“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.”
Long Wharf Theatre presents She Loves Me at The Lab at ConnCORP in Hamden, CT. Under the direction of Jacob Padrón, this classic musical is given new life that emanates a quiet dignity. There’s something to be said about a production that can make a person nostalgic for a time they hadn’t experience. She Loves Me captures the simplicity of a time before left or right swipes and the complexities of love that exists without regard for the era from which it’s being pursued.
Read MoreThe timeless tale of A Christmas Carol comes to life at Hartford Stage in a production comparable to any cinematic iteration of Charles Dickens’ original story ever produced. Directed by Michael Wilson, this production visually heightens the juxtaposition of the joy, life, and merriment of the Christmas holiday with the grief, death, and misery of those who’s hearts have calloused over the years. It’s doubtful that this production can be topped.
Read MoreKevin McCallister, Elf on a Shelf, and Charlie Brown walks into a bar. TheaterWorks Hartford celebrates another holiday season with a production of Christmas on the Rocks directed by Rob Ruggiero (and sponsored by Floyd W. Green, III) that takes the best memories of the holidays, adds a few dashes of adulthood trauma, double strains the somber, and pours up the laughter.
Read MoreFrom the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, Disney’s The Lion King musical is brought to life in fantastic fashion at The Bushnell’s enchanting Mortensen Hall. This production makes it clear that no matter how familiar a story is, there’s always potential to create awe in young and elderly alike. Produced by Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher and directed by Julie Taymor, this musical taps into the heart of the African culture surrounding the original and timeless story.
Read MoreIt’s difficult to see the bigger picture from inside of the frame. Exhibiting Forgiveness, Titus Kaphar’s brilliant work of difficult truths creates a cutout of shared emotional burdens for audiences to insert themselves into— it pulls back the rug on all of the familial things we thought we healed from, reminding us that healing isn’t linear. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a thoughtfully scripted and delicately executed vision of shared emotional experiences where the through line runs across a range of emotions that make perfect sense and no sense simultaneously.
Read MoreHeartBeat Ensemble offers us a peek, even if only by way of musings, into the lives of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in Jimmy & Lorraine. The convergence of art, love, and politics is a camp fire by which Black revolutionaries sat in the company of other brilliant, bar-raising, freedom-fighting, creative spirits. We honor their contributions and all of their sacrifices in the fight that should not have been— in their tenacity in keeping the baton of the struggle for longer than anyone should ever have to embody the vitriol of vehement and baseless rejection. We’ve gone as far as romanticizing the fight, given its own resilience. But, Jimmy & Lorraine romanticizes the sacrificial lives of two of Black History’s own in a new way. This production imagines what the love and camaraderie between these two civil rights visionaries could have been in a visual salve that attempts to heal the wounds created by the relentless battles they fought for a better America.
Read More“He who fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” — Nietzsche
Hartford Stage sets ablaze the black and white notion of good and evil with a shrill and provocative interpretation of Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde. This production, under the direction of Melia Bensussen, opens Hartford Stage’s 24/25 season with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde like you’ve never seen them before. This iteration of Stevenson’s gothic psychological thriller warns us of the danger of labeling the worst of humanity in ways that shelves our own innate propensity for darkness.
Read MoreTheaterWorks Hartford kicks off its 24/25 season with a gripping production of Jeffrey Leiber’s Fever Dreams, directed by Rob Ruggiero. Set present day, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, Fever Dreams pulls at the threading of the ties that bind in the tangled mess that is the connection between characters. This production explores the emotional range of grief, and the animalistic tendencies of human survival that give truth to the idea that, “it's not love on which the strongest foundations are built. It's the decency of merciful lies.”
Read MoreShelton, Connecticut’s Center Stage Theatre delivers a hilarious and slightly convicting production of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change just in time for cuffing season. In a season when bronzed and sun drunk singles sober up in time to think more seriously on their prospects before the cold season emerges, director Justin Zenchuk stirs up audiences with a scared straight to the alter theme that challenges the impossible way we approach dating and relationships.
Read MoreRebecca Kemper Goodheart has been a director, actor, and teacher specializing in Shakespeare and Voice for over 25 years. She is a designated Linklater Voice teacher who has directed over 30 professional and 50 educational productions. Currently serving as the Producing Director of Elm Shakespeare Company in New Haven, CT, she has worked with a dozen Shakespeare theaters around the world, and is a proud lifetime member of the Shakespeare Theater Association who chaired the global 2016 Celebration of Shakespeare's Legacy. Other leadership positions have included Director of Training at SF Shakespeare Festival, Producing Artistic Director for Maryland Shakespeare Festival (an equity theater she founded in 1999), Artistic Director of the Metawhateverphor Theater in NYC, and Director of Education for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. She is a classical text and voice teacher at Shakespeare & Co. in Massachusetts and on the theater faculty of Southern CT State University. She holds a BFA from NYU/Stella Adler Conservatory, a Master of Letters in Shakespeare & Renaissance Literature and an Master of Fine Arts in Directing (both from the American Shakespeare Center). She has presented her research into Shakespeare’s dramatic use of rhetoric at numerous national conferences, and theatrical workshops across the country, as well as having her scholarship published in the Wooden O Journal and Shakespeare Criticism, online.
