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Brian Slattery |
Jun 7, 2022 8:52 am
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Stephen Julien and cast.
The band room at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School was full of students getting into their costumes, changing into sailors and spirits, monsters and magicians. They donned robes and fixed their crowns of flowers, then congregated onstage.
“How does everyone feel in their costumes?” asked co-director Justin Pesce.
“Good,” said one student. “Hot,” said another. If they were all still wearing masks due to Covid concerns, it was a detail; what mattered was that, after two years, Mauro Sheridan was mounting its 2022 production of The Tempest, in collaboration with Elm Shakespare Company, in person.
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Brian Slattery |
May 26, 2022 9:25 am
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Ingui.
“So did you hear? We’re moving,” said Kit Ingui, managing director of Long Wharf Theatre, to appreciative laughter Wednesday evening at the Stetson branch library in Q House on Dixwell Avenue. Ingui, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón, Mayor Justin Elicker, branch manager Diane X Brown, and Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala were there to announce Long Wharf’s plans for its 2022 – 23 season, as it moves out of the space it has occupied on Sargent Drive for years and moves into an itinerant model, bringing theater directly into New Haven’s communities.
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Donald Brown |
May 23, 2022 8:21 am
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T. Charles Erickson
“We gonna talk about war and genocide and PTSD and molestation. So it’s OK to laugh,” says Larry (Justin Gauthier), the amiable host of Between Two Knees, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. He reappears in a variety of guises and his deadpan commentary is one of the best things in the show. He enters the stage on a lift through a trapdoor, looking like an icon of Native American tribal lore, and he ends the show in a kind of glam Native American spacesuit, a way of saying that the people who were the earliest human inhabitants of the American continent will always be here, no matter what the future holds.
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Brian Slattery |
May 20, 2022 9:35 am
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Bob Martin as Ezell.
Bob Martin, playing Ezell, the titular character in Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, stands in the mud of an outdoor set that is part nature run amok, full of huge, twisting tree trunks, and part industrial drilling site, with metal poles driven into the ground and chains connected to them. In this moment, he embodies a sense of desperate defiance, as he enunciates a key sentence twice: Ain’t nobody gonna tell me this isn’t my place to be. As Ezell proceeds with its story, the audience movingly learns just how fraught and fragile that ground beneath that assertion is.
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Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2022 8:41 am
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Srinivasan and Janssen.
Researchers Sanam Shah and Ariel Spiegel are presenting the findings of a project that may, once and for, stick it to the man. Their advisor is watching with eagerness as Spiegel turns on the fire, cutting straight to the chase about how they’ve uncovered evidence, real evidence, of corporate wrongdoing, creating active ecological harm. She’s flush with her commitment. That’s when Shah gets worried. Isn’t her presentation maybe a little too subjective? Her advisor disagrees; if anything, he suggests, Spiegel should lay it on thicker. After all, the passion is backed up by hard data. Isn’t it?
That’s when Shah suddenly looks worried. She’s found an anomaly. But she can fix it. She knows she can. In that moment, it’s hard to tell whether she’s reassuring them or herself.
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Donald Brown |
May 10, 2022 8:38 am
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Courtesy New Haven Theater Company
After a long pandemic-induced hiatus, the New Haven Theater Company has returned to its digs in the back of EBM Vintage on Chapel Street, with its first full-scale production in two years, as John Watson directs fellow members J. Kevin Smith and Susan Kulp in Sharr White’s Annapurna, which run Thursday through Saturday, May 12 to 14 and 19 to 21.
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Brian Slattery |
May 6, 2022 8:10 am
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The cast of BKLYN at Hillhouse.
“It’s good to be back. Today is very special for us because two and a half year ago, today was our last day,” said Ty Scurry, who runs the Academic Theater Company, the drama club based out of Hillhouse High School, as the cast prepared to do a full run-through of its upcoming production, BKLYN, which will run at the school’s auditorium from May 12 to May 14.
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Brian Slattery |
May 4, 2022 8:57 am
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When sibling rivalry becomes a little too hostile. When a puppeteer’s puppet refuses to cooperate. When a threesome collides with the cheerful aesthetic of a Disney movie. These and many other wonderfully absurd scenarios were mined for laughter by The Regicides on Tuesday evening, kicking off a week of ArtWalk programming in Westville.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2022 9:12 am
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Jafferis.
Aaron, a White playwright, needs his new play to work out for the sake of his career. Tone, an Inca of the Latin Kings, is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy to sell drugs; he has a story to tell about his conversations with the man in the next cell over — Justin Volpe, the NYPD cop imprisoned for attacking and sexually assaulting Abner Louima in an station house bathroom in 1997. What follows is a power struggle that actually contains several power struggles.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 12, 2022 8:58 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
There’s an odd discordance in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy, running now at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 23 in a sumptuous production directed by Christopher D. Betts, an MFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and featuring Israel Erron Ford, a recent graduate of the former Yale School of Drama.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 6, 2022 1:03 pm
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McDonald: Ready for the digital age.
With a new team and vision in place, Anthony McDonald begins his second year running New Haven’s historic Shubert Theatre with an eye fixed on the future as more people venture back out to public events.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 23, 2022 9:01 am
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Hoops, silks, and poles — and artists using them all to perform fantastical feats — are all part of Air Temple Takes New Haven, the latest show from New Haven-based aerial dance, circus and movement studio Air Temple Arts, running at Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street this Saturday and Sunday. The all-ages circus themed event is special for a few reasons. One is that it is the studio’s first in-person indoor show in 34 months.
Another is that it is the first one that features all of the Woodbridge studio’s staff. And they are thrilled for both.
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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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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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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.
