New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
CURTAIN CALL
THEATER SCENE PUTS NEW HAVEN IN THE LIMELIGHT
NEW HAVEN — Billed as the “Cultural Capital of Connecticut,” New Haven is home to numerous theaters and production houses, with the Shubert Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre and Yale Repertory Theatre as the most established.
Shubert Theatre
Two years after opening their first Shubert Theatre in New York City, the Shubert brothers built another theater in New Haven. The Shubert Theatre opened Dec. 11, 1914, with “The Belle of Bond Street.” One of the highlights of the evening was comedian Sam Bernard singing, “Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle When Rip Van Winkle Was Away?”
Local newspaper critics enjoyed the show, which already had played on Broadway, but they were more impressed with the much-needed, “beautiful, ultra modern playhouse ... which New Haven people can refer to with justifiable pride.” Their sentiments were echoed by the greatest stars, producers and writers of the theater world, who soon elected the Shubert Theatre and New
Haven as their favorite place to try out shows before opening them on Broadway.
From its first season, the Shubert Theatre has been a performing arts center presenting plays, musicals, opera, dance, classical music recitals and concerts, vaudeville, jazz artists, big bands, burlesque and a variety of solo performances. Since opening in 1914, the Shubert has played host to more than 600 pre-Broadway tryouts, including more than 300 world premieres and 50 American premieres, double that of any theater in New York City or other tryout cities such as Boston, Philadelphia or Washington.
The Shubert brothers ran the theater from 1914 through the 1940-41 season, establishing the pattern of tryouts. In fall 1941, Maurice H. Bailey took over the theater, and under his stewardship the theater became known as the “Birthplace of the Nation’s Greatest Hits” for the number of long-run productions that first came to life on the Shubert stage.
Fewer shows toured during the ’40s due to World War II, but in 1943, New Haven audiences went wild over an unlikely musical comedy about cowboys titled “Away We Go!” — renamed “Oklahoma!” before the show opened on Broadway. The show’s composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II considered the Shubert their “lucky theater,” going on to have several world premieres there such as “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “The Sound of Music.”
In keeping with its title of “Birthplace of the Nation’s Greatest Hits,” the Shubert also is the theater in which many of the world’s best and most popular actors received their first professional acclaim. “When actors and actresses come here, they’re absolutely astounded that all of this stuff happened here,” said Shubert spokesman Anthony Lupinacci.
The Shubert closed in 1976 and was threatened with destruction. “At the end of the ’70s, concerned citizens realized, ‘We can’t demolish the Shubert,’ because it was actually slated for demolition. We need to revitalize the downtown to get people to come back in,” said Lupinacci.
Through the efforts of many, over a period of seven years, the theater was saved. The interior of the theater was restored with particular care and attention given to historical accuracy, such as the original 1914 colors being used in refurbishing the auditorium.
Since reopening in December 1983, the theater has evolved from its original mission as a Broadway tryout house, into a community resource that is part of the heart of the region’s cultural life. In addition to the Broadway offerings, dance, cabaret, popular music and family entertainment, the Shubert in recent years reclaimed its legacy by again presenting world premieres and pre-Broadway shows.
Lupinacci said the theater over the years has tried to keep evolving. “What I do remind everyone is that as much as we love to talk about the history, we’re not a museum,” he said.
“The thing that’s really important to us, is that all of that happened here, and we’re so proud of it, but we love the fact that we’re still going,” he said. “Like we haven’t closed, and we’re still vital, and we currently have shows that we’re still running on Broadway.”
“Broadway was always the big place where everything started on the East Coast. A lot of people started to move to California, and a lot of shows started to open there,” Lupinacci said. “So the whole tryout thing was no longer fashionable, so what we started to do was, instead of starting Broadways shows here, we’d bring the national tours because a lot of these big Broadway shows started touring the country.”
Recently, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” played at the Shubert, with performances nearly selling out for the entire run, something Lupinacci described as an “intimate” experience, as it’s about the actors and the actresses and the subtle facial expressions and interactions between them.
“That kind of a show, if you see it in a 3,000-seat theater, because there’s not all of the spectacle and things, if you see it in a really big theater, because it’s all about this small group of people, you kind of lose some of it. Whereas here, that production worked so well, fit so beautifully,” Lupinacci said.
While most performing arts centers have about 3,000 seats, the Shubert has nearly half that, with 1,600 seats, and the first row starting just inches from the stage, “with all the lights on, they’re not even used to seeing people’s faces.”
