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Allan Appel |
Nov 11, 2014 4:41 pm
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Akintunde Sogunro as Sly and Singleton as Lank debate the cost of buying a bar business.
Does Marvin Gaye’s voice sound more velvety on a 45 RPM or on that new-fangled eight-track machine?
That’s one of the central questions in a play set four decades ago in a struggling but deeply loyal black family during the racial rioting — and profiling — of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it’s anything but dated.
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Allan Appel |
Oct 31, 2014 10:55 am
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A mother devours her children. Yet washing them thoroughly and boiling them in a large pot of water may not have been the very best cooking method. They tasted just like mud pies and gave the poor old dear indigestion.
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Remsen Welsh |
Oct 31, 2014 8:44 am
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WNPR
Remsen Welsh, a home-schooled 8th grader, plays the role of Rebecca Gibbs in the revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at Long Wharf Theatre, which closes Nov. 2. She is keeping a diary of the experience. This installment is from the day of a student matinee.
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Aliyya Swaby and Markeshia Ricks |
Oct 20, 2014 10:38 am
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After watching the new revival of Our Town at Long Wharf Theatre (reviewed here by Christopher Arnott), two Independent reporters — one who had repeatedly seen and read the play before, one who hadn’t — regrouped at Atticus Bookstore Cafe to hash out their divergent reactions. Excerpts of the conversation follow:
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Christopher Arnott |
Oct 20, 2014 10:36 am
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Robert Dorfman as Simon Stimson, leading a choir of “townspeople.”
Gordon Edelstein’s new Long Wharf Theatre production of Our Town is a magically normal, splendiforously matter-of-fact, divinely human interpretation of a world theater classic that, for all its self-consciously naturalistic tendencies, has a latter-day reputation of being formal and stuffy. This rendition, honoring the Long Wharf’s 50th anniversary, is mortal, moral and resplendently casual.
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Christopher Arnott |
Oct 13, 2014 8:45 am
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Rebekah Brockman as Thomasina Coverly.
Tom Stoppard writes for smart people really well. That means audiences as well as the characters in his plays.
In Arcadia—which the Yale Repertory Theatre is staging for smart audiences through Oct. 25 at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St. — Stoppard is dealing with true geniuses. One is the legendary British poet Lord Byron, who is never seen onstage but is on the minds of the main characters throughout the whole play. Another springs whole from Stoppard’s ingenious mind: a 13-year-old early-19th-century math prodigy named Thomasina Coverly, who doesn’t get the acclaim she deserves because of a series of circumstances, misunderstandings and chauvinistic assumptions. That sensitive plotl ine has made Arcadia a modern classic and one of the most produced of all Tom Stoppard’s plays.
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Remsen Welsh |
Oct 8, 2014 1:55 pm
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Remsen Welsh, a home-schooled 8th grader, plays the role of Rebecca Gibbs in the revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opening this week at Long Wharf Theatre. She is keeping a diary of the experience this installment is from “tech day,” the first day the actors move into the theater to check out the lighting, set, sound cues, and costumes.
The start of tech was filled with excitement … and the knowledge that it was going to be a long day.
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Remsen Welsh |
Oct 7, 2014 1:06 pm
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Remsen Welsh, a home-schooled 8th grader, plays the role of Rebecca in the revival of Our Town opening this week at Long Wharf Theatre. She is keeping a diary of the experience.
I got an e‑mail last night before from the production stage manager notifying me that I would be called at 11:30 a.m. today. My mom and I headed out on our usual route, but because of the traffic going over the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge, my mom looked at me and informed me, “You’re probably going to be a little late. Can you text Michelle [the child wrangler] letting her know we’ll be a little late?”
Long Wharf Theatre decided to make its revived version of Our Town look more like our town — in part by casting Myra Lucretia Taylor and others in roles once filled exclusively by white actors.
