, when Belbusti asked Guillorn if she wanted to collaborate in putting together a month-long Friday-night residency at Never Ending Books on State Street — a “variety show,” according to Belbusti — she agreed.
The result is the Wobbling Roof Revue, which features 28 acts performing 20-minute sets each across four Fridays in March, in a lineup that ranges from musicians and storytellers to a tarot reader, a comedian, and a trivia meister.
Continue reading ‘Wobbling Roof Revue Takes Over Never Ending Books’
by | Feb 12, 2016 1:17 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Budding playwright and accomplished director meet.
Remsen Welsh, a 14-year-old Educational Center for the Arts theater student, is just getting started on her most recent assignment, writing her own autobiographical play.
Jade King Carroll was about 14 when she was lucky enough to meet the centenarian Delany sisters, Sadie and Bessie, on the set at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, where her dad often contributed original music to the productions.
That’s where the outspoken Delanys’ lives — growing up with a father who was a freed slave and making their own pioneering achievements — were being fashioned into a Broadway-bound play entitled Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.
by | Feb 12, 2016 8:40 am | Comments (0)
DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
The characters in La Casa Rosa onstage in Fair Haven.
Wearing traditional fringed rebezos, a line of women cradled images of loved ones who had disappeared into the fog of northern migration as they defiantly pumped their fists in the air demanding justicia — justice.
by | Feb 10, 2016 2:42 pm | Comments (9)
Lucy Gellman Photo
New BFFs on the trail: Christie and “supporter” Anderson.
Hudson, N.H. — Midway through a town hall campaign event at Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company, Chris Christie zeroed in on a man at left of center stage, four rows back, whose hand had been raised for four or five minutes.
“Sir,” Christie pointed to the man, a New Haven Democrat operating undercover as a Nashua native concerned about the economy.
by | Feb 8, 2016 1:05 pm | Comments (2)
Joan Marcus Photo
Miriam Silverman and Kelly McAndrew.
Jen Silverman’s The Moors draws inspiration from the Gothic writings of the Brontës, but with a contemporary, subversive twist that makes it one of the best Yale Repertory Theatre productions in recent memory.
This dark comedy about love, typhus, isolation, and sublimated eroticism — which had its world premiere at the Rep and runs through Feb. 20 — has more layers than a mansion-sized onion.
by | Feb 2, 2016 12:53 pm | Comments (2)
Lucy Gellman
The not-leading man makes a final stand.
Manchester, N.H. — Exactly three minutes into Jeb! My Attempt to Save My Presidential Dream, the title character warmed up to his monologue.
by | Jan 28, 2016 1:04 pm | Comments (0)
Swaying just slightly at the center of Long Wharf Theatre’s main stage, singer Chris Peters was bringing the audience into his latest performance of ”Paul & Eddy’s Pipe Dream Pizza,” weaving together worlds of fantasy romance and Hamden haute cuisine. Light fell over his face and slipped onto his guitar as audience members laughed softly with the wedding-themed lyrics:
The service would be at Hogwarts /
with Dumbledore presiding /
Dino from the Flintstones /
would bear the ring /
and Paul and Eddy’s Pizza / would do the catering.
by | Jan 26, 2016 1:19 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
The cast of Women Beware Women.
When we are first introduced to the Duke of Florence in Women Beware Women, on at Yale’s Iseman Theater now through Jan. 29, he’s not the Elizabethan character the audience might expect from Thomas Middleton’s 17th-century morality tale — best known for exposing the slimy, hypocrisy-riddled underbelly of conservative governance. Yes, there are the customary furs and preponderance of red, a nod to the lush cochineal dye that wooed well-to-do Italians during the period. There’s the expected cupped-hand wave and ducal glide into the public sphere. But this Duke also sports serious 21st century bling. His red comes in the form of a leather jacket and bright pants, he rocks a dazzling faux-diamond knuckle ring, and a few dance moves leave no doubt that he can pop, lock, and drop it like it’s hot as he pleases.
by | Jan 26, 2016 1:19 pm | Comments (1)
Barker, Middleton.
T.S. Eliot placed Thomas Middleton in the top rank among the great playwrights who blossomed in London four hundred years ago, all superb but overtopped by Shakespeare. He said Middleton depicted “the unmoral nature, suddenly trapped in the inexorable toils of morality — not made by man but by Nature — and forced to take the consequences of an act which it had planned light-heartedly.”
by | Jan 22, 2016 8:12 am | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photos
Sylvia Heart.
Sylvia Heart was rocking it at center stage, squaring a yellow-bustiered chest toward the audience as Pink’s “This Used to Be A Fun House”, came fabulously to life, blaring through the speakers.
by | Jan 21, 2016 8:06 am | Comments (0)
“The play is about juicy and uncomfortable things,” said Leora Morris, third-year director at the Yale School of Drama.
She was speaking about her thesis show, Howard Barker’s Women Beware Women, which runs Jan. 23 to 29 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street. The play is a late-1980s adaptation by the British playwright of a Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton, dating from the mid-17th century and set in Medici Florence in 1621.
Barker retains Middleton’s text, mostly, for the first act. Then he rewrites the ending with a decidedly more modern, though no less mannered, idiom. For Morris and her team, this presented three challenges.