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Brian Slattery |
Mar 21, 2022 9:07 am
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Long Wharf Theatre
The three women in the room — two sisters and a TV host — are wearing safety glasses. It’s time to start demolishing the house the sisters grew up in. The TV host, all smiles, hands one of the sisters a sledgehammer, so she can do the honors of striking the first blow. Time stops, and there’s a fight. Time starts again, and the sister swings the hammer and puts a huge gash in the wall. That’s when something starts oozing out, like thick blood from a wound. Is that supposed to happen? No one knows.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 3, 2022 9:06 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Katherine Van Tassel and Nina Laverty.
“I’m exhausted,” said Salvatore DeLucia of Wilbur Cross’s Lights Up Drama Club, “but I’m absolutely riding on a cloud. I’m ecstatic. Because these kids are back on stage. It feels like it’s been forever, and at the same time, it feels like it was just yesterday, it was 2019, and we were performing Sister Act.”
Come hit the road along with us, help us dream big — and guide us to a new permanent home later on.
Long Wharf Theatre’s leaders delivered that message Friday to people who have questioned or been confused about the regional company’s dramatic new move.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 21, 2022 8:59 am
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As she moves from one side of the stage of Long Wharf to the other, actor Cloteal L. Horne transforms herself 25 times, from Jewish preschool teacher to Black playwright, from a girl in middle school to a minister in the Nation of Islam, from a rabbi to a Guiyanese immigrant. It’s a feat of performance in the service of a now-classic play — Fires in the Mirror, running at Long Wharf now through Feb. 6— that tries to get at the deeper truths in an incident of racial violence that happened 30 years ago, the roots of which lay in centuries of prejudice, and the specter of which still hangs over us today.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2021 9:04 am
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Leigh Busby Photo
The ceremony for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 41st annual arts awards returned to being an in-person event on Friday, as people gathered at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University to honor several of New Haven’s artist educators: Miguel Gaspar Benitez, James and Tia Russell Brockington, Allen “Dooley‑O” Jackson, Linda Lindroth, Patrick Smith, and Bill Brown and Sally Hill.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2021 8:53 am
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It was just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, and host Dan Kalwhite lost no time warming up the healthy crowd for the latest A Guy Walks Into a Bar comedy open mic night at Cafe Nine, which featured returning performers from September’s installment as well as fresh new faces. He fished the crowd for anything interesting they have eaten for dinner.
One audience volunteered that she’d had pretzels for dinner — at a pizza place outside New Haven, before coming down to the club on State and Crown.
“They serve pretzels at a pizza place?” Kalwhite said. “The pizza must be terrible.”
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Donald Brown |
Oct 18, 2021 8:34 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Shannon Tyo.
On the bare stage of Long Wharf Theatre is one of those huge packing crates used for shipping props or sets. A man comes out of the shadows and pushes it further back, then opens its doors to reveal a theatrical space with a curtain and graceful designs on the wings. If you’re a regular theater-goer who hasn’t been in a theater since the Covid-19 lockdown began — and certainly not at Long Wharf Theatre’s stage at Sargent Drive, which has been closed since the spring of 2020 — that simple act of opening the crate to make theater on stage is striking, thrilling, magical.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2021 8:24 am
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A piece of artwork hanging in Bregamos Community Theater summed up the theme of the Festival de la Resistencia, which took place at the Blatchley Avenue arts and community space Saturday afternoon. It made a serious point: A fist smoked down from the sky to smite the people on a city street. The people were not crushed; they pushed back. And someone was there to document their struggle, and let the world see, even as the city burned around them. But the seriousness of the subject was delivered in a colorful, vivacious tone, full of life and action. It drew you in and made you want to be a part of it — and it was the work of multiple artists’ hands.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 2, 2021 8:55 am
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Host Dan Kalwhite smiled at the mic on the Cafe Nine stage Wednesday evening as he welcomed the crowd of a few dozen who had come down to the club on the corner of State and Crown despite the rain picking up outside.
“You braved the storm — thank you so much,” he said. “Who came down the river by boat?”
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Aug 12, 2021 4:30 pm
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Kami Parisella photo
Independent Party council candidate Jay Kaye as “Lurch,” second to the left, with co.
Cindy Simell-Devoe has spent the past two decades raising a “family” of over 1,000 extended members, 42 of whom have finally returned to their home on Hamden High’s stage this week after more than a year of displacement and dramatic disappointments.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 6, 2021 9:19 am
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Eva Skewes Photos
Dress rehearsal for Heaven or California.
