The Long Wharf Theatre has a tour of Smokey Joe’s Café coming July 10-28. Pretty active summer for the Long Wharf, which just hosted a tour of the McCourt Bros. two-hander A Couple of Blaguards (while the mainstage season was concluding with Clybourne Park), has their annual gala—anchored by a performance of Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show Dress Casual—on June 7, and is once again being used as a key stage in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, for the East Coast premiere of the new musical theater piece Stuck Elevator by New Haven-based playwright Aaron Jafferis and composer Byron Au Yong.

The Smokey Joe’s Café tour is produced by Supreme Talent International which seems to specialize in jazz, jive and gospel musicals. Currently on the company’s roster: Sophisticated Ladies, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, Five Guys Named Moe and this Lieber-Stoller revue, not to mention “Anomal—World’s Greatest Mentalist Ehud Segev,” the girl-group pastiche Broadway Dolls and various tribute acts, some of which (such as Bruce in the U.S.A.) have played at the Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport.

If you read the autobiography of Jerry Lieber (who died just a couple of years ago at the age of 78), Smokey Joe’s Café comes off a sort of validation for decades during which Lieber and his songwriting partner Mike Stoller sought to be taken seriously in legit theater circles. The men were of course revered as pioneers of rock & roll, having written “Hound Dog” and “Stand by Me” and hundreds of other hits. They’d kept up with pop trends admirably, shifting from roots-rock to the girl-group harmonies of the Shangri-Las and the morbid Peggy Lee hit “Is That All There Is?” But they’d had several disappointments in the theater realm, including a musical adaptation of Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz which was thwarted by a weak book.

Smokey Joe’s Café, an ensemble revue strung together from dozens of Lieber/Stoller hits, was a major international success. Though it’s not so different in format, it seems to have been much more influential than Ain’t Misbehavin’ in inspiring other pop “jukebox” shows. It’s become a community theater staple and it seems like there never hasn’t been a tour out there. With the deaths of many of the performers who made these songs famous, it’s nice to have a place where audiences can still seek out these tunes live.

Smokey Joe’s Café plays at the Long Wharf Theatre July 10-28. Tickets are $59. Performances are Wednesday through Sunday at 8 p.m. with 3 p.m. matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and extra evening shows at 8 p.m. Sunday July 14 and Tuesday July 16. 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. (203) 787-4282, https://www.longwharf.org

Kathleen Turner in the new version of The Killing of Sister George, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the 1964 script by Frank Marcus. Through Dec. 23 at the Long Wharf Theatre.

The Killing of Sister George ends this week at the Long Wharf Theatre. It’s a noble attempt to reinvigorate and restage a well-known, if misunderstood comedy from the turbulent 1960s London theater era. The play, by a British playwright of German/Jewish parentage known for his stageworthy culture-hopping adaptations of works by Schnitzler, Molnar, Hauptmann and Kaiser, has now itself been adapted for new audiences. The Killing of Sister, about a self-involved actress, her submissive young flatmate/lover and her alternately empathetic and no-nonsense employer, retains its 1960s sensibilities but creates its own pace and mood, geared to the still-gravelly voice and aggression of this production’s star and director Kathleen Turner

But Turner’s not the only one twisting the dials on this not-as-dark-as-you-think comedy’s recalibrator.

While the show was still in previews, I had a phone interview with Jeffrey Hatcher, whom Turner had enlisted to revise Frank Marcus’ original script. I’ve long admired Hatcher for his uncanny theatrical instincts. Whether with his original plays or with his many adaptations of classic works from other media, Jeffrey Hatcher finds intriguing new structures and tones in his projects that make them naturally playable. His works are embraced by college theaters (I fondly recall a Yale Summer Cabaret production of his three-actor Turn of the Screw), mainstream community theaters (he did the stage version of Tuesday With Morrie), and especially regional theaters. When I ask him which theaters he can comfortably call up and offer new projects to, he reels off half a dozen without pause—the Guthrie, Arizona Theatre Company, Cincinatti Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Milwaukee Rep and several others.

A Hatcher script was done at Long Wharf just a couple of seasons ago; the framing scenes he provided for the biomusical Ella, strengthening a production which had begun at Hartford’s TheaterWorks with a different script but a similar set of Ella Fitzgerald song standards. Hatcher downplays his Ella efforts as “expectations which I hope were met,” and says it was difficult to build a convincing first-person drama around “somebody who was so famously reticent.”

The guy who got Jeffrey Hatcher to start adapting works of other writers was none other than Greg Leaming, the former Literary Manager at Hartford Stage and the Director of Artistic Programming at the Long Wharf Theater, who leapt into the breech as the Long Wharf’s Acting Artistic Director for a season when Doug Hughes abruptly left in 2001.

