by | Aug 22, 2019 7:58 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Ortiz and Elliott.
The members of the Regicides, the improv comedy arm of A Broken Umbrella theater, were lined up like a firing squad on the stage of the State House on Wednesday evening. De facto MC Ruben Ortiz rubbed his hands together and smiled at the audience.
“We’re going to start off hot and fast,” he said. “What’s your favorite candy?”
by | Aug 19, 2019 7:27 am | Comments (0)
Mike Franzmann Photos
Christopher Seiler, Kaia Monroe, Terra Chaney.
A twin named Dromio is yelling at his twin brother, also named Dromio. The Dromio outside wants to be let in the house. The Dromio inside the house doesn’t want to let him in. They don’t believe each other’s stories. As hatches in the door fly open and closed, the entire misunderstanding could be cleared up, if they ever made eye contact, got a good look at each other. But fate and some tight choreography prevent that from happening. The misunderstandings grow — and get funnier.
by | Aug 14, 2019 11:52 am | Comments (0)
Max Loignon of the Right Offs sat on a stool in Sara Scranton’s kitchen, strumming out a song that was already recognizable before Daniel Eugene started singing.
It was one of the musical numbers set to appear in the second production of the State House Cabaret — playing this weekend at the State House on State Street on Saturday, Aug. 17, and Sunday, Aug. 18. The music swelled and filled the room as the cast assembled there joined in, giving the classic “Crimson and Clover” their own sense of yearning and beauty.
At the end, Scranton ran over and gave Eugene a hug.
Continue reading ‘State House Cabaret Explores The Life Aquatic’
by | Jun 28, 2019 7:21 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Two suitors vie for the attention of a woman who approaches one, then the other, and then rises into the air, borne aloft on a bolt of fabric. She dances as if seemingly weightless while the suitors admire — or maybe lie in wait. When she returns to earth, they carry her off. Is it adulation or possession? Something’s off. Something doesn’t feel quite right.
by | Jun 26, 2019 7:40 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Diana Martinez and Mark P. Griffin.
Diana is a worker from Fellowship Place, which offers support to people with mental illness. Mark is a homeless man, everything he owns in a garbage bag at his feet. She offers him a cup of coffee, a sandwich, maybe a place to stay, maybe some help, and Mark doesn’t know how to take any of it.
“I’ve been using,” he says. He’s scared. He’s exasperated. “Is your program going to help or what?”
Diana listens and sits next to him. She’s undeterred. She suggests that Mark call 2 – 1‑1.
“I don’t have a phone,” he said. “I don’t have anything.” So Diana gives him her phone to use.
Continue reading ‘New Haven Play Project Takes Off The Mask’
by | Jun 20, 2019 3:05 pm | Comments (0)
There’s new construction happening at Yale’s University Theater on York Street. This act of construction is as fascinating to watch as any episode of your favorite home-makeover program on reality TV, except this one is live, with no time lapse. You watch a two-story interior get established before your eyes — with some intriguing sleight-of-hand — and then inhabited by a very busy cast of seven, eventually joined by as many audience members and ancillary personnel as they manage to entice onstage.
by | Jun 5, 2019 7:53 am | Comments (0)
Front: Martin Montaner V. (Director of Production); Jecamiah M. Ybañez (Artistic Director) Center: Estefani Castro (Producing Director) Rear: Oakton Reynolds (Managing Director); Danilo Gambini (Artistic Director).
When you hear the word “Latinx” what do you imagine? What specific characteristics come to mind? For Co-Artistic Directors Danilo Gambini and Jecamiah M. Ybañez and Producing Director Estefani Castro, the team behind “Verano,” the Yale Summer Cabaret season for 2019, the word applies to each of them but differently.
by | Jun 3, 2019 11:57 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Luna Candelario, Luciana Campoverde, and Charles Jefferey.
On the stage Saturday afternoon at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School — in preparation for the school’s performance of Hamlet on Tuesday, June 4, at 6 p.m. — Luna Candelario, as Hamlet, was getting some advice from co-directors Sarah Bowles and Michael Hinton on the best way to stab a man behind a curtain.
by | May 10, 2019 7:10 am | Comments (2)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Jorge Cordova and Maggie Bofill.
