by | Feb 5, 2020 2:19 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
On Tuesday evening, the students in the Academic Theatre Company at James Hillhouse High School were airborne. They were doing a strenuous warm-up for their rehearsal of The Wiz — which will be playing at Hillhouse High School from March 19 to March 22 — and learning to sing and fly at the same time.
by | Jan 31, 2020 8:41 am | Comments (1)
Joan Marcus Photos
Flores and Gladstone.
Before the curtain rises on Manahatta — now running at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 15 — there is an announcement in the theater, an acknowledgment that New Haven and Yale are built on Native American land, that other people were here first.
It’s an acknowledgment also heard at Long Wharf, at Arts Council events, and at smaller shows throughout town. Rarely, however, has the event that followed so ably showed the intense need for such an acknowledgment, and at the same time, demonstrated its near-futility compared to the monumental problem it seeks to address.
by | Jan 29, 2020 4:00 pm | Comments (32)
Sam Gurwitt Photo
Carmen Parker (standing in back) with husband Josh.
After finding out that her daughter’s teacher had been placed on administrative leave for planning a play that would have black children playing slaves, Carmen Parker had a message for the Hamden School District: The problem is not the teacher, it’s the system.
Continue reading ‘Slave Play Teacher Put On Leave; Parent: “Scapegoating” Not The Answer’
by | Jan 28, 2020 4:09 pm | Comments (8)
Sam Gurwitt Photo
Parent Carmen Parker: “They sent my baby home a slave.”
A play aimed at introducing elementary school students to the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade has instead sparked concern about how race is taught today in Hamden schools.
by | Jan 27, 2020 11:52 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Ellis.
A mad hatter. Skating on thin ice. A man with two faces, condemned to hell. Alice, the show theater director Robert Wilson and musical artist Tom Waits adapted from Lewis Carroll’s surreal children’s story Alice in Wonderland, has almost never been performed in the U.S. Thanks to Logan Ellis, a third-year director in the Yale School of Drama, New Haven will get its chance to see it when Alice runs at the University Theater from Feb. 1 through Feb. 7.
by | Jan 1, 2020 7:13 pm | Comments (0)
Marriages gone bad. Greek and Roman mythology. Midwinter malaise. These were a handful of many themes in the fifth installment of “Songs and Stories,” organized and hosted by Saul Fussiner and held at Next Door on Humphrey Street — a full Saturday evening of storytelling from Jeni Bonaldo, Marco Rafalà, and Mike Isko, and music from Kriss Santala and Stefany Brown, Shandy Lawson, and Daniel Eugene that packed the pizza place’s back room and turned it into a listening room.
by | Dec 9, 2019 2:11 pm | Comments (0)
Joan Marcus Photos
“Dialogue,” novelist Elizabeth Bowen once said, “is what characters do to each other.” In Will Eno plays, most of what happens is what is said, and how. And yet there is always a specific context. That factor — where talk takes place — is perhaps more important in The Plot, in its deftly witty world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, than in Eno’s other plays.
by | Dec 9, 2019 12:49 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erikson Photo
Gambini.
For Danilo Gambini, a third-year student at the Yale School of Drama, directing Fun Home — a musical that broke new ground in having a lesbian protagonist — takes him back to the moment when he saw new possibilities in musical theater, possibilities that become realities this week at Yale University Theatre.
by | Dec 8, 2019 5:20 pm | Comments (9)
Daniel Eugene Photos
Babz Rawls Ivy.
Babz Rawls Ivy, member of the board of directors of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, looked out over the crowd seated in the ballroom of the New Haven Lawn Club Friday afternoon for the Arts Council’s 39th Annual Arts Awards. “We are all connected,” she said. In New Haven, it is “just a few steps” from Newhallville to East Rock to downtown, and in those steps you found affluence and poverty, creativity and despair.
“Whatever happens in this city, it is all our responsibility, all our care.”
Continue reading ‘Arts Council Awards Celebrate City’s Connectivity’
by | Dec 5, 2019 1:09 pm | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Hicks, Ramirez, Eisen-Martin.
