Paul Bass Photo
Regicides Lou Mangini, Ruben Ortiz, Frankie Douglass, and Andrew Elliott at the WNHH FM Wall of Shame.
One guy had a stack of pizzas to deliver — on each floor. Another needed to go — badly.
It wasn’t looking good for the third occupant on the elevator.
He had one minute left to deliver petitions to a city government office so he could have his name on the ballot to run for alder. But the elevator was moving too slowly for him to get there on time.
A version of that story happened in real life. An assistant funeral home director’s hopes to run for alder in Newhallville were squashed when, after waiting for the slow elevator at 200 Orange St., he turned his petitions in to the Registrar of Voters Office at 4:02 p.m. Two minutes past deadline. The Independent wrote about the episode in this story. Commenters had a lot to say about it.
Four years later, members of New Haven’s improv theater troupe, the Regicides, revisited the episode, during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. They read the comments, invented some characters — the pizza deliverer and the restroom-seeker — to heighten the drama.
The Regicide members — Artistic Director Ruben Ortiz, Frankie Douglass, and Andrew Elliott — cooked up commenter-inspired sketches from two other Independent stories as well, about “bikists’ ” quests for cycling lanes and about a proposal to add a deposit to “nips” liquor bottles.
You can watch them perform the skits in the video below. The elevator sketch begins at the 29:25 mark, the biking sketch at 9:50, the nips sketch at 0:47.
In between, you can watch them discuss the troupe’s evolution, its current plans (including creation of a permanent community black-box hub), and their personal routes to Regicidivism. You can also watch them put their heads together to plan the final skit at the 26-minute mark. (But you can’t hear that.)
You can see the Regicides perform live tonight (Tuesday, May 7) at 446A Blake St. as part of the week’s Westville ArtWalk launch. (DJ Dooley‑O begins spinning a vinyl set at 7; improv begins at 8.) The Regicides will also perform an apizza-themed show called a Slice at Next Door on June 18 and 19. Check out their website for more info.
Click on the above video to watch Regicides perform and dish on WNHH FM’s“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.