TheaterWorks has announced which two women will offer equal and opposite reactions to Richard Dreyfuss’ portrayal of Albert Einstein in the play “Relativity” at TheaterWorks Oct. 7 through Nov. 13. Christa Scott Reed (“The Great Divorce” Off Broadway and on tour) will play the young woman who interviews Albert Einstein about his daughter. Lori Wilner (Golde in “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Goodspeed in 2014 and Grandma Tzeitel in the same show on Broadway) will play Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas. Details at theaterworkshartford.org.
Can You Tell Me How To Get to 50 Church Street?
Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon Robinson for more than 40 years on “Sesame Street,” will play the noble peacekeeper Doaker in the Hartford Stage production of August Wilson’s haunting drama “The Piano Lesson,” Oct. 13 through Nov. 13.
It was revealed in July that Orman was one of three longtime cast members who won’t be seen regularly on “Sesame Street” when the recently retooled program begins its next season.
“The Piano Lesson” stars Clifton Duncan (TV’s “Flesh and Bone” and several shows at San Diego’s Old Globe) as Boy Willie and Christina Acosta Robinson (the Yale School of Drama grad who appeared in the Yale Rep’s African-American “Death of a Salesman”) as Berniece, the siblings who spar over whether or not to sell a piano that’s become a family heirloom.
Galen Kane, who graduated from the Yale School of Drama in May (where he distinguished himself in productions of “Women Beware Women” and “The Brothers Size”) is Boy Willie’s pal Lymon. Cleavant Derricks, who originated the role of James “Thunder” Early in “Dreamgirls” on Broadway, is Wining Boy, the piano player whose glory days are behind him. Toccarra Cash (who was in a Philadelphia production of Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) is Grace, and Daniel Morgan Shelley is Avery. Ten-year-old Elise Taylor will play the child Maretha, with Tyra Harris as her understudy.
“The Piano Lesson” is directed by Jade King Carroll, who did the Hartford Stage/Long Wharf Theatre co-production of “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years” last season. Details at hartfordstage.org.
Distinguished Alumni
Stephen Trask — the “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” composer who grew up in New London, attended Wesleyan University in Middletown and was living in New Haven when “Hedwig” had its initial Off Broadway and film success — is apparently working on a new musical. “This Ain’t No Disco” is set at the 1970s New York nightclub Studio 54. A workshop of the show in New York earlier this month was directed by Trip Cullman, the noted New York director who happens to be a graduate of both Yale University and its School of Drama.
Michael McQuilken’s thesis project when he was in the directing program at the Yale School of Drama in 2011 was an original rock musical, “Jib.” The show has been rewritten, with new music by indie rock stars Amanda Palmer (a Wesleyan grad) and Jason Webley. McQuilken toured internationally as the drummer in Palmer’s band, Grand Theft Orchestra, playing on her well-titled album “Theatre is Evil.”
Weird Al Storms The Palace
The staff at the Palace Theater in Waterbury regularly conduct tours of that historic building. But the Palace backstage has seldom looked better than when “Weird” Al Yankovic sauntered along its hallowed backstage corridors, crooning his pop parody “Tacky” (sung to the tune of “Happy”) in the opening moments of his “Mandatory Tour” concert Sept. 18. Live video of his backstage wanderings was projected on a screen onstage. “Tacky” concluded with Al strutting through the Palace lobby and through the doors at the back of the auditorium. The crowd went wild.
The Palace’s 2016-17 “Broadway” season doesn’t open until “Dirty Dancing” Oct. 7-9. The “Weird Al” show gave it a useful test-run, with video, effects, a loud band (not just accordion) and a big costume change every five minutes.
The next guided tour of the Waterbury Palace is Oct. 15 at 11 a.m. Tickets are $6. “Weird Al” won’t be there. Details at palacetheaterct.org.
Artists Needed To Share Insights
The New England Foundation for the Arts (now presided over by Cathy Edwards, the former director of programming for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas) has launched a new survey, Creatives Count. The hope is “to better understand the employment and professional needs of New England’s creative workers, especially artists.” You can find the survey — in English, Spanish and Chinese — at nefa.org/creativescount. You don’t have to be a full-time professional artist to take part. The whole point is that many artists have to manage their time and money in special ways. If you take the survey, you get entered in a drawing for gift cards, and you also can add your name and profile to the CreativeGround.org directory of artists.
Reading Jacques Lamarre
Hartford-based playwright Jacques Lamarre is having another busy theater season. His latest food-themed, one-person play, “Raging Skillet,” will be seen next year at TheaterWorks, where he also has a one-act in the seasonal comedy anthology “Christmas on the Rocks.” Lamarre’s “Born Fat,” which premiered at Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury last season, made its New York debut in July at the Midtown Theatre Festival.
On Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m., Playhouse on Park in West Hartford is holding a public reading of Lamarre’s latest comedy, “Honey LaBrea — The Lonely Thetan.” The script is described thus: “For washed-up Hollywood has-been Honey LaBrea, L. Ron Hubbard’s church promises career rejuvenation in a spa-like atmosphere … or does it?” Details at playhouseonpark.org.
McArthur Fellows
Two of the just-announced 2016 McArthur Fellows (aka “Genius Grant” recipients) are well-known to Connecticut theatergoers. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ bleak family drama “War” had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2014. Another Jacobs-Jenkins play, “Appropriate,” will be seen next summer at the Westport Country Playhouse. “Appropriate” is also being done next month at the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island. Trinity Rep must be pretty thrilled to have a show opening within days of its playwright getting a Genius Grant.
I saw “War” at Yale Rep and “Appropriate” when it world-premiered at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky in 2013. Jacobs-Jenkins deserves all the recognition he’s getting. His plays can be off-putting, with their over-the-top anger and abrupt juxtapositions of different worlds. The hospital-room hysteria in “War” was underscored by scenes features a tribe of apes. But this is a playwright who has new ideas about how theater should work, and who knows how to put those ideas across strongly. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is impossible to ignore.
Another McArthur Fellow, Julia Wolfe, composed “Steel Hammer” which was a highlight of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven this past June. Originally composed as a concert piece, “Steel Hammer” was given a theatrical staging by director Anne Bogart. In my Courant review of the show, I wrote that “Steel Hammer” “is most resonant when its six-person cast becomes an extension of the live music ensemble, adding to the already complex rhythms by dancing and clapping and body-slapping and running in circles until they reached a point of true physical exhaustion.”
Wolfe is a co-founder (with two other Yale School of Music grads) of the influential new-music collective Bang on a Can, won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2015 for her oratorio “Anthracite Fields.”
Also among the 23 MacArthur Fellows for 2016: Claudia Rankine, the poet and critic who joined the Yale faculty earlier this year as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry in the Departments of English and African American Studies.