There is a point, at one of the dramatic peaks in the story of Pride and Prejudice, when Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks) is staring down the man who is either her nemesis or partner for life, Mr. Darcy (Biko Eisen-Martin). The sparring they’ve been doing has gotten about as intense as it can. The verbal gloves are coming off, and the illusions are all being stripped away. It’s then that Hicks’s take on the iconic character comes into full bloom. She’s one of the most famous characters in literature. But on the Long Wharf stage, she’s also a thoroughly contemporary black woman — and even more broadly, a person of our time. She’s fiercely intelligent, craving total honesty, and also a little frightened of what might happen if she actually gets it.
Continue reading ‘Long Wharf Stages A “Pride” To Be Proud Of’
by | Nov 26, 2019 1:05 pm | Comments (2)
Aneisa J. Hicks and Octavia Chávez-Richmond, who play Lizzie and Jane Bennett in Long Wharf Theatre’s upcoming production of Pride and Prejudice, are seizing the moment, along with the rest of the cast and crew, as the theatre heads in a bold new direction under Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón. This direction includes bringing younger and more diverse voices, and hopefully audiences, to the regional theatre anchor.
But then why revisit Jane Austen? Hicks and Chávez-Richmond have answers to that.
by | Nov 20, 2019 8:51 am | Comments (0)
Anna Luther Photo
Madame Thalia performing at Lyric Hall.
Zohra Rawling — professional opera singer and the creative force guiding the troupe of performers in Madame Thalia — will be celebrating the heyday of radio and New Haven’s own role in it at Cafe Nine this weekend, even though she had her own tenuous but amusing experience with that medium about three years ago at WNHH, when she and fellow Madame Thalia member/musician Gretchen Frazier performed as a duo during the station’s annual fundraiser.
Continue reading ‘Madame Thalia Brings Old Time Radio Show to Cafe Nine’
by | Nov 1, 2019 7:31 am | Comments (0)
Steven Scarpa
Edward is in a cushioned chair in the living room, recounting the horrors of the French army’s disastrous march across the wintry Russian countryside during the Napoleonic war. The drivers took to picking rutted roads, he says, so that the weaker soldiers might fall off the carts, making the load lighter for the stronger survivors. The weak were left to die in the snow.
Shortly after that, he says he’s leaving his wife.
by | Oct 23, 2019 12:29 pm | Comments (0)
Yale Cabaret
Vermilion, Bailey, Burton, Totti.
“Welcome home”: That’s the tagline for the Yale Cabaret’s 52nd season. The basement theater space at 217 Park Street wants to feel like a familiar hangout. The Cab’s three artistic directors — Zachry J. Bailey, a third-year in stage management, Brandon Burton, a third-year acting major, and Alex Vermilion, a third-year in dramaturgy and criticism, all at the Yale School of Drama — along with managing director Jaime Totti, a fourth-year joint candidate for an MFA in theater management at the School of Drama and an MBA at the school of management, are committed to creating community.
by | Oct 23, 2019 7:39 am | Comments (5)
Brian Slattery Photos
King and Davis.
Moses and Kitch are two young black men on a street corner. The backdrop is New Haven, but it could be any street in any city. They start with a game. “Kill me now,” Moses says, by way of greeting in the morning. “Bang, bang,” Kitch says in jest.
“Man, I got plans to get my ass up off this block,” Moses says. “Off this block here?” Kitch says. “I ain’t stutter,” Moses says. They sound serious. But they don’t go anywhere.
Continue reading ‘Collective Consciousness Theatre Gets Cornered’
by | Oct 22, 2019 10:08 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Kat Yen.
Can you imagine a world without electricity? It’s almost impossible in the 21st century, when things that used to be solely physical objects — books, notebooks, photographs — have increasingly become electronic. That includes, of course, all the songs and shows we love, the things that make us who we are.
But that’s the situation of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the first of this season’s third-year directors’ thesis shows at Yale School of Drama, running Oct. 26 through Nov. 1 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street.
by | Oct 18, 2019 12:15 pm | Comments (3)
Joan Marcus Photos
Scene from Girls.
