Previews and Coming Attractions . . .
The summer of 2025 has officially passed away. And that means it's a good time to catch up on what is happening in our local theaters from now to the end of 2025. Some theaters are finishing their 2024-25 season, others are commencing their 2025-26 season. But we'll take the shows in the order of their openings.
First and foremost: Goodspeed Musicals at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam is running a very popular revival of A Chorus Line, recently extended through November 2. The show, with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban with a Book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, is enjoying its 50th anniversary. That's right, it originally debuted in 1975, won almost everything it was nominated for at the 1976 Tonys (9 awards), and if you haven't seen it by now we really must wonder what you've been waiting for—if not the Goodspeed revival. Famous as an effort to dramatize the ups and downs of working in musicals, A Chorus Line thrives on the buzz that admirers of musical theater bring to the show. It's like watching a show take shape before your eyes, directed by TheaterWorks Artistic Director and CT Critics Circle award-winning musical director Rob Ruggiero. Next up, at the Terris Theatre in Cheshire, is The Great Emu War, October 3 to 26. A new musical with music and lyrics by Paul Hodge, and a book by Hodge and Cal Silberstein. Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, Hodge has created an "emusing" take on a little-known historical event: when a war was declared on troublesome emus in Australia. We're exhorted to "think of it as Cats, but with emus." I'm not sure I can quite imagine it, but I'm all for our feathered friends getting their shot at musical glory. Finally, Goodspeed ends 2025 with a return to the nostalgia-laden musical White Christmas, November 14 to December 28. The songs are by Irving Berlin, of course, including the familiar standard that shares the show's title. It's that old roasting chestnut about two army buddies/performers who turn on the charm, variously, with two performing sisters in an effort to save the snowless Vermont inn and ski resort run by their beloved Major General.
If you want more theater about theater, get over to the Legacy Theater in Stony Creek, Branford—if you can get tickets (it may already be sold out, even with two shows added)—where Noises Off runs to October 15. This lively farce by Michael Frayn entertains audiences with a behind-the-scenes approach to putting on a play, and the Legacy production features several familiar television actors, such as James Roday Rodriguez, of Psych, Kurt Fuller (Rob Lowe's second banana in Wayne's World, among many other roles), and Allison Muller, who played in Legacy's Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors in 2024. It's been five years of intimate shows at the Legacy—including sold out runs of Sweeney Todd and Noises Off—and to celebrate, the storied theater is hosting Take 5, a gala, on October 10 at the Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club in Branford. Cast members from Noises Off will make the date, and the inaugural Anchor Award will go to Ted and Tina Ellis, tireless supporters of Legacy since its inception. Attendance is limited to 160, so get in on it soon.
Long Wharf Theatre, now housed at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, opened its season September 5 with a production of Torera that runs to October 19. Staged in conjunction with The Sol Project, Latinx Playwrights Circle, and WP Theater, the production takes place at WP Theater, 2162 Broadway in NYC. Written by Monet Hurst-Mendoza and directed and choreographed by Tatiana Pandiani, the play explores with great visual poetry the ramifications that occur when the Mexican bullfighting tradition faces a challenge from a talented female would-be torera. Later in the month, Long Wharf's August Wilson Celebration Kick-Off Party, hosted by the New Haven Museum, takes place on October 25 at 2 pm. The celebration is the second in a series of special events—including free panels, workshops, public dialogues, and film screenings—organized as preludes to Long Wharf's staging of Wilson's Gem of the Ocean in spring 2026.
In West Hartford, Playhouse on Park opened its season last night, September 24, with the catchy crowd-pleaser Million Dollar Quartet which showcases, in a Book by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux, how four guys named Elvis, Carl, Johnny, and Jerry Lee entered rock'n'roll musical history at a little recording studio called Sun in Memphis, TN. The musically vigorous show, directed by Alessandro Viviano with music direction by Chris Coffey (who also plays Carl Perkins), runs through October 19. Next, Playhouse on Park offers an unusual choice for its seasonal show December 5 through December 21: All is Calm, The Christmas Truce of 1914 by Peter Rothstein is based on the true story of an impromptu singing of "Silent Night" in the area called "No Man's Land," separating the trenches of the warring forces in World War 1. A hope that even the most antagonistic forces can letup a little at Christmastime, directed by Sasha Brätt with musical direction by Benjamin Rauch. (For adults 40 and under, check out the Playhouse's deals for season tickets: "Access 40.")