Read MoreCenter Stage Theatre’s production of RENT, directed by Liz Muller, captures the timelessness of the original production, reminding us of all the things that truly matter in a world that seems set on actively contributing to the tear in the fabric of humanity. The story, set in New York City’s East Village in the late 80s to early 90s, tackles themes that still resonate today. Themes of love, life, hopelessness, and collective loneliness permeate the production, while characters with vibrant dreams and relatable gripes battle mental and emotional turbulence, as well as addiction and illness.
Read MoreHartford Stage presents Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass. This story fuses a retrospective exploration of Lisa’s history by way of her father’s life with happenings from her family’s present. 2.5 Minute Ride is an emotional rollercoaster that allows us to try on a lens of personalized grief to view stories we only received glimpses of though the histories we’ve heard recounted over and over again— but with an understanding that life goes on despite all those things “we thought we could walk alway from.”
Read MoreTheaterworks Hartford’s production of Sandra, directed by Jared Mezzocchi, is a masterpiece of a love story, where love, as we know it, is as rare and elusive as the “birds that never show up if you go out looking for it.” Sandra is a one-woman psychological thriller that plays like a cautionary tale of the dangers of the impulsivities surrounding our restlessness.
Read More“Girls without a source of income become women who find money in unfortunate ways.” The life of Marcenia Lyle Stone is laid bare in Playhouse on Park’s biographical production of Toni Stone, written by Lydia R. Diamond and directed by Jamil A.C. Mangan. This play tackles themes of women excelling in a man’s world and the struggles it provides, as well as the plight of the African American in the United States. It reminds us that barriers have been in place from the beginning of time, but “sometimes you have to reach” to get where you’re heading.
Read More“You’re only allowed three great loves in your life” and sometimes, the subject of that love isn’t a who but a where. Seven Angels Theatre of Waterbury, Connecticut, presents a musical production of A Bronx Tale, based on Chazz Palminteri’s 1989 play, set in The Bronx, New York between 1960 and 1968. This production, directed by Joe Barbara and Janine Molinari, dispatches melodious themes of identity, pride versus integrity, good versus evil, love versus fear, and Machiavellian philosophy as characters grapple with different iterations of the Italian-American dream.
Read MoreShelton Connecticut’s Center Stage Theatre presents a laugh-out-loud funny production of The Play The Goes Wrong directed by Betsy Kelso. With an Inception-like depth, The Play That Goes Wrong is a play within a play where the cast and crew’s ‘who dun it’ becomes a ‘who’s doing what’ as the lights and sound glitch, the set falls apart, and roles are confused. This production is a picture of Murphy’s Law where everything that could possibly go wrong absolutely did.
Read More“A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.” Hartford Stage gives new life to Arthur Miller’s All My Sons directed by Melia Bensussen. With rivaling themes of ‘for love or for wealth’, ‘man versus machine,’ and ‘God versus man’ with a sprinkle of star dust, this iteration of Miller’s work compellingly unravels the tightly woven fabric of familial duty and asserts that a responsibility to the broader family—to the connection of humanity is just as important, if not more so.
Read MoreThe borrowed lives of American immigrants are honored in the visually stunning and remarkably layered story that is Sanctuary City. TheaterWorks Hartford, in partnership with Long Wharf Theatre, presents Sanctuary City, written by Martyna Majok and directed by Jacob G. Padrón and Pedro Bermúdez.
Set in Newark, New Jersey on the heels of 9/11, this production plays on the non-linear nature of memory, exposing excerpts of two intertwined lives in a fragmented back-and-forth as they recall defining moments of their connection. As Dreamers with an acute awareness of the disconnect that exists between them and the country they call home, B and G are tasked with the impossible—planning for their respective futures in a place that is provisional at best, without the security of belonging.
Read MoreThe delicate coating of truths outlined in Origin, Director Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, gives life to the notion that “race is not where the line is drawn.” Wilkerson’s work weaves together the atrocities imposed on Jews at the hand of Nazi Germany, the plight of India’s Dalit, and the lives of descendants of Africa in America in a way that we’ve never seen done before. DuVernay gives visual life to these truths that we’ve all known, in a way that will be branded in our hearts and minds forever.
Read MoreRepresentation matters in all things and we all want choices—chief among those options is the desire to choose who and where we call home. Hartford Stage transforms into a house on a journey to becoming a home for the characters of The Hot Wing King. This play, written by Katori Hall and directed by Christopher D. Betts explores themes of Black masculinity, love, identity and home in a heart-warming and comical production that ushers audiences through every emotion from frustration to joy. Hall asks us to set down our ideals and beliefs of what home and love should look like to see the humanity in a twice-marginalized group of people. If you focus enough on the heart of the characters, you might be able to find yourself in their shoes.
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