by
Brian Slattery |
Jun 19, 2020 10:15 am
|
Comments
(0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2020 9:36 am
|
Comments
(1)
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2020 9:59 am
|
Comments
(0)
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 18, 2020 12:37 pm
|
Comments
(1)
Brian Slattery Photos
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?
by
Emily Hays |
Mar 13, 2020 11:47 am
|
Comments
(2)
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 5, 2020 1:24 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Brian Slattery Photos
King and Pettway.
There are fleeting moments in Skeleton Crew — playing at Collective Consciousness Theatre through March 22 — where time seems to stop. We’re in the break room of a Detroit auto plant, and though the noise of the factory is running outside, inside is where the action happens. Times are tough at the plant and the relationships among the people who work there are wearing thin. Conversations get had that can’t get taken back. Secrets are kept and then revealed. And then, at the end of several scenes, it’s just one character alone onstage — Faye, played by Tamika Pettway. The fluorescent lights blink out, and the set is bathed in blue, and the weight of the world seems to settle on Faye’s shoulders, reflected in Pettway’s worried eyes. What is she going to do?
by
Brian Slattery |
Feb 24, 2020 11:04 pm
|
Comments
(0)
The Zoo Story — a one-act, two-character play by now-canonical American playwright Edward Albee, now running at New Haven Theater Company through March 7 — is a short, sharp shock to the system. It begins when Jerry (Trevor Williams) approaches Peter (J. Kevin Smith), who is sitting on a bench in Central Park in New York City, reading.
“I’ve been to the zoo,” Jerry says. Peter, engrossed in reading, doesn’t hear him. Jerry repeats himself. Peter still doesn’t notice. Then Jerry gets a little hostile. “Mister, I’ve been to the zoo!” he says.
by
Donald Brown |
Feb 20, 2020 12:32 am
|
Comments
(1)
Patrick Dunn as Kiki Lucia.
Is winter on the wane already? It’s the time of year when the Yale Cabaret announces the remaining shows of the spring semester. Artistic directors Zachry J. Bailey, Brandon E. Burton, Alex Vermillion, and managing director Jamie Totti have made their final selections for the 52nd season of the Yale Cabaret, which ends in late April. From this week until then, there are two more shows per month. And up this week is one of the shows that has earned its place by tradition and popular response: Dragaret.
by
Donald Brown |
Feb 14, 2020 8:30 am
|
Comments
(1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
The Gründerzeit Museum in Berlin houses transgender survivor of Nazi Germany and East Germany Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s collection of manufactured objects from the “founder’s period” of Germany — the 1870s through the start of World War I. Set in a “memory space” inside the museum, Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of I Am My Own Wife, the Tony and Pulitzer-winning one-person show by Doug Wright, creates an eerie space that is both inside and outside.
by
Brian Slattery |
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.
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.
by
Sam Gurwitt |
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
Donald Brown |
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
Brian Slattery |
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
Donald Brown |
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
Donald Brown |
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
Brian Slattery |
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.”
by
Brian Slattery |
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
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
Karen Ponzio |
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
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.
