by | Apr 28, 2014 8:17 am | Comments (9)
Thomas MacMillan Photos
Brouard: “It’s great to see.”
After muggers attacked an 83-year-old architecture professor at the Lilac Street building site of a Yale-designed house, the university pulled up stakes from Newhallville. A year later, the home was completed and drew a crowd — including the professor.
by | Apr 26, 2014 9:00 pm | Comments (1)
Go ahead. Mock We Will Rock You, the Queen- based musical that’s just ending its 12-year original run in London and is only now seriously coming stateside.
But every joke you’re likely to make about how silly this show must be is already in the show.
Continue reading ‘Queen Musical Does Its Utmost To Rock You’
by | Apr 25, 2014 12:40 pm | Comments (0)
CAROL ROSEGG PHOTO
Yale Rep has really got this invigorated-classics thing down. Capping a season that included the modernistic, politicized old-school commedia of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, the cutting-edge legend-warping of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, and These Paper Bullets’ Beatlesque rebranding of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, now comes The House That Will Not Stand, Marcus Gardley’s brash Louisiana transplanting of basic themes from Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.
by | Apr 3, 2014 11:24 pm | Comments (0)
T. CHARLES ERICKSON PHOTO
The last time Athol Fugard performed on a stage in New Haven, in A Place With the Pigs at Yale Rep in 1987, he scurried and hid and played paranoid, in a historical drama about an undetected WWII deserter.
In his grand return to acting, in the world premiere of his The Shadow of a Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre (through April 27), Athol Fugard is still finding himself. This time, though, his beard is not gray but pure white, he shuffles around in pajamas, and the history he records is his own.
by | Mar 31, 2014 2:58 pm | Comments (3)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Brandon Harrell as Geppetto and Donte Warren-Black as Pinocchio.
“Why is it that people who shouldn’t have children have children?”
by | Mar 31, 2014 11:54 am | Comments (3)
English comic Eddie Izzard played a short-notice show in town Friday night. Three shows, actually, in three different languages.
by | Mar 28, 2014 1:10 pm | Comments (1)
JCC Theaterworks understands the concept of community.
Not in the sense of “amateur,” which is what we usually think of when we put the words “community” and “theater” together. Theaterworks comes out of a certain community. It finds scripts that raise provocative issues in that community. Then it brings in representatives from other communities to broaden the discussion. Finally, it doesn’t stick to its Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven home base in Amity. It finds other venues and audiences, and communities.
by | Mar 21, 2014 11:34 am | Comments (0)
Joan Marcus photo
Yeah, yeah, verily yeah!
These Paper Bullets! is a fab, gear, madcap, majestic play with music.
And it’s all New Haven’s, the way Shakespeare was all Avon’s and The Beatles were all Liverpool’s.
by | Mar 20, 2014 1:30 pm | Comments (0)
by | Mar 19, 2014 12:01 pm | Comments (0)
Long Wharf Theater
World-renowned playwright Athol Fugard is in town for the premier of The Shadow of the Hummingbird, his new long one-act about the disappearing capacity for play and for wonder delivered in the form of a grandparent-grandchild love story. It features a lot about bird watching, as well as Plato’s allegory of the cave
by | Mar 12, 2014 2:53 pm | Comments (3)
“Cross pride is on the rise!” exclaimed Edith Johnson, Wilbur Cross High School’s new principal, against a backdrop of enchanted trees and princesses roaming the stage in bright ball gowns. Next to her, Jennifer Frechette pinned Little Red Riding Hood’s bonnet back into place and nodded enthusiastically.
by | Mar 10, 2014 2:11 pm | Comments (3)
Allan Appel Photo
It survived the movies in the 1920s that gradually required bigger and bigger houses for the new cinematic melodramas and spectacles.
Continue reading ‘Little Lincoln Theater To Reopen In Spring’
by | Mar 6, 2014 2:55 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
“I fucking hate the matinee. Tell them no more matinees,” the magician says to his manager.
As a cheesy, loghorrheic magician and his manager, actors George Kulp and Peter Chenot do a lot of heavy drinking in the New Haven Theater Company’s new show at the English Market Building.
Off stage they are drinking the right way, by raising a glass and toasting the first play their scrappy local company is producing in its first-ever permanent home.
Well, permanent at least for the next year.
by | Mar 4, 2014 3:44 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
When regional theaters realized that Amy Herzog — an acclaimed playwright still in her 30s, known for her sensitive yet theatrically riveting depictions of family strife and coming-of-age conundrums— had written a one-set, four-character drama with key roles for a young man and an elderly woman, they must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
by | Feb 28, 2014 12:19 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Co-Op Junior Sean Hughes and DeAnglis.