“It was Turn of the Screw,” Hatcher says. “I hadn’t done adaptations before, and it was not a straight-up adaptation.” He’s since done many, none of them straight-up, including a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in which four members of the six-person cast gets a chance to be Hyde, stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, Herman Melville’s novel Pierre and reworkings of plays by Shaw, Goldoni and Anouilh.

The new version of The Killing of Sister George was done with the blessing of the late Frank Marcus’ family and estate. Unlike, say, Grease or The Graduate, this is not a stage revision beholden to a well-liked film adaptation of the source material. The 1968 movie version of The Killing of Sister George is notorious for its wrongheaded  emphasis on swinging London environments and sexual themes which in Marcus’ play are more atmospheric and not to overwhelm the plot and characters. But the play itself had developed its own problems. “There was a London revival,” Hatcher explains, “and it didn’t do well.” That was just in 2011, at the Arts Theatre in the West End, starring Meera Syal and directed by Iqbal Khan. “It has had American revivals, but they’ve tended to be further off the beaten track. Nothing with the status of Long Wharf, or with New York aspirations.

“I’d never seen it onstage. I read it a long time ago—I have that old paperback copy with the red lipstick on the cover. The movie is famously disliked by everyone—the performances are all outsized, except Coral Browne. You can’t imagine Beryl Reid playing it that way onstage.”

Hatcher joined this attempt to realign the play after director/star Kathleen Turner had already held a reading of it and realized its shortcomings. “I thought the original energy came from the ‘Oh, my god, they’re lesbians’ element,” Hatcher ruminates. “It struck me that it might need a little more plot. There wasn’t not any shock value you could use to gin it up anymore.

To that end, the adapter says, “we ramped up the radio element.” The plot of  Killing of Sister George, in which a beloved actress is abruptly kicked off a popular radio show, relates to a real-life broadcast scandal when the BBC did away with a key character, Grace Archer, on its popular soap opera The Archers, reportedly to jack up ratings and withstand competition from the just-launching ITV network. The situation by which Sister George is “killed” in The Killing of Sister George is somewhat different, and more entertaining: the actress playing the good-hearted character in the show-within-a-play, June, is a foul-mouthed loose cannon and a mountain of insecurities, whose public behavior has earned her disciplinary action from an executive at Broadcasting House, the BBC Radio headquarters. Hatcher compares it to Maclean Stevenson leaving M*A*S*H and the producers having his character die in a helicopter crash to make clear that he was never being invited back on the show, or Charlie Sheen’s imbroglio with Two and a Half Men.

Hatcher feels that Frank Marcus’ original script telegraphed the play’s ending way in advance, so his version maintains some suspense. Ultimately, he feels he had a comfortable amount of leeway in revising The Killing of Sister George because while the title is familiar enough to provoke interest, it’s really “something the audience kind of thinks they know.” But they don’t know it so well that they’ll notice Hatcher’s hand in it. He likens it to an adaptation he did of  The Inspector General, where he knows which are his jokes and which are Gogol’s, but most viewers won’t.

The success of The Killing of Sister at Long Wharf ultimately rises or falls due to the work of its director/star Kathleen Turner, who clearly sees the role of June/George as a grand stage character around which the rest of the show revolves. But even if it’s about explosions and chewed scenery, somebody’s got to be minding the details, and you’re in good hands if that person is Jeffrey Hatcher.

The Killing of Sister George continues at the Long Wharf Theatre through December 23. 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, http://www.longwharf.org/

But there are other directorial prophesies to ponder. For instance, there are only six actors in Ting’s version, versus more than 20 in the most traditional stagings of Shakespeare’s.

For a few answers (and without wanting to indulge in any egregious spoilers), I had coffee at Book Trader with Barret O’Brien. He’s the only member of the cast who has two distinct characters—MacDuff and Banquo. The other players take multiple parts—porter, witches, whatever—and roll them into a single seamless character. The most consistent character is Macbeth, played by McKinley Belcher III, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California MFA Acting program whose credits include Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird at Bay Street Theatre and, notably, Dale Jackson in an another play about Vietnam vets, Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag (at Shadowland Theatre in the Catskills).

Barret O'Brien (center, in red) as Dionysus bathing Pentheus in wine and honey in Michael Donahue's 2007 Yale Summer Cabaret production of Euripides' The Bacchae. Photo by Sarah Scranton.

I was a fan of O’Brien’s work throughout his time at the Yale School of Drama, between 2007 and 2009. So, apparently, was Eric Ting. “I think he had seen me in The Bacchae,” the actor recalls. O’Brien played Dionysus in Michael Donahue’s Yale Summer Cabaret production of the Euripides tragedy, and later reteamed with Donahue to play the title role in Ibsen’s epic Peer Gynt. “We met socially after he’d seen my work,” O’Brien says. “We started talking about working together sometime. When the workshop for this came along, he asked me.”

