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Brian Slattery |
Dec 1, 2023 8:59 am
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Taylor A. Blackman
When we first meet Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), he’s shoveling snow, and turns it into a dance. The labor he’s doing can’t take away from the grace with which he’s doing it. As he continues to move, in more abstract ways, the dance becomes a strong expression of character, a portrait of a young man with more within him than he knows how to contain. In that context, his act of shoveling becomes meaningful, given the mountain of snow that hovers in the background for his dance — and for the entire play. No matter how much he shovels in that moment, can he make a dent in it? But he works, and dances, anyway.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2023 8:34 am
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Kathleen Chalfant as Joan Didion.
“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” In the first lines of The Year of Magical Thinking — currently staged by Long Wharf Theatre at various locations in and near New Haven through Dec. 10 —the lone actor on stage establishes herself. She’s a reporter, drawing power from facts. Her voice matches the unblinking eye and mind implicit in her words. But that voice, with its mix of sharpness and vulnerability, also flags what’s ahead: that the coming waves of shock and grief will tip over some facts, wash away some logic. If facts and logic have been your guiding lights, how do you navigate the next days, months, years, without them? And where are you at the end of it?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 10, 2023 9:00 am
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From the Shubert production of Come From Away.
A bus driver has brought a busload full of stranded airline passengers to a camp in Newfoundland, in the middle of the night. The passengers don’t really know why they’re there, and many of them are scared. When they arrive at the camp, the first passengers in line don’t want to get off the bus, and they don’t speak English. The bus driver doesn’t know how to get through to them. Then he notices that one of them is holding a Bible, and he knows his Bible. He flips the pages to Philippians 4:6: “Be anxious for nothing,” the verse begins. He points to the page. The passengers read it, and understand.
“And that’s how we started speaking the same language,” the actors address the audience.
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Lisa Reisman |
Nov 9, 2023 1:54 pm
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Sheila Carmon, Dr. Chaka Felder-McEntire (second from left), and Higher Heights high school students at Links annual gala.
The crowd listened, rapt, as Diane X Brown told her story.
The scene was a lavish Saturday-night black-tie affair in the ballroom of Hamden’s Cascade Fine Catering to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the New Haven Chapter of The Links, a historic Black female advocacy organization rooted in community service and philanthropy.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2023 8:41 am
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Jamie Guite, Marie R. Altenor, Kendall Driffin, Joshua Eaddy.
There’s a moment rather early in Fairview when a family is dancing together, performing steps and singing a song that they all remember. It’s an expression of joy, the strengthening of a familial bond. It’s silly and easy to like. But then Keisha, the youngest family member, steps away from her family and into a spotlight. She’s not having fun. She’s troubled. “My future just looks so big and bright, I can’t wait for it to hurry up and Get Here. I want to know all there is to know and be all there is to be,” she says. “But. But I feel like something is keeping me from all that. Something.… Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be. And that something. It thinks that it has made me who I am. It’s.… It’s just so confusing.”
Something’s off. Something’s wrong. And we’re just getting started.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 24, 2023 8:53 am
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Advertisement outside University Theater.
“A small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” where abortionists are tolerated but forced to wear clothes that reveal the scarlet A seared to their flesh, where there are more people in prison than aren’t, where sex workers can sell exclusive rights to their persons to the highest or most powerful bidder, where hunters run down anyone accused of anything and submit them to vicious forms of torture, for money and amusement. Is this fiction or simply a slight exaggeration of current tendencies?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 17, 2023 8:49 am
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Jeremiah McCullough, Christopher Samuels, Azaad Mamoon.
All through the play Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau — running at New Haven Academy from Oct. 19 to Oct.21 — trumpeter Blue struggles with his music. He’s trying to play just the right note. Some days he gets close. Some days he’s a million miles away. But he’s starting to think he’s never going to get it. It’s an encapsulation of the conditions of his life, the way everything he has is starting to slip away from him. And it’s driving him a little crazy.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 16, 2023 8:40 am
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Vaneh Assadourian, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Anita Abdinezhad, Bahar Beihaghi, and Shadee Vossoughi.
