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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.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 1, 2023 9:01 am
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Kayode Soyemi, Ashley Thomas, Jason Gray.
Blood-spattered limbs. Wigs and heels. A marriage in trouble. Angels and demons, birds and fish. All of these and more are part of the Yale Cabaret’s current season, as it has returned to in-person dining and theater under an inspired and historic artistic team pursuing the venerable old goal of delivering the shock of the new.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 20, 2023 1:53 pm
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Manuel Camacho, Eliza Vargas, and Catherine Wicks in Ice The Beef and Elm Shakespeare's new anti-violence production of Hamlet.
Student leaders and Shakespeare theater-makers came together to create a new performance of Hamlet that was part social justice theater, part violence prevention program — and all heart.
With a look of defeat, Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) eighth grader Dakarai Langley lifted his left foot and dangled it over the edge of an auditorium stage as a song shook the dark room with the lyrics: “Would anyone cry if I finally stepped off of this ledge tonight?”
And then Langley kept dancing, proving to everyone in the room before him just how lucky this city is to have this young artist call New Haven his home.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 9, 2022 8:54 am
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As A Soldier’s Play — running now at the Shubert Theatre through Dec. 11 — opens, a group of faceless and as yet nameless soldiers join in a song. Their performance is full of strength, energy, even joy. But the song is a work song, captured at Parchman Farm, the notorious maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in which inmates were made to work in conditions all too reminiscent of slavery. The parallel is clear: these Black soldiers in the U.S. Army, at (the fictional) Fort Neal in Louisiana, deep in the Jim Crow South, are in some sense prisoners, trapped and laboring under a crushing system of racist oppression that they are in no position to be able to change. Though this being the Army, they do have the chance to be promoted in it, if they follow the rules and don’t make too much trouble. So what happens when one of them, Sgt. Vernon C. Waters, is shot to death under mysterious circumstances?
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 6, 2022 8:47 am
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Dexter Singleton.
As Collective Consciousness Theatre in Erector Square prepares to roll out its plans for 2023, artistic director Dexter Singleton thought back to 2021, when he first walked back into the theater after the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, which interrupted the company’s run of Dominique Morrisseau’s play Skeleton Crew. “We came back into CCT and we still had the Skeleton Crew set in there,” Singleton said. “Jenny” — Nelson, who directs many CCT productions — “said it was like walking into a time warp.”
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Donald Brown |
Dec 5, 2022 9:02 am
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Michele Selene Ang and Katherine Romans.
Set in Lexington, Kentucky (home of the University of), Leah Nananko Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World is a rom-com, a sitcom, and a story of addiction and recovery, of the bond between sisters, of goofy romance between a nerdy woman and a more worldly one. It has babbling drunks and maudlin drunks, tough honesty and an almost slapstick emergency, with enticing baked goods, cutesy Christmas paraphernalia, a random dance number, and a final scene of intense, visceral truth. The play, receiving its world premiere, is running now at Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 17, directed by Margot Bordelon.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 21, 2022 8:35 am
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Marmol-Gagne.
Puppeteer and host Anatar Marmol-Gagne was trying to start the Pinned and Sewtered Puppet Cabaret at the State House on Sunday night. The problem: fellow puppeteer Madison J. Cripps, who attempted to hijack the audience’s interest with puppets, dance routine, and blazing harmonica. It seemed like chaos might reign for a moment, until he was dragged away by a giant red cane wielded by a silent stagehand. Marmol-Gagne smiled.
“Who invited you?” she said to Cripps, now offstage. “Oh, right. I did.”
by
Karen Ponzio |
Nov 7, 2022 8:50 am
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Movimiento Cultural
The world-renowned Shubert Theatre was home to some of New Haven’s own on Saturday night, as a show entitled Elm City’s Finest brought artists performing everything from bomba to dramatic monologues to rock ‘n’ roll to this first-of-its-kind event. The evening also included work displayed by local visual artists, food from local restaurants, and wares from local vendors.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 4, 2022 9:03 am
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In the first scene of Bekah Brunstetter’s Going to a Place Where You Already Are — now on at New Haven Theater Company as a staged reading through the weekend of Nov. 3 through Nov. 5 — Roberta (Susan Kulp) and Joe (Ralph Buonocore) are sitting in the pews of a church, chatting amiably as the service starts. What they’re talking about is, in some ways, not as important as the fact that they are talking, with the ease and camaraderie of a couple happily together for years. They forget where they are, have to apologize to the people around them. After a minute or so, it finally occurs to Roberta to ask: whose funeral are they attending, again?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2022 8:43 am
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The cast of Songs for a New World.
At a recent rehearsal at Picasso Parties in West Haven, the company of Fuse Theatre of CT was going through “The River Won’t Flow,” one of the songs from composer Jason Robert Brown’s musical theater piece Songs for a New World, which Fuse is preparing for a run at Bregamos Community Theater on Jan. 6, 7, 14, and 15. “The River Won’t Flow” centers on Brian Meltzer and Ty Scurry, who play panhandlers jostling for control of a street corner while trading sentiments about how their luck has run out. It’s a fun song about a serious subject, and the company wanted to make sure they got the balance of humor and heartache right.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 17, 2022 10:45 am
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Long Wharf Theatre leaders at Audubon St. fest Saturday.
Lucy Gellman / New Haven Arts Paper photo
Bidding adieu to 222 Sargent stage on Friday.
Audubon Street burst into party mode Saturday as Long Wharf Theatre celebrated its move from a Sargent Drive stage to offices downtown — as well as the beginning of a new itinerant model of presenting works across various locations in Greater New Haven.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 17, 2022 9:08 am
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Emma Pfitzer Price, Nate Janis, René Augesen, and Dan Donohue.
Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a classic of American theater. Its depiction of a middle-aged academic couple at a New England university joined by a younger couple for a night of nonstop drinking seems tailor-made for Yale, where James Bundy, the dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, directs a revival both respectful and gripping, through Oct. 29. It’s a play full of shifts in sympathy and understanding, as we realize — somewhat uncomfortably — that unlikeable people may have earned their manner from deep hurts and sorrows.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 4, 2022 8:30 am
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Rawling.
In preparing for the latest production from Madame Thalia — the Prohibition-era vaudeville show that music and theater mastermind Zohra Rawling is bringing back to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 — Rawling thought of the last time she got to stage it in the club on State and Crown, in 2019. She ended a particular segment on a complete cliffhanger. “Tune in next time,” she recalled intoning to the crowd, only to have a member of the audience interrupt, yelling back “you monster!”; the cliffhanger was apparently too much anticipation for them to take. “I’ve done my job,” Rawling recalled thinking. “That was the best compliment I’ve ever received on stage.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 15, 2022 9:44 am
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Iridessa Søul LaFlare performs for PRIDE.
Host Maddelynn Hatter broke in the crowd at Gotham Citi Cafe on Orange Street Wednesday night by establishing a few guidelines regarding drag shows.
“If you ever know any drag queens, you know the most important rule — other than to be able to paint your face — is to be kind,” she said. “All of the queens have passed the test. They are very kind. Which is good, because I am an awful person.”
