What's Next on the Local Theater Scene

2020 has launched and the Connecticut theater season resumes this week.

New Haven:

Local theater troupe The New Haven Theater Company features a staged reading for three nights this weekend—Thursday, January 16 through Saturday, January 18—at English Markets Building on Chapel Street. The work is a new play in development by NHTC member Christian Shaboo. The Three Wisemen is about a young man facing uncertainty in his romantic life who takes to the road with the titular “wisemen”—his longtime roommates—to confront the ghosts of his past. The reading, directed by Shaboo, features NHTC regulars George Kulp (seen this past fall in Retreat from Moscow) and John Watson (last seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last season), as well as Aleta Staton, who appeared in Doubt in 2015, and newcomers Ny’Asia Davis, Solomon Green, and Eric Rey. For tickets for the limited seating go here.

At New Haven Theater Company this week only!

Tickets are also available for the next full production at NHTC: Steve Scarpa, who directed Our Town, Proof, and Waiting for Lefty and appeared in Middletown, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney, The Seafarer, and Doubt, among others, will direct J. Kevin Smith, who played the title role in Lucas Hnath’s …Death of Walt Disney, and Trevor Williams, who played Randall McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, for three weekends, February 20-22 and 27-29, and March 5-7. This will be the first rendering of an Albee play by NHTC. (preview)

Yale Cabaret resumes its 52nd season at 217 Park Street this weekend—Thursday, January 16-Saturday, January 18—with a production of Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama director Christopher D. Betts. Betts directed the Cab’s season’s bracing opener, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the years 1884-1915 as well as two shows last season. Harris’ play, which was staged at SoHo Rep in 2018, is described as “a modern myth about twin sisters who sojourn from the Dirty South to the California desert to exact righteous revenge against their father in an epic saga” that mixes tropes from “Spaghetti Westerns” and Afropunk culture (review). Next up at the Cab is a brand new musical by third-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe called Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars: The Musical which explores the catchy idea that to prevent the colonization of Mars we must destroy the red planet to save the blue one. Thursday, January 23-Saturday, January 25 (review); for tickets and more information, including dining reservations, go here.

At Yale Cabaret this week only!

The Yale Repertory Theatre returns later this month with its third show of the season: Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, former Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In the play, set in 2008, a female descendant of the Lenape tribe—who were forcefully removed from the island of Manahatta by the Dutch in the 1600s—works on Wall Street during the mortgage crisis that opened questions of land ownership—and capitalist greed—anew. Directed by Laurie Woolery, who directed the play in its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018 and directed El Huracán, the Rep’s inventive season opener of 2018-19. Friday, January 24- Saturday, February 15 (review); in previews until Thursday, January 30; for tickets and more information go here.

The third and last show of the Yale School of Drama season plays in early February: Alice, Robert Wilson’s experimental treatment of Alice in Wonderland, with cabaret-style songs by Tom Waits, will be directed by third-year director Ellis Logan. Saturday, February 1-Friday, February 7 (preview) (review); for tickets and more information go here.

At Long Wharf Theatre, the third show of the season runs through February. Directed by Rebecca Martínez, I Am My Own Wife is Doug Wright’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning one-person play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender woman who survives the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Germany. Mason Alexander Park—who has played a variety of genderbending roles such as the Emcee in Cabaret, Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch—plays Charlotte and more than thirty other characters embodied in the role (preview). Wednesday, February 5-Sunday, March 1; in previews until Wednesday, February 12; for tickets and more information go here (review).

Mason Alexander Park

Hartford:

Hartford Stage’s first show of 2020 is in previews and opens this week. Directed by Ron Russell, Pike Street is Obie-winning playwright and actor Nilaja Sun’s solo show in which she plays dozens of roles in a story of struggle, survival and redemption for three generations of a Puerto Rican family on New York’s Lower East Side. In previews since January 9, the show opens on Friday, January 17 and continues through Sunday, February 2 (review); for tickets and more information go here.

Opening night this Friday at Hartford Stage!

Playhouse on Park in West Hartford continues its 11th season with Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical which features Susan Haefner, who originated the title role, as Rosemary Clooney. The show by James Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman is directed by Kyle Brand, who directed an energetic Avenue Q at Playhouse on Park in 2017, and depicts both the successes and struggles of Clooney’s long career, including such signature hits as “Come On-a My House,” with music direction by Robert James Tomasulo and choreography by MK Lawson. Previews are tonight—January 15—and tomorrow night with the opening reception on Friday, January 17; the show runs until Sunday, February 2; for tickets and more information, go here.

TheaterWorks returns at the end of the month with its second subscription show of the season. The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Karekan & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell is a CT premiere and the play was a NYTimes Critics’ Pick during its Broadway run in 2018. Directed by Tracy Brigden, who directed the delirious Hand to God at TheaterWorks in 2018, the play is a comedic treatment of the “current media tug of war” about so-called “fake news” and the way in which spin affects the status of facts. The three-person cast features actors with CT work in their resumés: Nick LeMedica starred in TheaterWorks’ Hand to God; Tasha Lawrence starred in A Doll’s House, Part 2 at TheaterWorks in 2019 and in The Roommates at Long Wharf in 2018, and Rufus Collins was in Long Wharf’s The Old Masters in 2011. Thursday, January 30 to Sunday, March 8; Press night: Thursday, February 8 (review); Pay-What-You-Can: Thursday, January  30 and Wednesday, February 5; All-Free Student Matinee: Saturday, February 8; for tickets and more information go here.