Aerial routines. Juggling. Tumbling. All in the service of telling the real and tragic story of the Donner Party, a group of wagon-train settlers who, in 1846, tried to get to California from the Midwest but were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846 – 47; those who survived did so by resorting to cannibalism. This was the vision of director Liz Richards, who, with the help of a crew of New Haven artists, will bring that vision to life as Heaven or California, performed at Air Temple Arts on July 10.
Music mogul and noted superyacht owner David Geffen has donated $150 million to Yale School of Drama so that all students can attend tuition-free in the future.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 9, 2021 8:46 am
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Maria and Ndemeh.
Making a painstaking cup of coffee the traditional way while recounting a harrowing story of flight from Ethiopia into an unknown future. Family photographs lovingly thumbed through, even while the speaker mourns a sense of childhood lost. And dancing that invokes ancestors and reaches back into the past to both face trauma and draw strength.
Curated and produced by Jasmin Agosto and featuring Haben Maria, Colleen Ndemeh, Paul Bryant Hudson, Zvlu, Yexandra Diaz, and Ch’Varda, Yerba Bruja is part ceremony, part storytelling, part music, spoken word, and dance performance, and all honesty and respect, as the participants ruminate on what it means to leave home, lose home, and reconnect and stay resilient, in ways large and small.
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Brian Slattery
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May 26, 2021 8:42 am
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The cast of A Light in the Dark — the showcase from Lights Up Drama Club at Wilbur Cross High School, which will be broadcast June 4 and 5 — assembled in a rehearsal room at the school that would also serve as the beginning scene for the number “I Feel So Much Spring,” from the William Finn-penned musical A New Brain.
As the music began, and music director Matt Durland conducted, all the voices behind the masks sprang to life.
The students glided across the floor as co-director Salvatore DeLucia weaved among them with a camera. It would all be edited together into a final product, with 17 other songs, in time for broadcast.
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Brian Slattery |
May 5, 2021 8:53 am
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A visit to a gynecologist’s office that may or may not be under siege. How copulation might resemble the objects you might find in your attic. And the travails of a child maligned by his shallow parents, seeking May 4‑appropriate, Star-Wars-themed revenge. On Tuesday night the Regicides — the improv troupe from A Broken Umbrella Theatre Company — started ArtWalk in Westville, which returns to live, in-person, yet still social distanced activities this year.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 30, 2021 8:46 am
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Teaching artist Justin Pesce looked over his cast of A Comedy of Errors through the window of his Zoom meeting. Before him, on the screen, 13 students from Mauro Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School were ready, in their Renaissance clothing, to perform.
“Show me what you got today,” Pesce said, both goad and encouragement. “Yesterday I challenged you and you stepped up to the challenge. I know each and every one of you can do it. Everybody get into your space. Have a great run through. We’re going to have fun.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2021 10:09 am
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Liz Lauren Photo
Darci Nalepa and Priya Mohanty in Queen’s world premiere at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago.
For director Aneesha Kudtarkar, two scenes from Madhuri Shekar’s play Queen stood out as scenes she was most excited to stage sometime in the future. In one, Sanam, a scientist, and Arvind, a Wall Street broker, go out on a first date in Northern California. They’re there because they’re both in their 30s, and in India, their grandfathers apparently played golf together, and while this isn’t exactly a possibility of an arranged marriage, it feels a little like it. In another, Sanam and her longtime scientific colleague Ariel are arguing over the ethical quandaries their years-long project has stumbled into, and it all comes out — the cultural and economic differences between them, the strains of being women in a male-dominated field. They’re the true heart of Queen, and in that scene, the heart perhaps beats the loudest.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 1, 2021 9:30 am
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Two murder mysteries. A string of love letters. A Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. And testimony after testimony of the things lost and found during the pandemic.
Co-op High School’s theater department has joined a national theater-by-mail festival, and in doing so, will have a chance to show New Haven and beyond how a high school theater program can continue to make art even when stages have to stay dark.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 11, 2021 11:25 am
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Contributed
Anthony McDonald inside his hallowed new place of employment.
Anthony McDonald, the new executive director of the Shubert Theatre, took a tour recently of the theater’s facility at Co-op High a block away. It brought him back to his own experiences of doing theater in high school, in Kenilworth, N.J.
The Shubert Theatre has a new executive director, promising to bring new energy and diversity to downtown’s historic stage as he steps into a role his predecessor commanded for two decades
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 3, 2021 10:49 am
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Pages from journals are frozen in midair, as if caught in a photograph of them flying away in a windstorm. A figure emerges from a book, a look of concern on her face. A mirror captures the skyline of a city. They’re all part of a larger show and puppet theater piece called Sueños, by artist Anatar Marmol-Gagné, running in the project room at Artspace through March 20. Together, the elements combine wonder and gritty, emotional realism to tell a story about family chaos and the wrenching effects of immigration that make the political deeply personal.