Five female friends prepare for the wedding of one of them. High-spirited, vivacious, thoroughly at home with one another. They are Iranian, in Karaj, Iran, and it’s 1978, just before the monumental change that occurred when the Shah fled Iran and the country was taken over by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Muslim fundamentalist, in 1979. Much of the poignancy of Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here — now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through Oct. 28, directed by Sivan Battat — stems from that introductory scene. We won’t see these five together again, and none of them will ever again be this light, vain, frivolous, raunchy, and comfortable with one another. It’s a scene that becomes, in hindsight, more and more rich in possibility the further the play goes into these women’s occluded futures, eventually reaching 1991.
Did any of you, dear readers, catch the appearance of Ron DeSantis just before opening night of the Shakespeare comedy, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” at Edgerton Park?
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 22, 2023 8:46 am
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Edmund B*Wak Comfort: "God left me just enough to get by."
New Haven artist and designer Edmund B*Wak Comfort faced a harrowing health crisis in the spring that saw him lose both of his legs below the knee as well as a few of his fingers. Now home from the hospital, he has found family and friends rallying to help him, including a performance from the Regicides improv comedy group this Saturday, Aug. 26 that will double as a fundraiser to help him meet living expenses while he recuperates.
“After the incident, I really appreciate being here,” Comfort said. “I realize how precious it is, all the things I took for granted. It is amazing that I still get an opportunity to be here.” He thinks of friends and family who have passed. “I was on the verge of being one of them,” he said, “missing all the beautiful things that life has to offer.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 18, 2023 7:23 am
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Detail from promotional art for Merry Wives of Windsor.
“Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English,” says Mistress Quickly, played with cheeky humor by Martine Fleurisma in Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of one of the bard’s lesser-known works, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The production plays fast and loose with the audience’s expectations, but it never betrays their patience or wastes their time. Instead, The Merry Wives of Windsor — running now through Sept. 3 at Edgerton Park — provides exactly what it promises: wit, wiles, wanton scoundrels, and scheming wives. Most of all, it supplies the audience with over two hours of good, old-fashioned fun.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 14, 2023 10:21 am
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Karen Ponzio
This photo says it all.
Under a Saturday night sky swelling with the threat of thunderstorms, The Regicides performed to a rapt and enthusiastic audience at A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s current location on Blake Street with a bonus: they were treated to a preview of the theater’s new performance space in the making, and a pitch for assistance to help it come to fruition — all while eating, drinking, and making merry in the truest laugh-a-minute fashion.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 10, 2023 9:03 am
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Aric Isaacs and Ian Alderman inside the space at 280 Blake St. to be developed into a black box theater.
A Broken Umbrella Theatre has big plans for the property at 280 Blake St. in Beaver Hills. If they come to fruition, in a couple years the property will house a roughly 90-seat black box theater as well as a cabaret complete with restaurant and bar. According to Ian Alderman, Broken Umbrella’s executive director, the project will likely cost somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million. Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the state’s Good to Great Program, they’re on their way. To realize their vision in its entirety, they have faith in the strength of the New Haven arts community and its desire to have a space where the arts can be.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 24, 2023 7:33 am
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Mustafe Mussa performs for audience at Gather.
Outside of Gather, the cafe at 952 State St., rain poured down in torrents. Wet-haired and clutching their umbrellas like lifesavers, people filed in, ready to dry off and cheer up. Fortunately, this Friday evening Gather could offer both. Nine performers — two musicians and seven comics — were busy setting up for a show. As Jake Strom sold tickets to the incoming audience members, his fellow comedian Mustafe Mussa stood ready and waiting with a roll of paper towels.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 14, 2023 8:35 am
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La Fille du Laitier
La Fille du Laitier's Macbeth Muet.
A black screen. A table, covered by a white cloth. Styrofoam cups and origami paper fortune tellers. These, along with performer-puppeteers Jérémie Francoeur and Marié-Hélène Bélanger Dumas, comprise both the setting and the characters of La Fille du Laitier’s Macbeth Muet, a silent pantomime version of Shakespeare’s classic. Using minimal props and a wealth of choreographed body language, Francoeur and Bélanger Dumas interpret the Scottish tragedy into a visceral and lavish affair that does full justice to the scope of the original play.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 6, 2023 8:43 am
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At Monday's Shakespeare-in-the-schools rehearsal.
