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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2016 2:39 pm
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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.
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.
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David Sepulveda |
Feb 12, 2016 8:40 am
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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.
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Lucy Gellman |
Feb 10, 2016 2:42 pm
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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.
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Alessandro Powell |
Feb 8, 2016 1:05 pm
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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.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jan 28, 2016 1:04 pm
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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.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jan 26, 2016 1:19 pm
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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.
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Joe Markley |
Jan 26, 2016 1:19 pm
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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.”
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Lucy Gellman |
Jan 22, 2016 8:12 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 21, 2016 8:06 am
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“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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 20, 2016 3:45 pm
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Matthew Murphy Photo
Benjamin Scheuer had reached perhaps the most dramatic moment in his one-man show The Lion. Dressed in a neat suit and holding a guitar, he was describing a harrowing visit to the doctor when someone in the audience sneezed.
“Bless you,” he said, without dropping a beat. And then to the rest of the audience: “I mean, we’re all here, you know?”
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Lucy Gellman |
Jan 15, 2016 1:00 pm
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Eston Fung and Steven Johnson as John Wu and Paul.
By five minutes into Salt Pepper Ketchup, the latest play at the Yale Cabaret, all of the major players — and their conflicts with each other — have been introduced, and the audience is hooked.
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David Sepulveda |
Jan 6, 2016 1:20 pm
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DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
168 York Street Cafe.
Those walking down York Street Cafe last Saturday night might have gotten a sip of Bear Soup, a hearty mix of “bears, leather, drag and more” — the “more” being an evening of rollicking entertainment and fundraising to support LGBTQ programs at True Colors, a Connecticut-based nonprofit organization that serves sexual-minority youth and provides family services.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jan 5, 2016 2:36 pm
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Even in the animated video to Benjamin Scheur’s song “The Lion,” something deeply emotional happens less than a minute in. It isn’t just the nostalgia of the brown and yellow landscape, on which paper cutouts of animals — giraffes, lions, and their cubs — spring to life, nuzzle, and teach each other. There’s something deeper there too, caught in the just-flinty parts of Scheuer’s voice.
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Lucy Gellman |
Dec 22, 2015 1:32 pm
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Robin Banks was laughing hard, one set of artfully trimmed nails reaching toward a small ball cage, while another wrapped slowly, sultrily around her second Bloody Mary for the night. A large, gem-red ring glinted from her right hand. The balls shifted and whirred as they came rolling out of the wheel. She grinned, lips glittering Wizard-of-Oz red as they curved upward. She readjusted a balloon shoved down her tank top as she inched toward the mic to speak.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 16, 2015 7:19 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
Living in a town that is home to one of the top-ranked colleges in this country, we might become a bit blasé about its status. When the media explodes with stories of protests about racism at the school or badly handled rape cases, or when we experience simply the usual town-gown tensions, we might pause to think about how elite colleges are a world unto themselves, but do we think about what the kids there had to do to enter that world?
peerless, Jiehae Park’s dark comedy at the Yale Repertory Theatre, which runs through Dec. 19, aims its satire close to home in that respect.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 15, 2015 1:12 pm
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There may be no better example of the costs of the cycle of revenge than Aeschylus’ Oresteia. It’s the tale of how Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus killed her husband Agamemnon, king of Argos, just back from the sack of Troy, for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia — and how Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is driven to avenge his father’s death by killing his own mother, and then is besieged by Furies who demand Orestes’ death for the crime of matricide. This highly dramatic stuff is the thesis project of third-year director Yagil Eliraz at the Yale School of Drama. And it runs until December 18th at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street.
But wait a minute, you say. The Oresteia isn’t one play. It’s three: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 10, 2015 1:19 pm
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T. Charles Erickson
The Fiasco Theater’s production of Measure for Measure, directed by company members Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld at the Long Wharf Theatre and running until Dec. 20, makes the Bard’s darkest comedy more viewer-friendly. First of all, the characters to keep track of has been shrunk from 21 to a much more manageable 11 (or 12 if you count the unseen Barnardine, a prisoner), and played by a cast of 6. And that means everyone but Andy Grotelueschen as the Duke — who disguises himself for most of the play as a friar — plays two roles.
In William Shakespeare’s time, stewed prunes were commonly served in bordellos because they were thought to be a kind of prophylactic against venereal disease.
When Pompey, a clownish character in Measure for Measure full of bawdy street talk, said “stewed prunes” back in 1604 or so, you can be sure all in the audience broke into knowing hee-haws and elbowed their mates.
But would the reference land for a modern audience?
Just to be sure, maybe substitute “cherries”? Or “nuts”? Or “salty nuts?”
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Alessandro Powell |
Dec 4, 2015 2:14 pm
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Johnny Moreno
Orestes, played by Julian Elijah Martinez, scrawls an obscene message across his bathroom wall in red lipstick at the climax of Boris Yeltsin, Portuguese playwright Mickaël de Oliveira’s reimagining of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, running through Saturday night at the Yale Cabaret.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 3, 2015 1:21 pm
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Entertainment Events
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the birth of Jesus. Even for the faithful, a lot of questions go unanswered. They’ve been the subject of debate for centuries, and they’ve defined and redefined people’s spiritual lives. Left relatively uninvestigated: What happened to the Magi’s gold — one of the presents they gave to the infant when he arrived?
This mystery will, at last, get its due investigation at the Long Wharf Theatre from Dec. 8 to Dec. 20, through Sister’s Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold, a one-woman show featuring Nonie Newton Riley. In this play, however, the gold is more of the comedic variety.
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Lucy Gellman |
Nov 16, 2015 2:22 pm
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When it begins with the story of Perseus, slayer of Medusa and unknowing fulfiller of bleak prophecies, Refuse The Hour presents itself as the kind of thing that will revel in narrative. A young William Kentridge and his father are on a train, itself barreling through space and time. His father has opened a book of mythologies — maybe Hamilton’s, maybe someone else’s — and begins to unwrap the story step by step, starting with the original prophecy from the Oracle of Apollo that Perseus, who is not yet born, will kill his father.
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Lucy Gellman |
Nov 6, 2015 7:20 am
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Ellen Elmendorp Photo
In a back room at the Yale University Art Gallery last year, a half-record, half-video looking machine — the proper name is actually an anamorphic projection, which is what happens when 35mm film is transferred to DVD, and meets a cold rolled steel table and cylinder — sprang up during the institution’s exhibition on Contemporary Art/South Africa. Over eight minutes, viewers saw ripples, lines and semi-human forms rise up out of the white, slow-spinning cinematographic ground, and take flight as another dizzying suite of images began.