Since he last spent time in New Haven, O’Brien has co-starred in a national tour of Ken Ludwig’s crossdressing farce Leading Ladies (produced by Montana Rep), had one of his own plays (Eating Round the Bruise) produced by the Annex Theatre in Seattle, and spent serious time writing his first novel. He also married his YSD classmate Erica Sullivan, known to Long Wharf subscribers as the title canine in Eric Ting’s production of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, and to Yale Rep subscribers as Hester in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, directed by James Bundy. The couple has a nine-month-old daughter. Following O’Brien’s Long Wharf stint, Sullivan is scheduled to play Rosalind in As You Like It for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Barret O'Brien (in yellow gown) as Jack in the Montana Rep tour of Ken Ludwig's The Leading Ladies.

Macbeth 1969 is the first Shakespeare play that Barret O’Brien has done since his Yale days, where verse drama takes up an entire year of the acting program.

There were a lot of logistics to work out in paring down Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a modern framework and such a small cast. “It’s like Eric took the all the text and cut and pasted it like a collage. It’s so much more complicated, getting the impressions straight in our minds,” O’Brien says. Ting, he explains, “is still changing things now, but the workshops were so major, and this time we just have the month of rehearsals. We’re able to give our input, but not like in the workshops. The script is really in a solid place. It’s like, let’s make the text we have work now.”

The actors have responded differently, and complementarily, to the demands of the adaptation. “Shirine [Babb, who assumes Lady Macbeth] has a strong classical background. She’s the ‘line guard’—it’s good to have someone in the room who’s a purist, who’s true to the text.”

Then there’s question of whether the Shakespeare plot, involving murders, witchcraft, disturbing visions and complex battle strategies, are happening in the reality of this production’s snowed-in hospital patients and nurses, or whether they’re perchance dreams.

“From my vantage point,” O’Brien says of his characters, “the things that are occurring are occurring. It’s a very realist design. It’s like a Middle American hospital in lockdown has appeared over there on Sargent Drive. There’s no musical score.”

“Shakespeare wrote this play before there were words like ‘shellshocked,’ but he understood what that meant. We’re not shying away from blood onstage. There are hints of a horror movie in this—people trapped in a hospital, snowed in, with a murder happening. It’s entertaining, not knowing what’s going to happen.”

At the same time, O’Brien insists the production is being very careful to uphold a heroic image of the American war veteran and not cheapen or stereotype it for the sake of fictional drama. “Not having served myself,” O’Brien says, “I feel a responsibility to not be glib. Theater can be glorious fun to do. To take on big topics can be very important, but also dangerous. It would be easier for us to just do the play Macbeth and set it vaguely in the ‘60s.”

There is a real-life veteran elsewhere in the cast—George Kulp, who’s playing the King role from Shakespeare’s play, rethought here as a prominent politician.

One of O’Brien’s roles, Banquo, is portrayed as a war veteran, as is his fellow soldier Macbeth. In Macbeth 1969, Banquo has “served in a firefight,” O’Brien says. “He’s suffered burns. He’s as deeply scarred physically as Macbeth is emotionally.” Macduff on the other hand, is portrayed as “not military at all. He’s a draft dodger.”

“This is a war play,” the actor concludes, “but we are trying to avoid making a statement about the war itself. If we’re making any statement, it’s that with war there are not innocents. We’re trying to reflect what Shakespeare wrote about veterans coming back from the war, and bring those elements to the forefront.”

Macbeth 1969 runs Jan. 18 through Feb. 12 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven.

Brian Dennehy as Krapp, as he appeared the last time he played Krapp's Last Tape, at the Goodman Theater in Chicago three years ago. Photo by Richard Hein.

Long Wharf subscribers, don’t get complacent. Krapp’s Last Tape isn’t part of the regular subscription season. Subscribers do get special offers and discounts, but don’t just expect the tix to turn up in the mail. For the general public, all seats for this multimedia minimalist classic are 70 bucks.