Nineteen middle-schoolers, all dressed in black, filed into the band room of Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School. They were preparing for the dress rehearsal of their production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Before they took the stage, however, they partook in a light refreshment of fruit snacks, Cheez-Its, juice boxes — and grapes. When the students dangled bunches of the purple fruit from their hands, they looked for all the world like the Roman citizens they were about to embody.
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Brian Slattery |
May 10, 2023 8:50 am
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Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home starts with a perky voice on an answering machine, bright and insistent. The young woman on the other end is trying to get a hold of an older woman. The reason is a civic event, the dedication of a swimming pool, which is to be named after the older woman’s father. When the older woman — Janice — finally calls the young woman back, she is polite, but hesitant. There’s a little pain in her voice, and (the audience can see) more pain on her face. The phone call is bringing up difficult memories. Why would the renaming of a swimming pool do that?
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Brian Slattery |
May 3, 2023 8:45 am
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Marty Tucker, a recently minted member of New Haven Theater Company, recalled how he was asked to join the troupe. “One night Kevin” — that is, J. Kevin Smith, NHTC’s president — “bought me a beer and said, ‘hey, I got a question for you.’ How are you going to say no after someone buys you a beer?”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 28, 2023 8:39 am
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Steven Sapp.
To a rapt audience at Space Ballroom on Thursday, Steven Sapp, of the theatre company UNIVERSES, was finishing a riveting spoken-word piece. “We bite the hand that feeds us,” he said, “because it hasn’t fed us enough.” The line resonated through the room, a breath before another onslaught of singing and rapping, harmonies and rhythms that formed the backbone of Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Live from the Edge, running at the Hamden music club now through May 21.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 22, 2023 9:40 am
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Alejandro Hernández, Camila Moreno, Mónica Sánchez, and Alma Martinez.
Armida has a proposition for the family in front of her. She wants to make Hason, who already works for her, more of a business partner. Hason is game. He’s been working for this opportunity for a while now. Acan, his son, is also ready. He’s been getting used to his life in Los Angeles. But Medea, Acan’s mother, isn’t so sure. She worries about what Hason may be giving up. She and Tita, the family’s matron, worry that maybe Armida’s designs on Hason extend past the professional. In that moment, there is a sense that the family, which has held together through several hardships, might just start coming back. And Medea doesn’t know what to do.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 17, 2023 9:03 am
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Nelson on the set of Barbecue after rehearsal.
A family has gathered in a park. They’re worried about one of their siblings, who has yet to arrive. But it’s clear each of them has their own problems, too. Their conversation is fraught with personal history, some of it harrowing, most of it hilarious.
There’s a scene break. Now the family is back — same pavilion in a park, same cooler, same grill, same clothes. Except that now, all the family members are Black. They pick up right where the White family left off. As if they’re the same family, but different too. Something weird is going on.
On Your Feet! The Story of Gloria and Emilio Estefan.
The music and musical backstories that New Haveners carry around from the last century are popping back up at the Shubert Theatre this spring, still vibrant and relevant to a changing world.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 16, 2023 8:45 am
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Warren Leftridge, Finn Crumlish, Amelia Tamborra-Walton.
Seymour, who works in a flower shop, has found an unusual plant. He stumbled across it during a total eclipse and has brought it to the store, where it’s attracting customers. His boss, Mr. Mushnik is pleased. But Seymour has discovered a terrible secret: the plant only grows by being fed human blood, and is ever hungry for more. Plus, it seems to be able to talk. What is Seymour going to do? And how will all of this affect the relationship he hopes to have with his co-worker, Audrey?
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Donald Brown |
Mar 7, 2023 9:01 am
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Goldfish, the first full production by New Haven Theater Company since Annapurna last May, features a scenic design by director John Watson that truly sets the stage: on one side, a kitchen in a scrappy apartment where 19-year-old Albert Ledger (Nick Fetherston) lives with his father Leo (John Strano), a widower who has a problem holding onto money whenever there’s something to bet on; on the other side, a sumptuous house where a divorced mother, Margaret (Sandra E. Rodriguez), swills martinis in her pajamas and pearls, while sharing smokes with her daughter Lucy (Sara Courtemanche), also 19. In between is a shifting space — now library, now cafeteria, now bed, now bus stop — that serves as the upstate college, set amidst rolling hills, where Albert and Lucy meet and evolve a relationship.