(Opinion) If you have purchased tickets, or about to do so, to the world premiere of Girls by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, be forewarned about forewarnings. As you enter Yale Rep’s University Theatre, the staff will repeat the trigger warning that appears on the website: “Girls contains coarse language and violence. Girls contains haze, fog, strobe lights, loud music, and gunfire (from a semi-automatic weapon and from pistols)…”
You may reply, “Thank you for telling me all that.” Or not.
by | Oct 17, 2019 7:34 am | Comments (2)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Smith and Clapp.
It’s two men in a bar. The bartender, seeing the heat rising between them and realizing they have nowhere else to go that’s safe, leaves the keys with one of them and tells him he can lock up. So the two men begin a verbal dance. One is bold and direct. The other cautious, even afraid. But they both want the same thing. Finally one of them asks the question: “May I kiss you?”
The other hesitates. Someone in the audience can’t handle it anymore and calls out: “Do it!”
by | Oct 14, 2019 12:00 pm | Comments (1)
Klein Memorial Auditorium.
“Her Time” poster.
An FBI community outreach worker and a local youth worker have teamed up to write, direct, and produce a play about the challenges women face after leaving prison.
Continue reading ‘New Play Follows Women’s Post-Prison Lives’
by | Oct 14, 2019 7:52 am | Comments (0)
Joan Marcus Photos
There’s a rave in a lush, green setting as the locals flock to the Club to gyrate to the tunes provided by Deon’s playlist.
by | Oct 9, 2019 9:12 pm | Comments (0)
González.
Ricardo Pérez González describes himself “a queer Latinx writer with bacalao on his lips and salsa on his hips.” His first play, In Fields Where They Lay, got a rave from The New York Times. He has written a drag ball musical, Neon Baby, and a transgender family drama, La casa de Ocaso. He just finished writing for the third season of Netflix’s Designated Survivor. And his latest play, On the Grounds of Belonging, is enjoying its world premiere this week — at Long Wharf Theatre.
Continue reading ‘Long Wharf “Belongs” To Ricardo Pérez González’
by | Oct 7, 2019 7:57 am | Comments (2)
“Necessary Diva” Jackson, who performed a moving one-way biographical show Sunday night.
Dr. Tiffany Jackson began with her parents. Her mother was born in Alabama to sharecroppers who had “a lot of kids,” Jackson said, and raised them in a shotgun shack. Jackson recalled asking her mother why it was called that.
“If you stood in front, and you aimed a shotgun,” her mother told her, “it would go clear through the back door.”
by | Oct 2, 2019 7:32 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
Artist Jules Larson stood in the lobby of the Shubert with Anthony Lupinacci, the theater’s director of public relations, and Lew Michaels, the theater’s director of operations. Together they were taking a long look at the art adorning the walls of the theater’s lobby, big canvases of swirling, vivid color that were enlivening the space even as the lights were off while the lobby was closed.
Lupinacci thought he saw the comedy-tragedy masks in Larson’s design. Had she intended to put them there?
“No!” said Larson, delighted. “But I see it.”
Continue reading ‘Jules Larson Gives Shubert A Splash Of Color’
by | Sep 27, 2019 7:54 am | Comments (5)
Chion Wolf/ WNPR
Oppenheimer.
Singing in church — very badly. Crying in Target. Starting an international incident over a bad joke. Going viral. Recovering from trauma.
These were among the five stories told to a packed house at College Street Music Hall Thursday night as part of The Moth — a storytelling organization now 20 years old that puts together events around the country and for NPR.
by | Aug 30, 2019 7:24 am | Comments (0)
Lisa Keating
Kuzma.
Two months ago, musician and conductor Marika Kuzma hadn’t even moved to the New Haven area yet. Today she finds herself having organized an upcoming event at United Church on the Green featuring acclaimed musician Paul Winter, a member of indie-rock darlings the Hold Steady, and a chamber ensemble, amid a host of speakers, all in the name of doing something about climate change.