Donald Margulies (standing, left) toasts Gordon Edelstein (seated, right, in black jacket) at a tribute to the Long Wharf artistic director, held on the theater mainstage Oct. 3. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Long Wharf celebrated the glorious middle last Monday night. Tricks in My Pocket … Things Up My Sleeve was a catered feast in honor of Gordon Edelstein’s first decade as the theater’s artistic director. This wasn’t a climax, some “farewell” or “new beginnings” affair. Honored speaker after honored speaker wished Edelstein many more years in his current position. He himself acted as if he had no desire to leave Long Wharf for at least another decade, if not a century. Paula Vogel was the first to say it, and the sentiment was echoed many times during the night: “Here’s to the next ten years.”
This wasn’t an anticlimax, or the cliffhanger ending of a second act. It comes at a peak time in Edelstein’s directing career, with his acclaimed production of Glass Menagerie last year and his continued championing of new works by both established writers (Athol Fugard) and up and comers (the new musical February House this season).Playwright Donald Margulies, whose Shipwrecked and Two Days have been staged at Long Wharf during Edelstein’s reign, gave a toast, suggesting that the director “reached a pinnacle with Glass Menagerie,” that it represented “everything you’ve practiced and preached all these years.”
Nor was it a prologue–Edelstein was Associate Artistic Director under the Long Wharf’ s longest serving artistic director, Arvin Brown, for several years in the 1980s and early ’90s. Brown sent a video greeting for Monday’s party, in which he spoke of his pleasure at seeing Edelstein’s recent production of The Glass Menagerie at L.A’s Mark Taper Forum.
The cast of Glass Menagerie–the Long Wharf cast of Judith Ivey, Keira Keeley and Patch Darragh replete with the Gentleman Caller who couldn’t make the New York transfer with them, Josh Charles (the SportsNight star is now back on TV in The Good Wife)–did a fourfold impersonation of Edelstein laughing, eating and directing.
Film clips from those who couldn’t attend in person included some other impressionists, notably Dael Orlandersmith.
Others were packing anecdotes. Will Ginsberg, president of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, revealed he’s known Edelstein since they were teenagers, working as counselors at the same summer camp in 1972; he recalled eating spaghetti with salad dressing in the Edelstein kitchen, and recalled a frantic road trip they took together while leaving out juicy details. “Gordon was hip before being hip was hip,” Ginsberg said, then added “Gordon is fundamentally, unalterably theatrical.”
Paula Vogel had both a recent and a vintage tale to tell–how Edelstein sent her a dirty martini in the bar at the study hotel just the other night, yelling the bartender “maybe I’ll get lucky”; and how, when they were both starving artists in new York city, Vogel and her then girlfriend designated Edelstein “am honorary lesbian” so that he might be granted a sleeping spot on the small bed in their apartment after they’d been up all night talking.
Omar Metwally, who co-starred in the Long Wharf premiere of Sixteeen Wounded, Eliam Kraiem’s bakeshop drama of Israeli/Palestinean relations, recalled how protective he felt of his character, to the point where he went to complain to Edelstein about how a promotional mailing misrepresented the play. Edelstein agreed, and scrapped the mailing, even though thousands of the cards had already been printed. At the same time, Metwally’s even-handed tribute had this punchline, a quote from Edelstein: “Omar—I love you. But I’m not putting Chomsky in the lobby.”
Oskar Eustis, now of course the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, but who has known Edelstein for decades and was doing co-productions with him when Eustis was running Trinity Rep in Providence, declared that “Gordon’s an amazing artistic director.” More than that, Eustis recalled a trip to Alaska with Edelstein, when neither men were running theaters and had jointly taken a short-term teaching gig in Juneau. The experience, Eustis said, took place during a time of indecision and depression for him. He credited Edelstein’s positive frame of mind as being “not just career-restorative but life-restorative.”

The Public Theater's Oskar Eustis with Obie-winning actress Karen Kandel at the Edelstein tribute. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Keira Keeley (who played Laura in the Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf) attempting the role of Amanda while the production's actual Amanda, Judith Ivey, plays Tom. The erstwhile Tom, Patch Darragh, looks on, being Laura. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Josh Charles and the cast of Glass Menagerie get serious for a moment. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Gordon Edelstein, flanked by James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama, and Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Debra Walton and Eugene Barry-Hill as they appeared in Ain't Misbehavin' two years ago at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. They and two of their castmates from that production will be in a new production at the Long Wharf next months that attempts to bring the show back to its smaller-venue roots. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The cast and creative team of the impending Long Wharf Theatre production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Oct. 26-Nov. 20) has been announced, and every member has been involved in some previous production of the same show.

Which is appropriate, since this isn’t one of those Long Wharf musicals which seeks to reinterpret large-cast classics for a more intimate stage, openly questioning traditional takes on the material.

Nope, in the case of Ain’t Misbehavin’, it’s the show that got bigger.This production is a sort of regional retrofitting, restoring the five-person, 31-song revue of Fats Waller songs to the Off Broadway scale in which it began—not to mention the Harlem nightclub dimensions of Waller’s own career.

