Author Archives: Christopher Arnott

How daring of the Riverdale High School drama club to be staging a Tarzan drama 25 years before the Disney Broadway version. This story appears in Archie Giant Series Magazine #504, March 1981. The animated Disney movie which begat the Broadway show was released in 1999. There is a Tarzan stage legacy dating back to … Continue reading »

Joey Fly Private Eye 2 in Big Hairy Drama Written by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Neil Numberman. Henry Holt & Co., 2010) Insect noir adventure in which a private eye who has the compound eyes of a fly and who is a magnet for atrocious puns (“I do believe your fly is down.” “So I … Continue reading »

BBC Radio 4 Extra is currently broadcasting a new radio dramatization of Karel Capek’s War With the Newts. You can listen to it on demand, for free, for the rest of this week, here. In the theater, Capek’s known for his social-satire fantasy classic R.U.R. (for which the playwright coined the now-standard term “robot”) and … Continue reading »

Church Through Nov. 5 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Written by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Matthew Lotschic, Laura Gragtmans, Kate Attwell and others. Directed by the ensemble, with Sunder Ganglani. Sound: en Goodwin. Lights: Masha Tsimring. Choreography by the female members of the cast plus Mary Laws and Sunder Ganglani. … Continue reading »

Ain’t Misbehavin’—The Fats Waller Musical Show Through Nov. 20 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. Conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. & Murray Horwitz. Created and originally directed by Richard Maltby Jr. Original choreography and musical staging by Arthur Faria. Musical adaptation, orchestration and arrangement by Luther Henderson. Vocal and musical concepts … Continue reading »

David Schramm works when he wants to. He’s just been offered a new play, but doesn’t like the idea of spending six weeks in the Midwest in the middle of winter. Playing Toby Belch in Twelfth Night in Connecticut in autumn—during storms which rage as wildly as the one which wrecks ships at the beginning … Continue reading »

At the Long Wharf tribute to Gordon Edelstein’s first decade of leadership last month, I ran into one of my favorite actors, David Margulies. (I also ran into one of my favorite playwrights, Donald Margulies, who is no relation to David and says “we get mistaken for each other all the time. He gets my … Continue reading »

They’ve announced the cast for the next Yale Rep show, Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself, playing Nov. 26 through Dec. 17. The production brings back the director/star team of Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp, who oversaw the Rep’s hit rendition of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters in February 2010. That previous show … Continue reading »

  For Darius De Haas the Westpoort Country Playhouse production of Twelfth Night is “my first public Shakespeare. I studied Shakespeare in school, but this is my first professional production.” The theater’s not far ahead of him. While director Mark Lamos is renowned for his Shakespeares—in New York, at numerous regional theaters and especially at … Continue reading »

1. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Writer/producer Aaron Sorkin is an unapologetic diehard who regularly drops Gilbert & Sullivan quotes into the dialogue he writes. He’s used “I’m never ever sick at sea as a punchline more than once.” For the opening episode of his unfortunately shortlived series about a live late-night comedy show, … Continue reading »