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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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Christopher Thompson Photos
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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Lucy Gellman Photos
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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John Hodgkiss Photo
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.
Actors Davis, Kulp, Warner-Crane, Singleton, as German soldiers, shouting “More resources for everyone!”
When the fast-rising, Yale-educated playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury was casting about for material that grabbed her, she came across a record of one of the earliest genocides of the murderous 20th century: the extermination of the Herero tribe of Namibia by the occupying Germans around 1915.
Yet the conventional play she wrote was, by her own determination, awful.
Yet she didn’t give up. She turned that experience into a new play whose structure is a play within a play: a play about how difficult, impossible, mind-bending, and even hysterically funny it can be to write a play about race, culture, and genocide.
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Donald Brown |
Nov 3, 2015 8:24 am
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In the dark backroom of the English Markets Building, a play was being born. I ventured out to the theater on Chapel Street and was greeted there by a shadowy figure who led me inside. There, a developing set had been laid out for the New Haven Theater Company’s latest offering, Smudge. The play, which first played in New York in 2010, is a contemporary look at parenthood and its problems, with a rather unusual take.
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Lucy Gellman |
Nov 2, 2015 1:12 pm
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Ashley Hamel stepped up to the mic, her ukelele pressed tightly to her torso. She smiled out into the audience, drawing cheers from the back of the cavernous room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, addressing the crowd in a low, drawl-kissed voice. “We are the most powerful beings on this earth, with the power of insight, the power of love, the power of intuition, the power of insight, and the power of … smell.”
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David Sepulveda |
Oct 30, 2015 7:08 am
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The entrance to the large ceramics studio at the rear of Erector Square’s building 8 — where City Wide Open Studios held its final weekend — is shared with Bregamos Community Theater. Last weekend, the sound of Latin jazz drew me to “Imagine My Space,” a pop-up exhibit featuring the work of artist Michael Alan Roman. A photographer who is new to painting, Roman said he first picked up the brush less than a year ago and has been creating his ethereal, otherworldly landscapes since.
“I don’t know where they come from,” he said, “I pick up the brush and go.”
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Christopher Arnott |
Oct 28, 2015 12:09 pm
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T. CHARLES ERICKSON PHOTO
The Pulitzer-winning Disgraced raced to the top of the “most produced plays at regional theaters nationwide” list for this season after rousing successes in Chicago in 2012 and Broadway in 2014. The Long Wharf Theatre didn’t used to be part of the pack of theaters that produce the latest hot things — it was, and still is, in the rarified realm of regionals that frequently creates those new hot things that other theaters glom onto a year or two later.
But in recent Long Wharf seasons we’ve had Clybourne Park,Bad Jews,brownsville song (b‑side for tray) and now Disgraced — and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
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David Sepulveda |
Oct 16, 2015 2:21 pm
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OEG Photography
Clark, center, with statuette; Jemar Phoenix, center right with hat, was the play’s lead.
The cast of Legends of the Forgotten Borough, a play written and directed by New Haven’s Sharece M. Sellem and produced at Bregamos Community Theater, returned home this week from a triumphant staging at the Atlanta Black Theater Festival (ABTF) Columbus Day weekend, garnering a gleaming Festival Favorite Award statuette for best supporting actor.
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Lucy Gellman |
Oct 16, 2015 12:42 pm
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“Hello, would you like to change religions and have a free book written by Jesus?” Elder Cunningham (Conner Peirson) asked from center stage, his pressed white shirt glowing under a spotlight. He grinned widely at an imaginary couple through a similarly imaginary doorway, utterly chuffed with himself, until a voice came over the loudspeaker to tell him he’d done it wrong.
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Christopher Arnott |
Oct 15, 2015 3:46 pm
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In the spring of 2000, for her thesis project at the Yale School of Drama, a student named Rebecca Taichman created The People vs. The God of Vengeance. The show was a riveting courtroom drama about an internationally renowned Sholem Asch play which had — in its Broadway debut following engagements at other New York theaters and a triumphant European tour — been put on trial, charged with obscenity. Asch’s drama was about a man who runs a brothel and keeps his daughter in the dark about the nature of his work, only to have her fall in love with one of the prostitutes. A New York rabbi thought the play misrepresented the Jewish community and brought the charges against it. The show’s defenders argued that realistic plays about modern morality were what the Jewish people needed in order to grow.
When Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth opened at the Shubert in 1941, cabbies lined up outside at 9 p.m., an hour into the show, to catch the fares fleeing the theater. Though well-received critically — it won the Pulitzer — Wilder’s experimental play, which toys with expressionism and creates a palimpsest of different times and places, asked a bit too much of its initial audience.
On Oct. 20, we have a chance to learn whether audiences have caught up.
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Lucy Gellman |
Oct 9, 2015 12:52 pm
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Christopher Thompson Photo
Gumby in “Rockland,” which runs through Saturday night.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, Allen Ginsberg’s clipped and certain tenor boomed through a loudspeaker. Starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.
The first lines of Ginsberg’s famous poem filled the still, slightly warm air. A glass of wine clinked in the audience.Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry/ dynamo in the machinery of light .
There is a fact playwright and performer Sharece Sellem likes to share with people the first time she meets them: In the 1980’s, a group of teens formed a sound that no one had ever heard, and a brotherhood that couldn’t be broken.
She likes to follow it up with a question: do they know that their story can be performed right here, in New Haven?