Richard Maltby, who co-conceived (with Murray Horwitz) and directed Ain’t Misbehavin’s first production over 30 years ago, is reclaiming the director responsibilities, joined by the show’s original choreography/musical stager Arthur Faria (who’s directed numerous productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ himself) and original set designer John Lee Beatty (who did a bunch of sets for the Long Wharf in the 1980s and ‘90s, but nothing lately).

The music director for this production, Philip Hall, has done eight previous Ain’t Misbehavin’s. Costume designer Gail Baldoni worked on the show’s 30^th anniversary tour and its current European tour. Lighting designer Pat Collins lit Ain’t Misbehavin’ on Broadway and in London. Only stage manager Bonnie Brady appears to be newbie.

As for the cast, Eugene Barry-Hill (in the “Andre” role, the guy who gets to croon pot songs like “Viper’s Drag” and “Reefer”), Doug Eskew (“Ken,” the Waller manqué who does “Honeysuckle Rose” in the master’s playful style), Cynthia Thomas (“Armelia,” of “Squeeze Me” fame) and Deb Walton (“Charmayne,” who does “Yacht Club Swing”) all appeared in a 30^th anniversary Los Angeles production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in 2009. Kecia Lewis-Evans (Nell, who establishes herself right away in the opening medley of Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad, Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness and the show’s title song) was the standby for Nell Carter (the best-known veteran of the show) in the 1989 Broadway revival, and has done the show in L.A. in many regional theaters, including the Hartford Stage’s SummerStage production in 2005. Cynthia Thomas, who grew up in New Haven (an ECA grad!) and Bethany, was part of the 1995 Ain’t Misbehavin’ revival which was reformatted to star The Pointer Sisters.

Given Ain’t Misbehavin’’s extraordinary decades-long success, with non-stop regional productions and regular New York revivals, it’s probably harder to find performers who HAVEN’T been in it than those who have.

Charmingly, the enduring stage names of the characters in the show are a tribute to Ain’t Misbehavin’’s original Broadway cast: Andre DeShields, Ken Page, Nell Carter, Armelia McQueen and Charlayne Woodard. In that spirit, music director Philip Hall ought to be dubbed “Luther” in honor of the Ain’t Misbehavin’ original pianiast/arranger, Luther Henderson.

The Long Wharf production, in any case, is about scale. I asked Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein about it just last week.

“One thing you can point to during my time here is the consistent production of great American musicals. I love musicals. Each time we’ve done one, we’ve retooled them for our theater. Richard Maltby heard I was tooling around with it, and he called me.” Maltby wanted to know if Edelstein was to play around with the staging and arrangements of the show, the way the Long Wharf had with The Fantasticks, Guys and Dolls and two co-productions with Chicago’s Court Theatre, Man of La Mancha and Carousel. “I know him,” Edelstein says of Maltby, “and we talked about it. Then he called me back and says, “If you want, I’ll do it for you. Even more fun!”

Edelstein saw Ain’t Misbehavin’ pre-Broadway, when it was a club-sized cabaret show at Manhattan Theatre Club. The Long Wharf’s goal is to restore it to that dimension. It will indeed to be fun to see if the show’s creators remember how.

Ciaran O'Reilly in the Irish Repertory Theatre production of Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney, at the Long Wharf Theatre through Oct. 16. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The first show of the Long Wharf’s 2011-12 season was the last one chosen for it. Molly Sweeney wasn’t mentioned at the theater’s season-announcement event in May. Long Wharf’s artistic director Gordon Edelstein explains that while he was looking for something economical, with a small cast, to fill the remaining mainstage slot on the sched, “I can’t allow anything on my stage that I don’t believe in. I’m so sick of a lot of these one-man shows. It can be hard to find something I really believe in.”

The opportunity to bring in the Irish Repertory Theatre production of Molly Sweeney—essentially three monologues which add up to one engrossing story about a blind woman who reluctantly regains her sight—answered his prayers. “I love this play,” Edelstein says. “I’ve seen it three or four times over the years. I’m dazzled by this production.”

The deal was just finalized a couple of months ago, but moving the production was no trouble at all, says Ciaran O’Reilly, co-founder of the 23-year-old New York-based IRT company. The well-reviewed New York run just closed a few months ago. The entire cast—O’Reilly, Jonathan Hogan and Simone Kirby—were available for a remount, as was director Charlotte Moore (who happens to be married to O’Reilly). “It’s the exact same cast, the same design. The set is basically three different types of windows,” O’Reilly said in a ‘phone interview Sept. 10. We arrived in New Haven, went to the theater and did a run-through. It was one of the quickest techs in the history of Long Wharf, over in about three hours.”

Molly Sweeney began previews last Wednesday and has its press opening Sept. 21. (Expect a review on this site by the weekend.) It runs at the Long Wharf through Oct. 16.

