by | Sep 18, 2014 1:14 pm | Comments (0)
DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
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.
by | Sep 9, 2014 4:35 pm | Comments (2)
Phil Rosenthal Photo
“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.
by | Sep 4, 2014 1:09 pm | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
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.
by | Aug 8, 2014 3:25 pm | Comments (1)
Allan Appel Photo
Director Andreassi and Green.
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.
Continue reading ‘Elm Shakespeare Director Spots A Rising Star’
by | Aug 8, 2014 8:00 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Aug 7, 2014 12:05 pm | Comments (0)
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.
by | Aug 1, 2014 1:28 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
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.
by | Jul 22, 2014 4:43 pm | Comments (0)
The Bikinis summer show at the Long Wharf is a good-natured nostalgia trip to the beach and beyond.
by | Jul 18, 2014 3:49 pm | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘We Are Proud to Present ... Ourselves, Warts And All’
by | Jun 27, 2014 11:07 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Jun 26, 2014 6:00 pm | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘Arnott’s Arts & Ideas Diary: Installment Eight’
by | Jun 25, 2014 2:55 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
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.
Continue reading ‘Long Wharf’s “Our Town” Will Look Like Our Town’
by | Jun 24, 2014 1:05 pm | Comments (0)
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.
by | Jun 19, 2014 1:32 pm | Comments (0)
Arguendo makes your brain want to explode. Then the show explodes for you, which is very nice of it.
Continue reading ‘Arnott’s Arts & Ideas Diary: Installment Five’
by | Jun 15, 2014 1:20 pm | Comments (2)
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.”
Continue reading ‘Arnott’s Arts & Ideas Diary: Installment 1’
by | Jun 10, 2014 11:41 am | Comments (0)
CHRISTOPHER ASH PHOTO
If you really want to see how talented the current crop of Yale School of Drama students are, you should see them take this lousy script by Christopher Durang and turn it into something far better than it deserves.
Continue reading ‘Why Torture Is A Bad Play Except For The People Who Act In It’
by | Jun 9, 2014 12:03 pm | Comments (3)
Neither car horns honking nor chatty families passing with babies in perambulators could keep a 13-year old Hamlet, Tyler Felson, from declaiming, in the middle of Orange Street, “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
by | Jun 6, 2014 4:04 pm | Comments (3)
Allan Appel Photo
In the vitrine outside the building was a copy of a 90-year-old playbill for The Romantic Age by A.A. Milne, the first show performed in 1924.
Inside the building, the vocal ensemble of talented high schoolers sang Bruno Mars’“Just the Way You Are,” the first performance in the space in five years.
But Friday afternoon the star of the show was the building itself, the Little Theatre on Lincoln Street.
by | Jun 3, 2014 2:13 pm | Comments (0)
Over a spinach omelet and hash browns at the Pantry restaurant, Actor and director Greg Webster suddenly lifted his fork from the plate and leaned forward. The silverware became a trendy new cell phone. The shining tines became the prow of a ship breaking Antarctic ice back in 1914.
by | May 21, 2014 12:46 pm | Comments (2)
Allan Appel Photo
As actors prepare to bring new life to a famed New Haven toy inventor’s former factory floor, they feel the mythical man’s presence, watching over their shoulders.
by | May 16, 2014 11:27 am | Comments (0)
T CHARLES ERICKSON PHOTO
Long Wharf Theatre has featured musicals in many of its recent seasons, from Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill to Ain’t Misbehavin’ to Ella to the non-musical play about one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, Satcho at the Waldorf.
Sense a pattern there? Well, The Last Five Years, the show currently running at the theater, is not a musical about aging black jazz icons. It’s about young white contemporary New Yorkers, one of whom — Jamie, played here by Adam Halpin — proclaims his Jewishness loudly in his opening song, singing about the “Shiksa Goddess” he’s just met. Said goddess is a wholesome, hardworking blonde named Cathy (played by Katie Rose Clarke), who’s come to the city to seek fame and fortune.
by | May 15, 2014 12:16 pm | Comments (6)
New Haven’s mayor called down from a City Hall balcony: “Good night, good night!/ Parting is such sweet sorrow/ That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
by | May 13, 2014 1:00 pm | Comments (0)
“We’re going to take it from the top of the genie scene!” Laura Attanasio called from the back of Worthington Hooker Middle School’s auditorium.
On cue, the room began to transform: house lights went completely down, a spot flashed on, and soft feet were heard padding quickly across the modest stage. Suddenly, viewers were not in an East Rock school at all, but the far-away land of Agrabah, where Aladdin and his newfound friend the genie were brainstorming their escape from an evil Sultan’s cave.
by | May 9, 2014 1:59 pm | Comments (0)
Playwrights Kate Tarker (left) and Hansol Jung.
The authors featured at this year’s new play festival opening Friday night at the Yale School of Drama have one thing in common: All feature soldiers as key characters.
The Carlotta Festival is named for a woman who knew when it was the right time to release a new play.
Carlotta Monterey was the widow of the multi-Pulitzer-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill. When Eugene died in 1953, it was Carlotta who made the controversial call to have his magnum opus A Long Day’s Journey Into Night produced earlier than the “25 years after my death” he had stipulated in his will. The rights to the play were transferred to Yale University, and one of the conditions of giving Yale those rights was that its School of Drama establish scholarships in O’Neill’s name.
by | May 1, 2014 2:07 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
“But, captain, the waves are getting higher,” cries Shaboo as the hero Louis to Gabbard as Captain Jensen.
Six actors play 60 roles changing from devoted mother to sea captain to loyal dog, to sea turtle — and let’s not forget Queen Victoria . There’s even a gaggle of nosy reporters.
When it’s time for the storm to rage, one of the actors in full view of the audience walks over to crank the burlap cloth over a wooden frame.
Presto: loud ominous wind. And you believe it, wholeheartedly
Continue reading ‘“Shipwrecked” Makes Waves ... Of Imagination’