Music Theater of CT in Norwalk kicks off its season this weekend with the ever-dynamic show Rent (Book, Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson), running September 26 through October 12, directed and choreographed by Chris McNiff with music direction by David Wolfson. MTC is the place to enjoy intimate takes on big musical shows, so that audiences get an unusual opportunity to feel themselves in the midst of the action. Rent, if you don't know, is a Tony and Pulitzer-winning play about bohemian creatives struggling to become professionals and deal with much stress, while rocking out, in the era of AIDS/HIV in NYC. Ladonna Burns, winner of the CT Critics Circle Award for her role in last season's Ghost, returns to MTC to play Joanne. Olivia Fenton, last season's Eileen in Moon Over Buffalo, also returns, among a cast of youthful talent. MTC's final show of 2025, November 7 through November 23, will be the madcap farce The Fox on the Fairway by Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo), conceived as "a tribute to the great English farces of the 1930s and 1940s," with a hint of the Marx Brothers, in a world of golf and "stuffy denizens of a private country club."
In Waterbury, Seven Angels opens this weekend with Lucky Stiff, September 26 through October 12, a "murder mystery musical," with Book & Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, Music by Stephen Flaherty, who you might recognize as the creative duo behind musicals like Ragtime, Seussical, Anastasia, and Once on This Island. What's this one about? Well, I'll just let Seven Angels' website explain: "The story revolves around an unassuming English shoe salesman who is forced to take the embalmed body of his recently murdered uncle on a vacation to Monte Carlo. Should he succeed in passing his uncle off as alive, Harry Witherspoon stands to inherit $6,000,000. If not, the money goes to the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn… or else his uncle’s gun-toting ex!" Then, November 14 through November 30, Seven Angels keeps the murdering spirit going with Art of Murder, winner of an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play. Written by Tony-Award-winner Joe DiPietro, the play concerns an eccentric painter in Connecticut who plans to kill his dealer, possibly with the aid of the painter's wife. Or?
The Sharon Playhouse in Sharon finishes their 2025 season, which began in the summer with productions of Annie and Sylvia, with Agatha Christie's venerable The Mousetrap (which I believe is always playing somewhere in the world), a classic story of murder and multiple suspects in a remote location during a snowstorm. Directed by Hunter Foster, who directed Rock of Ages at the Sharon in 2024, the play—clever and fast-paced—maintains a longstanding tradition in which no one who sees the play reveals "whodunit." September 26 through October 5
In October, the second wave of openings gets going with:
At the Ivoryton Playhouse in Ivoryton, Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help by Kate Forgette opens October 2 and runs through October 26. Set in 1973, this "female-centered play" treats the comedy and crisis that occurs when a nineteen-year-old, about to go off to college, attempts to explain "the birds and the bees" to her younger sister—within earshot of a shocked priest! Directed by Ivoryton's Artistic Director, Jacqueline Hubbard the play explores, in Hubbard's words, "those teenage 'end of the world' moments" that become the memories we treasure. Next comes holiday cheer in the form of Playhouse Holiday Jamboree, created by Katie Barton and Ben Hope, November 20 through December 21, in which six performers gather together to share seasonal songs, stories, jokes, and folk traditions.
TheaterWorks in Hartford opens its season with English by Sanaz Toosi, October 2 through November 2, in partnership with Long Wharf Theatre. Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Best Play, the critically acclaimed play, directed by Arya Shahi, is set in an English-language classroom in Iran in 2008, and looks at the humor and heartache experienced by adults trying to access new identities and opportunities through foreign-language acquisition. November 28 through December 23, TheaterWorks stages its popular, perennial send-up of the Christmas classics of our childhoods, Christmas on the Rocks, wherein a beleaguered bartender must cope with a series of guests in vignettes by five contributing playwrights: Judy Gold, Jenn Harris, Jeffrey Hatcher, Jacques Lamarre, and Edwin Sánchez. Rob Ruggiero directs.