Both the Irish Repertory Theatre and Molly Sweeney’s author, Brian Friel, have strong prior Long Wharf connections. Charlotte Moore acted in several Long Wharf productions in the 1970s and ‘80s, including the premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, during the peak of the Arvin Brown regime. Towards the end of his tenure as artistic director, in 1994, Brown—who’d presented other Friel works over the years, such as the playwright’s adaptation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons—brought over an acclaimed British production of Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer, a play which had been overlooked and underappreciated when first written and staged in the late 1970s. In 2001, the Long Wharf hosted the Dublin-based Abbey Theatre production of Friel’s Translations as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.  Quinnipiac University’s Theater for Community program, which uses Long Wharf stages for its student productions, also did Translations there just last year.

O’Reilly says that the Irish Repertory Theatre is regularly in touch with Friel; “He’s interested in who all is doing what, and sends notes and cards.” O’Reilly says the playwright is “very happy we were coming to Long Wharf. He has great memories of his times there.”

Friel’s work runs the theatrical gamut from intimate monologues to large-ensemble literary adaptations. His biggest international hit, 1990’s Dancing at Lughnasa, has a cast of eight. Molly Sweeney’s modest trio of performers is in line structurally and stylistically with Faith Healer. “It’s a very simple story, the forerunner of Irish monologue plays,” Ciaran O’Reilly opines. “He was fascinated by the subject matter. He’d read this Oliver Sacks essay, “To See or Not to See,” and it appealed to his searching mind.” O’Reilly too has a special interest in Molly Sweeney’s tale: “My brother John is legally blind. He has severe glaucoma and has had three cornea implants.” The actor is aware of how people who are not blind can behave towards those who are. “My character is trying to make [Molly Sweeney] ‘whole,’ which I mean with big quotation marks. But blindness is not the impediment people see it as.”

Since Molly Sweeney was written in 1994, there’ve been medical advances in how vision can be restored. The script doesn’t demand a “period” production and doesn’t come off at all dated, O’Reilly says. “There are only one or two give-aways: there’s talking of ‘playing tapes,’ as in not CDs, or records for that matter; and someone says ‘He sent me a couple of pounds’—not Euros or other currency.”

Relearning the dialogue was easy, since the company had already done the hard work of mastering the emphases and repetitions which distinguish Friel’s subtly complex wordplay. “I can feel the rhythms,” O’Reilly says. “I’m from County Cavan, which is not far from Donegal,” where Friel lives. “For me with Friel, it always seems to come easily off the tongue.”

While preparing to bring Molly Sweeney to Long Wharf, the Irish Repertory Theatre was in the process of doing something new at their New York space—presenting a production they didn’t originate themselves—and a dance show at that. Noctu, an Eriu Dance Company production conceived and directed by Breandan de Gallai, plays at the IRT’s West 22^nd St. homebase through Oct. 2. Irish Repertory Theatre offerings in the past have ranged from Dylan Thomas to Eugene O’Neill to Frank McGuinness to George Bernard Shaw to Charles Nelson Reilly to Oscar Wilde—all of whom have Irish blood. When the award-winning director/designer Tony Walton (himself English-born) suggested the IRT do a Noel Coward play, After the Ball, in 2005, the company initially balked, until Walton sent them a genealogical chart demonstrating, O’Reilly marvels, “that Noel Coward was more Irish than he was English!”

After the newfangled Noctu stepdances back to the old country, the Irish Repertory Theaatre is doing another Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, which like Molly Sweeney will have Charlotte Moore directing and Ciaran O’Reilly in the cast.

Ciaran O’Reilly regularly directs IRT shows himself, but not when he’s acting in them. “I would never direct anything I’m in. It’s like that saying about the lawyer who represents himself having a fool for a client.” That’s the sort of self-awareness you need to be able to play some of Brian Friel’s self-absorbed, coercive characters—and not become them.

The entire cast of Molly Sweeney at the Long Wharf: Jonathan Hogan, Simone Kirby and Ciaran O'Reilly. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Brian Kennedy looking like Krapp at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago three years ago. The Jennifer Tarver-directed production of Krapp's Last Tape brings Dennehy back to the Long Wharf Theatre this fall.

