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’
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.