Start with that set. It looks Scandinavian, maybe, with all those wooden planks for walls and floor, sort of an overgrown sauna. And there are plants hanging from above and a thin, curving tree downstage. We will hear birds and bugs and a cuckoo clock. And then there’s that single big armchair, on its side. We’re not sure if we’re inside the house or looking at a porch on the front of it. There’s a sliding door at the back that resembles a barn door.
by | Apr 30, 2019 7:42 am | Comments (0)
NHTC Photo
A group of asylum inmates pretend to watch a World Series game on a blank television. They’ve been forbidden to see the game because its airtime conflicts with the established time for TV viewing in the ward’s dayroom. Their feigned group hallucination is an act of boisterous solidarity. For a brief moment, these disparate misfits are united in giving the finger to Nurse Ratched (Suzanne Powers), their controlling overseer. Thus ends Act 1 of Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1963 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a joyous blow aimed at the powers that be.
by | Apr 23, 2019 1:59 pm | Comments (1)
Thomas Breen Photo
The Shubert Theatre has received its largest gift from an individual donor in its 104-year existence.
by | Apr 3, 2019 12:08 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
At rehearsal for Edgewood School’s upcomimg production of the play Madagascar, the students knew their lines, knew the songs, knew where they were supposed to be on stage. They had the dance routines together, the choreographed moments, even an effect that gave the impression of large shipping crates sliding from side to side in the hold of a boat tilting in the ocean — because an animal was now at the wheel.
by | Mar 29, 2019 7:37 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Christopher.
According to tradition the Iliad — the first epic poem attributed to Homer — was the source of Greek drama, which is the source of all European theater and everything that derives from it. At Long Wharf Theatre through April 14, An Iliad, directed by Whitney White and adapted by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from Robert Fagles’ translation of the poem, puts that idea into action on stage.
We watch a poem for one voice become a play with two actors — which was, according to Aristotle, the great innovation of Athenian drama, c. 460 BC, or about two centuries after Homer’s oral poem was first transcribed. It’s a rousing revisiting of theater in the making.
by | Mar 27, 2019 12:05 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Bethune and Lester.
Two men are in the ring, jabbing, swinging, and dodging, trading taunts while they trade blows. One is a stronger fighter, and he lets the other one know it. The stronger fighter wears his opponent down both physically and psychologically. He wins because he gets into his opponent’s head. After the fight, the winner calls the loser into his room, not to taunt him some more, but to hire him to be a sparring partner. Because the winner — Jay “The Sport” Jackson — has his eyes on a bigger prize. He wants to be the heavyweight champion of the world. That means beating the current champion, and this being the turn of the last century, it also means breaking some color barriers.
But is the prize worth the price?
by | Mar 26, 2019 7:45 am | Comments (0)
Conceived as a theater festival that “orbits” the Yale Cabaret, The Satellite Festival celebrates its fourth year this Thursday. As Molly FitzMaurice, the Cabaret’s co-artistic director and the co-producer, with first-year dramaturg Rebecca Adelsheim, of this year’s festival puts it, “the Satellite Festival is the Cab of the Cab.” It is to the Cabaret what the Cabaret is to the Yale School of Drama — “an alternative outlet” for student work and for talents that may go untapped by official assignments and projects.
by | Mar 25, 2019 7:45 am | Comments (2)
Joan Marcus Photos
William DeMeritt in Twelfth Night.
“Lord,” Ophelia says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “we know what we are but not what we may be.”
Many theatergoers feel certain they know what Shakespeare’s plays are, but that doesn’t mean they know what they may be. First of all, they may be fun — and very funny — as shown in the current production of Twelfth Night, directed by Carl Cofield, at Yale Repertory Theatre through April 6. The show is not to be missed, if you have any interest in classic plays reimagined for the 21st century. Cofield’s vision almost makes a new play of his source material with its wonderful treatments, showing how to break bad on the Bard.
by | Mar 19, 2019 12:18 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Usnavi runs a bodega in his neighborhood. He keeps giving free coffee to Vanessa, the woman he has a crush on and can’t bring himself to ask out. Everyone in the neighborhood buys lottery tickets at his spot. One day he realizes someone in the neighborhood has bought a winning ticket. He looks up the amount. How much could it be for? $1,000? $2,000?