Next time you drop by the Shubert, you might see Faith and Fashion duking it out.
This time it’s not on the stage but the lobby walls.
by | Feb 28, 2014 9:19 am | Comments (0)
In its nearly 100 years of existence, the Shubert has presented the works of many major Irish theater artists, from Synge to Wilde to Behan to the Abbey Theatre company. Just as importantly, the Shubert has served as a concert hall for appearances by The Waterboys, Cherish the Ladies and other cool Irish music groups.
The national tour of the Broadway musical Once, now at the Shubert through Sunday, brings us the best of both worlds. It serves the needs of the area’s bustling Irish community and far beyond.
by | Feb 20, 2014 9:02 am | Comments (0)
Agency Photo
Subjects outside Chapel Street location.
**CONFIDENTIAL**
Via AIRTEL
TO: SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, CONNECTICUT DIVISION (100 – 19186)
FROM: NEW HAVEN FIELD OFFICE
SUBJECT: THREAT TO STATE SECURITY
Continue reading ‘Subversives Infiltrate City; Action Planned’
by | Feb 11, 2014 2:22 pm | Comments (0)
Long Wharf Theatre
Ting and Zouanne LeRoy, who plays Vera.
Question to the director: How do you approach an exquisite play whose focus is authenticity?
Answer from the director: Cast fine actors who are absolutely born for the parts. Then get out of their way.
by | Feb 10, 2014 9:55 am | Comments (0)
The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls features forthright young women, a bear, weird old people, shocking small town secrets, sexual peccadilloes, strangely shaped bodily scars and amusing regional ethnic eccentricities.
So … It’s a John Irving novel?
Nyet. It’s a unique multi-styled commentary on Russian traditions and current realities, at a theater which has virtually cornered the market on Eastern European social commentary.
by | Feb 6, 2014 4:01 pm | Comments (0)
Oh, we could sit around and analyze Hedda Gabler, and talk about how amazing this grand old play is but how hard it is to do properly, with everybody involved sharing a dream and a purpose and working together.
But let’s not.
by | Jan 31, 2014 1:47 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
After taping the alginate is applied to Kirsten Sabia.
“While you’re here, do you need your appendix out?”
“Don’t worry, we won’t touch the pancreas.”
“Sit up any time if you’re having trouble breathing.”
Those words, by turns joking and reassuring, were offered not in a medical facility but the sunny art room at Co-op Arts & Humanities High where seniors and juniors were mentoring middle-schoolers from Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School in producing plaster casts of their own faces.
by | Jan 28, 2014 12:28 pm | Comments (0)
My Fair Lady had its world premiere at the Shubert Theater 58 years ago this month. In a recent production, Yale Musical Theater of the Air brought the show back to its historic birthplace.
by | Jan 20, 2014 11:51 am | Comments (0)
The national tour of Bring It On, which played the Shubert this past week, was so brand new that there are no official photos of it yet. (And, of course, “the use of cameras and recording devices inside the theater is strictly prohibited.”) So imagine this:
Uniformed dancers in short stripey skirts doing high flips off the outstretched hands of muscular cast mates.. A large digital projection screen that provides changing backdrops for this high school saga, and also makes a handy post for measuring how high these cheerleaders are flying in the air. Triple back-flips across the stage, at the drop of a pompom. Dialogue that ranges from too-cool-for-school to high screeching wails of youthful exasperation. A couple of dozen dancers filling the Shubert stage, kicking and thrusting and popping and locking just inches from each other, threatening to become a Pilobolus clingfest.
by | Jan 16, 2014 4:51 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Cassie Beck, Darren Goldstein and Nelson Lee use House of Pain’s “Jump Around” as a victory dance.
“It’s not bad, it’s not evil, but it is sick.” That pithy comment on the state of American business — specifically regarding a fictional small New York advertising firm in the reeling-economy realities of 2009 — is one of many quotable lines from Heidi Schreck’s mostly breezy, mostly comedic new play The Consultant.
The comment might also apply to parts of The Consultant itself. But so might another one: “I make my own schedule. I make my own life. Does that sound like something that would interest you?”
by | Dec 27, 2013 4:55 pm | Comments (0)
Networks
Blue Man Group is blowing through the Shubert with airbags a‑flyin’, drums a‑poundin’, paint a‑splatterin’, marshmallows regurgitatin’.