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David Sepulveda |
Sep 18, 2014 1:14 pm
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Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard once described theater production as a “team sport.” With a new play under production, New Haven playwright and theater director Sharece M. Sellem has broadened her theatrical team, inviting audience members to a series of staged readings to help shape the direction of Brothers Relived, a working title that could change — again.
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Christopher Arnott |
Sep 9, 2014 4:35 pm
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“He’s a rock star,” noted Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies was overheard saying as he and hundreds of other Tom Stoppard fans searched for seats in the packed Yale University Theater auditorium on Monday afternoon. The line to get in to see Stoppard deliver a lecture extended halfway down the block outside the theater. The theater seats 620; dozens, if not hundreds, were turned away.
Lisa Daly leaned into the glowing, white screen of her Macbook, where top-secret (OK, semi top-secret) material lay fleshed out in small black letters. The wind picked up around her shoulders.
With only a tiny number of lines like “Lord Helicane, a word,” 19-year-old Mychael Green is stepping into his first paying gig as an actor — and the beginning of what his director calls a lifelong journey for a potentially spell-binding actor.
The Shubert Theater is preparing a 13-month calendar to commemorate its upcoming 100th anniversary year — and it’s looking for artistic fans to help illustrate it.
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Lucy Gellman |
Aug 7, 2014 12:05 pm
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Christopher Ash Photo
Two windowpanes, clouded by years of dust and rain buildup. A spare, glistening park bench empty in the center of a manicured patch of grass, backed with a homely looking fence that could appear anywhere from Elm Street to Grand Avenue.
Were it not for its setting among the din and drone of a packed blackbox theater, perhaps it would.
Young drummer Jamie Donovan with teacher Kenneth Joseph (left) and assistant Gabriel Ortiz.
Jamie Donovan plays six different bass pans at the same time. He stands in the middle of six drums and maneuvers around to get the 12 notes his instrument is capable of. He’s so proficient at it his teacher often calls on him to set an example of the rhythm.
No wonder he’s having a good time this summer. Playing in a steel band for the first time, he feels he always has a part and is really needed.
There is a moment not quite midway through Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 – 1915, in which it is almost certain you have stepped into a dream. The vivid kind, in flashing, saturated color.
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Christopher Arnott |
Jun 27, 2014 11:07 am
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Endurance is in its final weekend at Long Wharf Stage II. It might seem an unusual show to mount during a summer season — unless you’re in New Haven, where it fits in beautifully with the creative abandon and intellectual rigor of the theater offerings at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
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Christopher Arnott |
Jun 26, 2014 6:00 pm
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The Events—one of the key, ahem, events of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas 2014 — might strike you, if you just read a description of it — as horrifically despressing. It’s not, even though it is indeed about the psychological motives of mass murderers. Since it involves two actors, a pianist and a choir, you might peg The Events, sight unseen, as abstract. It’s not. It has characters, dialogue that goes somewhere, and a neat ending.
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Allan Appel |
Jun 25, 2014 2:55 pm
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An Our Town not with a quaint, Caucasian, New Hampshsire-ish cast, but a multicultural one that truly represents our town — New Haven.
That’s what Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein promised as he announced that the great 1938 play will be the centerpiece of the theater’s 50th anniversary fall season.
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Christopher Arnott |
Jun 24, 2014 1:05 pm
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Christopher Ash Photo
The Yale Summer Cabaret started its 2014 season with a torture-themed comedy by Christopher Durang (Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them, which closed last week). It now has gotten darker still with the abduction-themed drama A Map of Virtue.
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Christopher Arnott |
Jun 15, 2014 1:20 pm
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Friday, June 13: Freed Up by Friedlander
For tens of thousands of people, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas started Saturday evening with the Lailah Hathaway/Ruben Studdard concert on New Haven Green. For a few hundred, it began 24 hours earlier at a low-key jazz cello concert-cum-slide show during a pre-fest “Kick-Off Gala.”
