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Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2021 10:09 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 9, 2021 11:01 am
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Ty Scurry.
“I have so much stuff planned for this place, and everybody’s like, ‘you’re crazy, you’re only 19 — how are you going to get all this done?”
So Ty Scurry — actor, singer, Wilbur Cross graduate, and theater director at Hillhouse High School — said with a humble chuckle about assuming ownership of Family Music Center in Hamden, which he hopes to not only rebuild out of its Covid-19 shutdown, but expand into a community-based center for students of the visual and performing arts.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 10, 2020 10:48 am
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Zulynette stood on a stage blank enough that it felt like a void. “This show is a spell,” she said. “If you have lived a life, you have a story to tell.”
In teaming up with Zulynette, the Long Wharf’s artistic leadership is making good on its promise to ground the theater further in the community around it, even as it wrestles with the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 3, 2020 10:41 am
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Host Babz Rawls-Ivy beamed from the offices of the Arts Council at the over 100 people gathered virtually Wednesday evening to celebrate the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 40th annual arts awards. She noted that it was an historic occasion — but not because pandemic restrictions had prevented the audience from gathering in person at the New Haven Lawn Club, as they have in years past.
“Forty years,” she said, “and all the awardees are Black. I love to see it.”
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2020 10:30 am
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Arts maven Bitsie Clark welcomed her virtual audience to her 89th birthday party on Friday evening with a cheeky rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” But there was a serious intent behind the festivities: to check in with the 2019 recipients of the Bitsie Clark Fund’s annual $5,000 grants, and to award another $5,000 grant to a new artist for 2020.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 27, 2020 10:37 am
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Singing. Dancing. Trivia. Beer floats. All this and more was part of the Shubert Theater’s second Covid-era installment of “Next Stop: New Haven,” a fundraiser and night of entertainment on Monday evening that featured Broadway stars, the Shubert staff, and a host of downtown restaurants who contributed snacks and libations to make an evening at home feel like an evening out.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2020 10:27 am
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Raffael DiLauro: Half a century later, still finding the joy.
Group W Bench, the venerable Chapel Street head shop, art gallery, and psychedelic boutique that has operated continually in New Haven for 53 years, is in negotiations to be sold.
It’s not because of Covid-19. It’s not because the rent is too high. Health complications are part of the equation, but owner Raffael DiLauro has been contemplating the move for a long time.
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Allison Hadley |
Oct 6, 2020 10:11 am
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Kate Gonzales sat tranquilly in her lyra, a large acrobatic hoop elevated several feet above the ground, gesturing elegantly to the pavement below. Decked out in a rich royal purple unitard that matched the material wrapping the lyra, she contorted and posed around the hoop, demonstrating mighty core strength and flexibility as she bent around to strike another pose. The tones of Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 in A‑flat major conjured a dance of courtly love. After a particularly elegant pose, fellow performers shouted, “Yeah Kate!” and the tiniest hint of a smile broke through her composed concentration of performance.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 29, 2020 9:06 am
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Artist Z Bell sang the song of Azhar Ahmed and turned the experience of Patrick Morrison into poetry. “The American Dream don’t shine at night,” Bell said. “The American Dream doesn’t teach you what’s right.” Ayse Coskun, on a park bench, talked about what it is to miss home even as you create new ones. Ismael Al Hraaki talked about the help he got in arriving from Syria via Jordan. “I want to show all these people it wasn’t a waste of time taking care of me,” he said. He wants to become a docfor and help take care of people right back.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2020 9:06 am
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Benny Mikula appeared with guitar in hand on Saturday. Before the pandemic he’d usually be found with seven-piece band The Alpaca Gnomes; tonight he was billing himself as the Lone Gnome.
“How’s everybody doing? Thanks for tuning in,” he said. And then sang a song that felt like easier times. “Little bit of happiness after the pain,” he sang. “A little bit of love can go a long way.”
It was part of the Shubert Theater’s Apart Together program, and part of the rollout for its fall programming as the theater finds ways to stay connected to its audience virtually during the Covid-19 shutdown.
Those are the staffing-level cuts at two local theaters since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. On Monday, theater managers and advocates joined U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal in calling for help to save their stages.
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Allan Appel |
Aug 25, 2020 11:49 am
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Forget the door-to-door trick-or-treating and the accidental sidewalk clustering of ghosts, demons, ballplayers, and Beyonces. Covid-19 may not allow for those traditions.
Here’s an alternative idea: Invite small groups of socially distancing trick-or-treaters and their families to four different garages to watch four groups of actors perform a story of a giant Brazilian snake that saves the forests and the world.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2020 12:37 pm
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The Zoom meeting filled fast Tuesday evening with about 15 Wilbur Cross students — half the cast from Lights Up Drama Club‘s spring production of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. The students had gathered together virtually for the online ceremony for the Halo Awards, for excellence in high school theater across the state of Connecticut. Their production of How to Succeed had been nominated in five categories. It would win two.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 19, 2020 10:15 am
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Ingui.
Long Wharf Theatre is facing the financial stress that theaters across the country feel as they remain dark during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a theater committed to social justice, it is also figuring out how best to play a role in the country’s reckoning with racism. But “we feel good about the future of Long Wharf,” said Managing Director Kit Ingui.
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2020 9:36 am
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Jason Calogine was tired and prepared. Rehab Rajou was energized and excited. Isabella Fletcher-Violante was happy to be there. They and several other fellow Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet students were on a Zoom chat with Michael Hinton, a teaching artist at Elm Shakespeare, recording a final few scenes for the school’s production of Cymbeline — which pivoted from theater to Zoom film project to keep the program going during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2020 9:59 am
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Who starred in My Fair Lady when it premiered at the Shubert Theatre in 1956? Whose ghost haunts the Palace Theatre on Broadway? What is the fastest song sung in Hamilton?
The questions may have been trivia, but the cause wasn’t trivial.
The trivia contest — as well as a series of musical performances, a sumptuous set of take-home snacks, and a quick cocktail lesson — were part of the Shubert’s “Next Stop: New Haven,” a fundraising event on Monday evening that drew together the theater, its patrons, and a few local restaurants for an evening of entertainment and a reminder of the importance of preserving downtown’s cultural scene through the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists, established in 2018, is now accepting applications from New Haven-area artists for 2020. The deadline to apply is May 1.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 18, 2020 12:37 pm
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Oliveras.
J. Pierpont Finch is making sparks fly in the boardroom, giving them the old razzle dazzle. He’s got moves. He’s got flair. He’s got charts and buzzwords. The only thing he doesn’t have is a good idea. And the idea he does have, isn’t his. But does that even matter?
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Emily Hays |
Mar 13, 2020 11:47 am
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Emily Hays Photo
Common Ground 10th graders Eliana Solano and Corey Boyd-Morton listen to visiting artist Kwadwo Adae.
Solano sketches a representation of the coronavirus COVID-19.
Eliana Solano sketched a virus with a diamond-shaped head and insect-like legs next to an Earth on fire, books, dollars and the word “expectations” in big block letters. The drawings partially filled a globe of anxieties and other thoughts held up by a small sketch of Solano herself.
Local artist Kwadwo Adae was warming the Common Ground High School class up for a group art project about climate change and its effects on students’ lives. Adae has visited the class weekly to build up to the project — one of numerous nontraditional, eco-conscious approaches that recently won the school a national award and a state seal of approval.