Aging Youth

Review of Avenue Q, Playhouse on Park

A certain irony creeps into the revival of the Tony-winning hit musical from 2003, Avenue Q, now playing at Playhouse on Park through October 8, directed by Kyle Brand. The brainchild of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who co-wrote the music and lyrics with book by Jeff Whitty, this lively and imaginative musical uses tropes that recall the long-running children’s program Sesame Street to explore the problems of a post-college existence in a less trendy area of Queens. The show’s strong closing song makes the case that most things in life are only “For Now.” That sense of the obsolescence of events and tastes may include, for younger viewers, the show’s key reference points, more than a decade after the show’s initial run.

There are always twenty-somethings, but they aren’t always the same twenty-somethings. The generation that grew up with Sesame Street, and would instantly recognize the name Gary Coleman—represented onstage as the quintessential has-been celebrity by Abena Mensah-Bonsu—is likely to be in its forties, as are Lopez and Marx. The show’s progressive songs, like “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “If You Were Gay,” effectively mimic the bright-eyed pedagogy of the award-winning PBS show, which aimed to educate and entertain simultaneously. But they must also seem a bit quaint to a twenty-something of today. Since it’s stressed that Avenue Q is not a show for children, its best audience may be those with nostalgic feelings for the turn-of-the-century era.

The cast of Avenue Q (left to right): Christmas Eve (EJ Zimmerman), Brian (James Fairchild), Princeton/Rod (Weston Chandler Long), Bad Idea Bears (Colleen Welsh), Trekkie/Nicky (Peej Mele), Kate/Lucy (Ashley Brooke), Gary Coleman (Abena Mensah-Bonsu) (photos courtesy of Curt Henderson, Imagine It Framed)

Still, it’s a great idea: using the tropes of children's TV to help render the growing pains of young adulthood. Princeton (Weston Chandler Long) must come to terms with the fact that his B.A. in English doesn’t open the doors of opportunity. He’s trying to find his way, helped by neighbors to learn important lessons about getting along, much as would any guest on Sesame Street. A key conceit of the show is that puppets are people, monsters—also played by puppets—live among us, and that some characters will be rendered by live actors.

A major aspect of Avenue Q—and one of the strengths of the Playhouse on Park production—is that the puppeteers are usually the actors and that all are fully visible on stage. This permits the audience to look both at the puppets—as for instance the porn-addict Trekkie (a ribald take-off on Cookie Monster)—and at the actors who manipulate them (for Trekkie, both Peej Mele and Colleen Welsh). Mele is a good example of an actor in service to a puppet: he manifests a variety of entertaining voices for different characters and generally maintains a self-effacing wide-eyed glare as though he were a puppet himself. Welsh, who helps with much of the ancillary puppet-handling, sometimes wielding the puppet another actor is voicing, is a key member of the cast.

The expressive aspects of the simultaneous presence of actor and puppet are particularly effective in Long’s body language for Princeton, and as the more uptight—and closeted—Rod, and in Ashley Brooke’s opposition between sweet Kate Monster and salacious Lucy T. Slut. These two fine actors do a lot, with their movements and their singing voices, to keep this revival fun, romantic, and endearing.

left to right: Peej Mele, Ashley Brooke, Colleen Welsh, Weston Chandler Long (Princeton)

As the live actors—without puppets—Mensah-Bonsu, in a boyish outfit that would suit the diminutive Coleman—steals the show, and she’s abetted by the couple Brian (James Fairchild) and Christmas Eve (EJ Zimmerman). The fact of a mixed-race couple is meant to be progressive as well, but the insistence that Christmas Eve speak broken English makes her a caricature (“The More You Ruv Someone”), and Brian seems to have little purpose other than to be an example of an older slacker (“I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today”).

Nicky (Colleen Welsh), Brian (James Fairchild), Trekkie (Peej Mele), Princeton (Weston Chandler Long), Gary Coleman (Abena Mensah-Bonsu), Christmas Eve (EJ Zimmerman)

While not always progressive, the lessons of the songs follow an arc to make characters confront behavioral norms—whether about efforts to enact or avoid romance (“Fantasies Come True,” “My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada”), or about how to face life (“Purpose,” “There is Life Outside Your Apartment”), or how to get it on—puppets Princeton and Kate simulate every variation of heterosexual sex in “You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love).” The rueful “There’s a Fine, Fine Line,” sung by Kate, is a high-point, late in Act Two.

The set by Emily Nichols is a perfect rendition of a grittier Sesame Street, with fun fold-down, dollhouse-like sets as backdrops to serve as interiors. The band, let by Robert James Tomasulo, is clear and unobtrusive, and Kyle Brand’s choreography uses the wide-open thrust space well, including a visit into the audience for handouts.

Not quite as dated as the reruns of yesteryear, Avenue Q may inadvertently underscore how timely an experience young adulthood is. The revival at Playhouse on Park is served well by its cast and design and Kyle Brand’s energetic direction.

Avenue Q
Music and Lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx
Book by Jeff Whitty
Directed by Kyle Brand

Puppets conceived by Rick Lyons

Choreographer: Kyle Brand; Music Director: Robert James Tomasulo; Lighting Designer: Christopher Bell; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Costume Designer: Kate Bunce; Scenic Designer: Emily Nichols; Properties: Pamela Lang; Video Designers: Zach Rosing and Ben Phillippe

Cast: Ashley Brooke, James Fairchild, Weston Chandler Long, Peej Mele, Abena Mensah-Bonsu, Colleen Welsh

Musicians: Nick Cutroneo, guitar; Sean Rubin, bass guitar; Andrew Studenski, reeds; Robert James Tomasulo, keyboard; Elliot Wallace, drums

Playhouse on Park
September 13-October 8, 2017