He stops short. It’s for $96,000, the kind of money that goes a long way. It can change the course of someone’s life. Who won the money? And what are they going to do with it?
by | Mar 1, 2019 8:26 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
It’s another Sunday in church, which means another day for the nuns to rip it up.
The pews fill in front and around them as the musicians start up the beat. The nuns burst into song and dance, habits billowing. The smiles on their faces are radiant.
And then, just for a moment, they leave the ground and take flight.
by | Mar 1, 2019 8:25 am | Comments (0)
NHTC Photos
It is sometime in the 2050s. Marjorie and her companion — a facsimile of her late husband Walter as a young man, share a conversation in which Walter is appealing, charismatic, showmanly, obsequious, and just a bit off. When Tess and Jon introduce themselves later, visiting Marjorie and taking care of her, Walter withdraws. He sits pleasantly and unobtrusively in teal light, watching the other players with rapt attention as he, the machine intended to learn how to be the man he has replaced, absorbs every word, memory, affect, and behavior of the people he was provided to comfort.
by | Feb 27, 2019 6:03 pm | Comments (7)
Thomas Breen photo
The Crown Street Garage commercial space.
Parking Authority Acting Executive Director Doug Hausladen on Monday night,
An arts consortium’s bid to open a theater, cabaret, and rehearsal space downtown isn’t dead yet.
Continue reading ‘Theater Plan Still Alive For Crown Garage Spot’
by | Feb 8, 2019 4:58 pm | Comments (3)
Carol Rosegg Photos
René Augesen and Laura Heisler.
At the end of Good Faith, three firefighters and a lawyer stand on stage.
“We fight the fire,” they tell the audience, one after the other.
By then the fire is a metaphor, the play moving from the concrete to the abstract. “Who will save you? Who will you save?”
by | Feb 8, 2019 1:37 pm | Comments (15)
David Yaffe-Bellany, Carol Rosegg Photos
Frank Ricci; “Frank Ricci” (Ian Bedford).
Carol Rosegg Photo
“Tyrone Ewing” (Rob Demery), “Michael Briscoe” (Billy Eugene Jones) in Good Faith, which opened Thursday night.
Frank Ricci looked up to watch himself onstage — and found a big bald-shaven guy speaking with a Brooklyn accent.
by | Jan 31, 2019 1:25 pm | Comments (2)
Costume sketches by Beatrice Vena; File Photos
Top: Sketches for Yale Rep Good Faith characters based on city firefighters (bottom, from left) Michael Briscoe, Frank Ricci, Tyrone Ewing.
Lou Daprile Photo
Karen Hartman, whose script hits stage Thursday night.
Liberal elite New Haven theater-goers beware: If you attend the new play inspired by the landmark Ricci v. DeStefano case, you won’t get to feel superior to the working-class white people who convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to change the rules for affirmative action.
by | Jan 28, 2019 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Kudtarkar.
Alice Childress’ best-known play, Trouble in Mind, — a hard-hitting study of racism in American theater, being put on by the Yale School of Drama at the University Theater from Feb. 2 to Feb. 8 — debuted in 1955. The play’s critical success made Childress the first African American woman to win an Obie as a playwright. Originally produced Off Broadway in Greenwich Village, the play was Broadway bound, until Childress became dissatisfied about changes she was asked to make in her play. The play remains as Childress originally wrote it, and also remains woefully underproduced. Aneesha Kudtarkar, a third-year director in the Yale School of Drama, sees irony in the way the play’s history relates to its subject matter.
by | Jan 22, 2019 3:31 pm | Comments (0)
Long Wharf Properties Manager Brian Fagan was in the theater’s kitchen, turning watermelon into steak.
“The actors actually like it,” he said. “They keep talking about how good it is.”
But why turn watermelon into steak at all?