Michael Bradford is the new artistic director of the Connecticut Repertory Theatre and the new department head of dramatic arts at the University of Connecticut.
An internationally recognized playwright, Bradford’s been on the UConn faculty since 2001; his most recent positions were director of Theatre Studies and associate professor of playwriting. His play “Olives and Blood” was produced by CT Rep in 2014, and has also had productions in New York and London. Some of Bradford’s other plays, such as “Fathers and Sons,” “Living in the Wind” and “Migration,” have been seen at regional theaters around the country.
Vincent J. Cardinal, who headed CT Rep and the Dramatic Arts department from 2006 until this month, is moving on to the University of Michigan, where he’ll chair the Department of Musical Theatre.
HGMC In Colorado
The Hartford Gay Men’s Chorus is in Colorado, attending the GALA Choruses Festival. The 4-year-old chorus is performing “A Newer World,” the piece it commissioned from composer Greg Gilpin and premiered in Hartford on June 3.
Arts & Ideas Year-‘Round’
The main two-week International Festival of Arts & Ideas 2016 ended June 25, but Arts & Ideas occasionally hosts events at other times during the year. The festival has announced that it will co-present a multi-media interactive art installation, “The Round” (aka “La Ronde”), by the French duo Projet in Situ, Oct. 8-16 during New Haven’s City Wide Open Studios. The co-presenter is CWOS’ main organizer, Artspace. Projet in Situ performed “The Round” in May at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., and in August 2015 at the Vermont Performance Lab. The piece involves guided tours of gallery spaces, using cell phones, live movement, audience interaction and, judging from the photos, a lot of lying down.
Light Entertainment
A couple of weeks ago The Courant heard from a disgruntled theatergoer who’d attended Cirque du Soleil’s “Ovo” at the XL Center and had been distracted throughout the show by a bright spotlight that impaired his appreciation of the insect-themed acrobatics. He did say that the arena offered him a different seat, yet his annoyance remained.
Just after I’d heard this illuminating tale, I found myself similarly blindsided by very bright lights that stood at stage level for several different shows at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, including “Steel Hammer,” “Air Play” and Cirque Mechanics.
I am not one to curse the lightness; in my opinion, many modern theater shows are way too shadowy. But these viewing experiences made me realize how many shows I’ve seen lately that have turned bright lights directly on the audience on purpose, shocking them into another level of consciousness. These include the touring musicals “Matilda,” “Dirty Dancing” and “Kinky Boots.”
Using too-bright lights as a theatrical effect probably goes back as far as the invention of electricity, but it’s deeply associated with Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty experiments of the 1920 and ’30s.
Most blinding show I ever saw? A chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, directed by Peter Sellars at the Boston Shakespeare Company in 1983. The finale had the entire audience looking away, afraid they’d burn out their retinas. The opera’s title: “The Lighthouse.”
On Garde!
With little fanfare, New London’s Garde Arts Center posted its 2016-17 Broadway series events on its website, gardearts.org last week. The season includes two musicals — the latest Connecticut appearances of “Once” (Feb. 10) and “Annie” (April 23) — and three other entertainments: the political comedy revue “Unelectable You” (co-produced by the Second City comedy troupe and the Slate news website) on Oct. 29, the dance/puppetry/musical/thin-metal spectacle “The Alumnum Show” on Nov. 16 and Matt Murphy’s off-Broadway play “Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man” on May 18 and 19.
The Garde’s Broadway subscription package also includes the latest of the theater’s popular “Classic Albums Live” concerts: “Led Zeppelin II” on Nov. 18, Prince’s “Purple Rain” Jan. 19 and David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” May 12.
The “Once” and “Annie” tours will be different from the ones seen in Connecticut this past season. “Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man” was on, then off, The Bushnell schedule this past season.
The Garde has also announced that the scheduled July concert appearance by Tony Yazbeck, the singer/dancer who starred in “On the Town” on Broadway and “My One and Only” at the Goodspeed Opera House, has been postponed until fall.
Season subscription details are at 860-444-7373 or gardearts.org.
Pre-Show Announcement Of The Week
“Stage fog will be used in this show. For you people in the first row — it’s like condensed water. It will come rolling toward you. It will feel like a spa day in the theater.”
Vincent J. Cardinal, before a performance of “Peter and the Starcatcher” at Connecticut Repertory Theatre
