The Long Wharf Theatre is swapping one city for another.
The theater announced to subscribers last week that it won’t be ending its 2015-16 season with “Shining City,” after all. Conor McPherson’s Dublin-based drama, about a man who visits a therapist after he thinks he saw his dead wife’s ghost, is off the schedule.
Instead, the May 4-29 slot will be filled with the new musical “My Paris,” which had a brief run last summer at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester. “My Paris” is about the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec and features songs by the famous composer/performer Charles Aznavour (of the pop hit “She” and the Truffaut film “Shoot the Piano Player”).
The project is vaguely connected to an earlier Aznavour musical about the painter, titled “Lautrec,” which ran for two months in London’s West End in 1999. “My Paris”‘ book is by longtime Connecticut resident Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy,” the movie “Mystic Pizza”) with new lyrics and “musical adaptation” by Uhry’s “Parade” collaborator, Jason Robert Brown. (The Long Wharf staged Brown’s “The Last Five Years” a couple of season ago; Goodspeed did his “13” in 2008.)
The musical is directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, who helmed the recent Broadway hit “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and the 2011 revival of “Anything Goes.” Vont-ils danser le cancan? Mais oui!
Ross Relocating
The ever-cheery Michael Ross, who was the managing director of Hartford Stage from 1986 to 1996, Long Wharf Theatre from 1997 to 2002 and most recently of Westport Country Playhouse starting in 2009, is leaving Connecticut for Maryland, where he’ll become managing director of Center Stage in Baltimore. Ross held the same position at that theater from 2002 to 2008. He came to Westport alongside the current artistic director, Mark Lamos, continuing the artistic partnership they fostered in Hartford. Ross’ last day at WCP is June 30, a couple of months after its 2016 season has begun.
What Is This Dagger I See Before Me?
“Macbeth,” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, is one of most critically acclaimed films out right now. (Yes, there are other movies besides “Star Wars.”) Memorable productions of the Scottish play in Connecticut include: Michael Wilson’s smoke-and-mirrors rendition for Hartford Stage in 2000; Darko Tresnjak’s decision to do “Macbeth” in repertory with Marivaux’s “La Dispute,” also at Hartford Stage, in 2013; a Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Anthony Sher at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2000; Eric Ting’s Vietnam-era “Macbeth 1969,” set in the snow-covered American Midwest, at the Long Wharf in 2012; and the comedy “Peerless,” which closed Dec. 19 at the Yale Repertory Theatre and adapted the power-lust drama to a contemporary high school. The new “Macbeth” film version opened in local cinemas Dec. 11 and, due to a special marketing deal, will apparently be watchable on Amazon Prime just two or three months from now.
Dream Come True
Yale Opera has enlisted filmmaker and director Claudia Solti (daughter of the late maestro Georg Solti) to helm its winter production of Benjamin Britten’s popular musicalization of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The fully staged student-sung production, with Rune Bergmann of Norway conducting the orchestra, will be performed Feb. 19-21 at the Shubert in New Haven. Solti, perhaps best known for her short comedy film “Shotgun Wedding,” previously directed the Britten opera in Russia in 2011 and is also using “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as the basis for a movie project titled “Dream On.”
Stratford Bound
Brian McManamon, a New York-based actor, director and teacher who graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2006 and appeared in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of “These Paper Bullets!” in 2014, is the new artistic director of the Shakespeare Academy at Stratford. The fast-growing summer program, which operates out of a house on the grounds of the old American Shakespeare Festival Theater site in Stratford, attracts students from around the country and abroad, presenting outdoor Shakespeare productions and other events each summer. The academy was founded in honor of Quinn Rooney, an actor and Stratford native who died of brain cancer in 2012 when he was just 19.
The Season of Giving
Newman’s Own Foundation is giving $75,000 to the Westport Country Playhouse to “encourage stability and increase individual donor support.” The National Endowment for the Arts is awarding $10,000 to support Hartford Stage’s May production of the musical “Anastasia.”