Brian Dennehy’s coming back to Long Wharf Nov. 29-Dec. 18 to finish what he started a few years ago.
In 2008, Dennehy and Joe Grifasi brought their bravura version of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie to Long Wharf Stage II. It’s an established production which they’d brought to several other theaters before Long Wharf (which, coincidentally, had produced a Hughie starring Al Pacino and Paul Benedict in the 1990s).
But that very year, Dennehy had begun exploring Hughie in the context of a later one-act play by an Irish playwright: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Dennehy did the shows as a double bill at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in June of ’08 and did them together again at the Goodman Theater in 2010.
It was hope, nay expected, that Dennehy would do both Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape at Long Wharf three years ago. Instead we got Hughie, which turned out to be quite a full evening in itself given Robert Falls’ stage-spanning direction and Eugene Lee’s layered, detailed, stairs-to-nowhere set design.
Now, at long last, New Haven’s getting Krapp’s Last Tape. The play (written for one man and a reel-to-reel tape machine) has been around for over half a century, beloved by small theaters, fringe theaters and college theater groups. Dennehy apparently hasn’t performed it since those Ontario and Chicago double-bills, so this may be the first time his Krapp has stood on its own.
Even when they were done together, Dennehy enlisted different directors for the O’Neill and Beckett plays. Krapp’s Last Tape is directed by Jennifer Tarver, known for her work with provocative modern playwrights such as George Walker and Will Eno, as well as lots of operas.

One final performance, 7 p.m. Aug. 27 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with the same troupe’s “Shake-It-Up Shakespeare” musical adaptation of Hamlet (7 p.m. Aug. 26).

Having seen this same Summer Youth Theatre ensemble’s rock theater rendition of Hamlet the previous night, I hied back to Long Wharf Stage II Thursday to see how they fared with an original piece (co-written by director Annie DiMartino, music director Carol Taubl and five of Taubl’s children). The stage set-up is identical—a live band at the back of the stage, a useful high platform and several lower platforms on a floor-level playing area. All the performers are high-school aged. All sing, several dance, and some join the band for the lusher string-laden songs.

Thematically, Threads of a Spider Web is a downer—more so than the group’s Hamlet, in the way that it dwells on the emotional after-effects of unthinkable family tragedies more. The songs, many monologues and much of the plot is concerned with loss and how to cope with it. As with Hamlet, the teen cast members play two generations of characters, though this time the ranks are enlivened with a young boy who plays an ill-fated five-year-old.

Where the SYT’s Hamlet let Shakespeare’s dialogue flow directly into lyrics by Queen, Eveanescence and Leonard Cohen, this show lets recitations of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other famous poems prepare you for affirmative original soft-rock ballads. There’s less sonic variety than in the Hamlet, but the consistency of tone works for a show with such heavy themes. Staging-wise, Threads of a Spider Web is stylized down to the style of eyeglasses (heavy black frames) which several of the actors wear. It’s casualness and youthfulness is carefully calculated.

There are tragic circumstances involving two of the characters in particular, but all suffer in various ways. While the talk of death and heartbreak will be harrowing for some, the issues which are most relatable to audiences the same age as the teenage cast—worrying about being popular, being tormented by siblings, moving too fast into a longterm relationship—are tastefully and instructively handled. The often beautiful, neatly harmonized musical score underscores the central themes of perseverance and acceptance. The point of trusting one’s inner spirit is driven home not just through poetic muses such as Coleridge, Emily Dickson, William Wordsworth but through other spiritual muses who guide the central mortal characters through their disputes and confusions. Ultimately there are twice as many of these angel characters as there are living ones. The show gets rather crowded with all that spiritual guidance.

Given the preponderance of death and depression, Thursday’s audience was eager to lighten up when allowed, and James Taubl received big laughs for this pop-and-lock dance moves as the muse of “Matt,” played by James’ real-life twin Jeremiah. I found Anthony Rockford, an impressive Gravedigger in the Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet, to be an equally warm, upbeat and measured voice in Threads (the guy honestly interacts with whoever else is onstage), though he has considerably less to do than the main characters and their respective muses and/or mentors.

Threads of a Spider Web, a work in progress just getting on its feet before audiences, still shows the sort of unnecessary repetitions and overstatements which mark a lot of new work. What’s notable is the confidence and aplomb of the young cast, who flit through this dour narrative gently and knowingly, aware of its pitfalls. There are some gorgeous singing voices to be heard here, and some charming performances all around. It’s all rather Rent-like, without the Bohemianism. A key lyric for the grieving: “Today is Yesterday Tomorrow.”

The curtain call of the first performance of Summer Youth Theatre's "Shake-It-Up Shakespeare" adaptation of Hamlet, at Long Wharf Stage II. Snapped furtively on my iPhone.

Final performance 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 26 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org. Playing in repertory with Threads of a Spider Web (7 p.m. Aug. 25 & 27).