Lupinacci said it can be intimidating performing a solo on the stage, as actors and actresses “can see every person’s face, all the way up to the last row of the balcony ... But they love it, though. As live actors, they like the interaction with the audience. It’s just that they’re not used to it.”
“The theater has wonderful advantages for the audience and to the actors, but what we like to say is our greatest asset, is also our greatest liability because we can’t have those really big, monster shows,” he said.
Despite not being able to house some of those nationally touring shows synonymous with Broadway such as “Wicked,” Lupinacci said people can still get that Broadway sense in New Haven as it’s not just about coming and seeing a show; it’s about the experience.
“They get the Broadway feeling when they come here because there are restaurants right nearby, the New Haven Green is right down the block, everyone loves that Yale is right down the corner. There’s more to do than just coming here, seeing a show and leaving. People make a day of it, and they really like that,” he said.
Long Wharf Theatre
Long Wharf Theatre was founded by Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman, two Yale University alumni who shared a dream of starting a resident professional theater company in New Haven. Assisted by an avid group of community leaders and patrons of the arts, they made that dream a reality in 1965 when Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” opened for a two-week engagement.
Initially, critics seemed skeptical of the theater’s prospects for success given its location — the theater it was built in a vacant warehouse space in a busy food terminal, with its main stage originally stocked with seats borrowed from a retired movie house.
One report following the opening of the playhouse harshly remarked that the area around Long Wharf was “born of slums and harbor marsh.” The critique went on to note the frenzied nature of the warehouse where the city’s food terminal and the theater coexisted.
Despite its unlikely locale, Kleinman and Jory remained optimistic that the waterfront spot on the outskirts of New Haven was the right place for the new theater. In particular, they correctly noted that its location — just six minutes from the heart of the city and right off of a major turnpike exit — would be attractive to both local and widely dispersed patrons.
Comprised of a company of 10 actors selected from across the country and a crew of 14 apprentices, the theater found immediate popularity, attracting more than 30,000 patrons in its first year. Financially, local community members became some of its most fervent supporters. This included the produce wholesalers, who served as the theater’s closest neighbors, donating $20,000 toward the acting troupe’s startup.
In 1967, after two years of steady growth, the hiring of renowned director Arvin Brown as artistic director forever changed the theater’s direction. Brown immediately set to work establishing a national reputation for the New Haven troupe. By 1972, he realized his vision.
After staging David Storey’s “The Changing Room” in fall of that year, critics from the major theater markets in the United States began to take notice of both the theater and its young director. For his part, Brown attributed much of Long Wharf ’s success to its Connecticut audiences, noting, “Our audience is experienced and sophisticated. It is more and more demanding, but demanding in an honest and spontaneous way . ... Wharfgoers are developing the toughminded but open sense of anticipation that once characterized New York audiences.”
Under the watch of Arvin Brown and Edgar Rosenblum for more than 30 years, Long Wharf established itself as an important force in the regional theater movement, a crusade during the ’60s that established professional theaters outside of major urban cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
“They created an opportunity for theater artists and communities to bring theater outside of the city, making a place where classics were performed on a regular basis, making a place for theater artists to grow, making a place where the artists could be responsive to what was going on in the community around them,” said Steven Scarpa, director of marketing and communications at Long Wharf.
Under the current leadership of Managing Director Joshua Borenstein, Long Wharf continues to be a leader in American theater, revitalizing classic and modern plays for a contemporary audience, discovering new resonance in neglected works and premiering new plays by new voices that both investigate and celebrate the unique circumstances of our time.
The successful rise of the Long Wharf is perhaps best exemplified by its current annual patronage of more than 100,000, and its transfer of more than 30 productions to Broadway or off-Broadway theaters, some of which include Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award and Obie Award winners.
“Long Wharf is a place over the course of its history has continually strived for theatrical excellence. It’s something we take great pride in. It’s something we are continually looking for,” said Scarpa. “We try to be excellent, so artists come to work with us. Artists who are striving to do special things see this as a place where they can come and try these things.”
He said a lot of times the ecosystem of the theater can be that play writers and actors try out roles in smaller cities, believing New Haven, in general, is an important stop for artists. Recently, some of the nation’s leading actors, including Sam Waterston, Stacy Keach, Brian Dennehy, Judith Ivey and Anna Deavere Smith have performed on the theater’s stages.
