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’.
by | Dec 20, 2013 2:12 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Yarbor in rehearsal.
For more than 30 years Black Nativity, the Christmas story set to a Langston Hughes’ text with African-American liturgical music performed by local choruses, had been a New Haven tradition, most recently performed at Long Wharf.
Then it stopped, seven years ago.
Now two local musical families and area professionals lWes Yarbor, who has performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, are combining their graceful moves into a new production designed to endure for decades to come.
by | Dec 19, 2013 2:36 pm | Comments (0)
CHRISTOPHER ASH PHOTO
You may think you know Peter Pan. He’s a flying boy, usually played onstage by a grown woman, who takes a girl named Wendy to an enchanted land where there are pirates and alligators and no mothers. But it’s no pie-in-the-sky lark. This is a harrowing tale of abandoned kids and the hazards they endure on a daily basis. It’s a story of survival and eternal hopefulness.
by | Dec 18, 2013 12:06 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Now that the Yale Cabaret has wrapped up the first half of its 2013 – 14 season, the winter break reminds us just how rare and special this small student-run basement theater is.
by | Dec 11, 2013 1:39 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photos
The “Birthplace of the Nation’s Hits” turned 99 years old Wednesday with a new lease on life — marked by a formal transfer of ownership and a ceremonial sharing of Claire’s Lithuanian Coffee Cake.
by | Dec 10, 2013 12:38 pm | Comments (0)
Before, I didn’t get it. Now there’s something to get.
A world-famous, Nobel-winning radical buffoon (in the best sense) who has mastered a centuries-old tradition of socially conscious clowning has been newly interpreted by a team who have pursued a particularly modernized form of classical European comedy at Yale for years.
by | Dec 6, 2013 12:24 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
In 1987, two theater productions from New Haven’s dynamic, world-class regional theater scene moved to Broadway and won Tony Awards. One was August Wilson’s Fences, which had been developed at Waterford’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and then had its world premier production at the Yale Rep. The other was Long Wharf Theater’s revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.
Twenty-five years later, it’s the Long Wharf that is doing Fences, on a set which could serve equally well (better, even) as the set for All My Sons. The whole production, in fact, is more in keeping with a mid-20th melodramatic style than the distinctive, visceral yet lyrical modern theatrical style which August Wilson brought forth in the 1980s.
by | Dec 3, 2013 1:36 pm | Comments (0)
Click here for a report on plans for a new 120-seat venue as the theater’s second century begins.
by | Dec 3, 2013 1:02 pm | Comments (0)
Occupy Wall Street and its local progeny, Occupy New Haven, have long since disappeared from the public consciousness. We are no less a divided nation (or region) than we were when the movement started in 2011.
The Occupy movement was on my mind as I navigated the world as experienced by the lowest portion of the “99 percent” during a recenCrossint poverty simulation at Southern Connecticut State University. It came up again that evening when the Occupy New Haven encampment on the Green was mentioned in the Yale Cabaret’s premiere production of Derivatives, Jabari Brisbort’s exploration of the income gap’s impact on people in New Haven. One character saw the encampment as little more than a well-intentioned tented folly that had damaged the Green.
by | Nov 29, 2013 1:10 pm | Comments (0)
“As you get older, you begin to gather all these models,” world-famous set designer Ming Cho Lee lamented. “And what the hell do you do with them?”
by | Nov 27, 2013 1:10 pm | Comments (1)
Allan Appel Photo
Esau Pritchett is Mr. Othello, having played Shakespeare’s great tragic hero nine times and counting. Yet he has never seen the Shakespeare’s great tragedy acted on a stage. Any stage. Anywhere.
Pritchett takes the stage in New Haven Wednesday night to step into another huge role, the embittered yet noble Negro Leagues ball player Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences. He has never seen that play either.
by | Nov 25, 2013 2:57 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Alders Santiagio Berrios-Bones, DeCola, Colon, and Ernie Santiago.
Marshmallows, graham crackers, marinara sauce, and pasta.
Patrons brought those non-perishable food products along with their tickets to the Shubert Theater Friday night as they entered the lobby and ascended to their seats to see Mamma Mia!.
by | Nov 24, 2013 11:35 am | Comments (1)
Kevin Thomas Garcia Photo
You might look at Mamma Mia! as a cheeseball 1970s retro piece which gets its big laughs from the sight of people wearing spandex who probably shouldn’t be wearing spandex.
by | Nov 22, 2013 3:00 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Brooks, Stetson’s Diva Book Club prez, speaks Wednesday night.
Black fathers of the 1950s may have experienced such pain they never said, “I love you,” but at least they supported their children, even those born out of wedlock. Young men today just puff out their chests at how many babies they make, and take a walk.
Sharon Brooks made that real-life argument as she and others at Dixwell’s Stetson Branch Library applied a play’s lessons to their community’s real life.
Continue reading ‘A New Generation Revisits Black Fathers’ Love’
by | Nov 21, 2013 2:03 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Mychael Green as Algernon and Robert Pease as Jack face off in Act One.
A serious outbreak is spreading rapidly throughout Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School: Students concocting imaginary people and places in order to avoid their obligations.