Strangely, this is not the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” performed live in its entirety by high school students as part of a summer theater program in Long Wharf’s Stage II space. The last time was over 15 years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

On the other hand, it’s the first time I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” done by the Players in Hamlet, rewritten to fuel the plot thus:
Mama, I’ve just killed a man
Poured some poison in his head…

And I can categorically state that I’ve never before heard the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father intone “I Used to Rule the World” a la Coldplay. That same band’s “42” is also sung, along with a couple songs each by Evanescence and Death Cab for Cutie, the June Carter Cash/Merle Kilgore classic “Ring of Fire,” The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (delivered here by the young women playing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), the Jack’s Mannequin dirge “Dark Blue” (its sea imagery underscoring Hamlet’s fraught ship voyage to England) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which here provides a play-ending soliloquoy for Horatio).

Oh, and the stomps and claps of another Queen song (the band, I mean, not Gertrude), “We Will Rock You,” punctuate the culminating duel of Hamlet and Laertes , who snarl the “Buddy, you’re a…” lyrics while violently stabbing at each other with violin and cello bows.

I don’t mean to make The Long Wharf Theatre’s Summer Youth Theatre Series production of Hamlet sound campy or forced. The show’s played straight and somber, shadowy and sincere. The teen actors show considerable talent. What’s most impressive is how fluidly this rock-theater rendition of Hamlet plays.

Impressive, though not exactly a surprise. There’s a rich tradition of classics being studded with modern music, dating back to at least the 1960s, though I’m used to it being more of a college phenomenon than a high school one. At Harvard University in the 1980s alone, there was Bill Rauch’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (which brought in country & western songs along with Rodgers & Hammerstein) in 1984 and Alek Keshishian’s Wuthering Heights (subtitled “A Pop Myth” and infused with songs by Madonna, Kate Bush, Sting and others) in 1986.

The Summer Youth Theatre’s Hamlet features complete musical theater performances, integrated into the Shakespeare text with the accompaniment of an onstage band of keyboards, percussion, electric bass and a hard-working string section. Several of the actors double as musicians.

Of the 18 kids in the cast, five were in a similarly styled Shake-It-Up Shakespeare production of Taming of the Shrew last year. Three of those five—Jack, James and Jeremiah Taubl—are offspring of the Summer Youth Theatre’s musical director, Carol Taubl. This year they’re joined by their older brother Jack, so that various Taubls handle the roles Laertes, Horatio and both Hamlets (prince and ghostly dad),. Whatever those casting decisions may lack in, say, variety (those Taubl boys all look frighteningly alike; two of them are twins) may be gained back in the sheer delight the brothers seem to have in pummeling each other in the fight scenes.

There’s the usual youth-theater complication of teens playing the parents of other teens. The universal code of how older men are supposed to look—dour expressions and business suits—is applied for Claudius (Erik Van Eck) and the Ghost (Jack Taubl). As the dead characters in the play mount up, they all go sit underneath the high platform which serves as Elsinore’s tower. To older viewers like myself, the sight of nine teens brooding in a corner resembles a detention room scenario, or perhaps the “jail” in a game of Kick the Can.

But strong examples of creative problem-solving throughout this show outweigh such understandable and unavoidable obstacles as teens happening to look their age. Mostly, what happens when you strip down the stage to black-box essentials, stick a musical ensemble at the back of it, and insert pop songs into the soliloquoies and swordfights, is that the key moments of the play are cleanly delineated and plainly pronounced. The result is simply good scenework, an honest and brisk interactions between focused actors handling the Shakespearean scansion remarkably well.

Hamlet premiered last night, and has its second and final performance Friday, Aug. 26 at 7 p.m. A whole other Summer Youth Theatre series show, Threads of a Spider Web, opens tonight (Thursday) at 7 p.m. and has its second performance Saturday. Threads utilizes the same cast, stage set-up and theater/music mix as Hamlet, this time in service of a compendium of poems by Shakespeare, Dickenson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, informing a narrative about a family coping with the loss of loved ones in a car crash.

Annie DiMartino who adapted Hamlet, created Threads of a Spider Web and directed both shows, explained to me in a phone interview last month that the Summer Youth Theatre Series is “not a class. There’s no tuition. The kids really do audition.” There’ve been 15 hours of rehearsal a week since mid-July.

DiMartino incorporated modern pop music into the plays so as to give the young actors a quick handle on their characters’ motivations, and to further their input by having more mutural reference points. “They’d say ‘Oh, I love that song,’ and explore the connections. Like last year, when we piloted this project, and this year, doing two shows, I’m just awed.”

Despite consistent themes of death and despair, DiMartino considers both showsto be “totally appropriate for a youth ensemble. In cutting Hamlet (which still runs two and a half hours, what with all those songs in there), she says she aimed to “cut out the political commentary, and made it about family: Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet is very dark, with the ghost, revenge, death. Threads of a Spider Web is more hopeful. It’s a nice balance for the cast.”

A Bohemian rhapsody, if you will.