Scarpa said he’s seen tremendous pieces of writing and beautiful moments from actors, both famous and not famous, during his tenure. One example that comes to mind is the performance of Reg E. Cathey — well-known for his role as Norman Wilson on “The Wire” — in Samuel Beckett’s play “Endgame.”
During the final dress rehearsal, Scarpa said Cathey delivered a monologue to the mostly empty audience, “so (Cathey) looked, and I happened to be sitting in the front of the section, and delivered the monologue to me. I’d never seen an actor be so committed and intense and focused. It was a special moment.”
Just one of many special moments Scarpa said he has seen over the years.
Yale Repertory Theatre
Founded by Robert Brustein, former dean of Yale School of Drama, in 1966, Yale Repertory Theatre was created with the goal of bringing collaboration between theater professionals and talented students, becoming one of the first distinguished regional theaters.
Artistic Director James Bundy said the theater’s name has sometimes confused people, who believe Yale Rep is solely an education theater, serving as an extension of the university. Yet, despite being run as a profession theater, he said Yale Rep does embrace early career professionals who are still in training.
“The key premise of (Yale Rep’s) operation is that it is to the (Yale) School of Drama as a teaching hospital would be to a medical school. We’re bringing in people who work at the highest levels of the field to work alongside current students,” he said.
As head of Yale Rep from 1966 to 1979, Brustein brought professional actors to Yale each year to form a repertory company and nurtured notable new authors including Christopher Durang. Some successful works were transferred to commercial theaters.
“New Haven was — and is — a city that’s revitalizing itself, largely by emphasizing its cultural assets, as an attraction for Connecticut residents and tourists from outside the state,” said Bundy. “People come to Yale (Rep) with an idea that the work is going to be adventurous, inventive, bold.”
Since its creation,Yale Rep has championed new works, producing well over 100 premieres, including two Pulitzer Prize winners and four other nominated finalists, by emerging and established playwrights. Seventeen Yale Rep productions have advanced to Broadway, garnering more than 40 Tony Award nominations and 10 Tony Awards. Yale University School of Drama also has the nearby nearly 100-year-old University Theatre on York Street that seats more than 600 people.
While not all new Yale Rep works experience commercial success, some have unexpectedly attracted attention from mainstream audiences, such as such Paula Vogel’s “Indecent.” According to Bundy, “Indecent” isn’t necessarily the kind of play someone would expect to go onto Broadway as it recounts the controversy surrounding the1932 Broadway play “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch, for which the cast of the original production were arrested on the grounds of obscenity.
Bundy said he believes part of the reason for some of these plays’ success, like “Indecent,” is due to audiences wanting to see what’s new and surprising works. “Ideally, every new play is surprising, [but] one doesn’t go to the theater to have one’s prejudices confirmed,” he said.
Despite performing some visceral interpretations of classics, Bundy said the theater is probably best known for producing new plays, something that was helped along by the creation of Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre in 2008.
To date, the Binger Center has supported the work of more than 50 commissioned artists and underwritten the world premieres and subsequent productions of 27 new American plays and musicals at Yale Rep and theaters across the country. As an artist-driven initiative, the Binger Center devotes major resources to the commissioning, development, and production of new plays and musicals.
With respect to new plays, Bundy said Yale Rep receives hundreds of submissions every year, as well working with established directors and writers to develop and commission new plays. He said they usually start with 40 to 50 “pretty good ideas” that has to be narrowed down to five.
Bundy said sometimes, they’ll know certain projects will be in a season as far as a year and a half beforehand, while other times, things come together “quite” late, so it could only be six months before the play is in pre-production and a final determination is made.
“Sometimes we have things we think will be in the season. We’ll spend a year thinking something’s going to be in a season, but all of sudden because of artist availability, it’s not. So you have to do a lot of planning, but also be very flexible when things don’t go exactly as planned,” he said.
However, Bundy said once they decide what they’re going to produce, they try to empower the artists to tell the story in the best way they possibly can, something that really comes through in front of an actual audience.
“The magic doesn’t really happen until an audience is there because no matter how cool we think the show is, we’re ultimately doing it to see what happens when it meets an audience. Then it’s an interesting thing because the magic can happen at any given moment, and the idea is to keep stacking up the moments that lead to, in some perspectives, the cathartic experience. Theater is a subversive medium, so the idea is to somehow engage the audience in an experience which is attractive and implicates them in the moral or aesthetic questions of the piece. The human questions of the piece, whatever the human struggle is.”