Here in New Haven, the Yale Repertory Theatre is staging, October 3 through October 25, the world premiere of a play world-class author Zora Neale Hurston adapted in 1935 from an early short story. Spunk, directed by resident director Tamilla Woodward, choreographed by nicHi douglas, with new songs, arrangements, and music supervision by Nehemiah Luckett, shows the triumph of love in a context of musicianship, charisma, hoodoo and local power struggles. Then November 28 through December 20, the Rep stages what happens to be my favorite play by the towering nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Hedda Gabler, in a translation by Paul Walsh, offers an amazing drama of sardonic irony, flaring envy and jealousy, domestic dysfunction, thwarted ambitions and bad decisions. Directed by James Bundy whose latest effort, Edward Albee's celebrated Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof, won Outstanding Production of the 2022-23 season from the CT Critics Circle. Bundy, who this year concludes his lengthy tenure—since 2002—as the inspiring Artistic Director of the Rep and Dean of one of the best theater schools in the country, has had an amazing run: Yale Rep has produced four world-premiere plays that transferred to Broadway and earned two Tony Awards and 11 nominations; two other Yale Rep plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and ten plays and musicals have received the CT Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Production of the Year.
Connecticut Repertory Theatre at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, starts off its season with Qui Nguyen's Living Dead in Denmark, October 9 through October 19 in the Nafe Katter Theatre; with a cast comprised of UConn students, grads and undergrads, it's a story of zombie Shakespearean characters in an "action-adventure sequel to Hamlet" that should put you in a Halloween mood, eh Yorick? Then, November 13 through November 22, in the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre, As You Like It, a folk-pop musical adaptation by Shania Taub (Suffs), Music & Lyrics, and director/author Laurie Woolery of Shakespeare's beloved rom-com of that name set mostly in the forest of Arden, directed by Brandon Lamar Kelly of the Broadway Dance Center.
Meanwhile, in New Haven, Yale Cabaret, run entirely by students in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, continues its season, which amounts to a grueling stretch of at least 14 shows from September through April. This year the Co-Artistic Directors are Jasmine Brooks, third-year at DGSD in directing, and Karen Loewy Movilla, third-year at DGSD in Set Design (her set design can be seen at the Rep's Spunk), with Managing Director Sarah Suraiya Saifi (Theater Management). This week, the Cab announced the next three shows. Cab 3: Mouth/Full, October 9-October 11, written by Karen Loewy Movilla, a member of Latinx Playwrights Circle, and co-directed by Roberto Di Donato and Fabiola Andújar, which explores hunger in both metaphorical and visceral ways; Cab 4: [Title TBA Soon], October 23-October 25, written by Andrew Rincón (co-artistic director of Yale Summer Cabaret, 2024), co-directed by Juice Mackins and Max Sheldon, choreographed by Juice Mackins; Cab 5: Twink Death, November 20-November 22, written by Matthew Chong.
Hartford Stage in Hartford, the grande dame of Connecticut theater, starts its 62nd season with Rope, October 10 through November 2, Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of the Hitchcock cat-and-mouse thriller of the same name (1948), starring James Stewart, itself based on the 1929 play—known in the U.S. as Rope's End—by Patrick Hamilton, and derived from the infamous Loeb and Leopold murder case. Hartford Stage Artistic Director Melia Bensussen directs, having recently scored triumphs(4 CT Critics Circle awards) with Hatcher's adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, last season's opener, as well as her CT Critics Circle win as director of Romeo and Juliet last spring. From November 22 through December 28, Hartford Stage stages its wonderfully evocative, warmly flavored, and at times—just enough—unnerving adaptation of Charles Dickens' prized A Christmas Carol, cleverly adapted and directed by Michael Wilson with an ear to the 1951 film, still and ever the best version.
A.C.T. of Connecticut in Ridgefield opens its season October 18 through November 23 with a revamped version of Almost Famous, filmmaker Cameron Crowe's fond and immensely entertaining evocation of his days—in the 1970s—as a member of the rock music press. The film's screenplay won Crowe an Oscar, and the subsequent Broadway show was nominated for a Tony for its Best Original Score by Tom Kitt, Tony and Pulitzer-winning composer of Next to Normal. Ridgefield Artistic Director Daniel C. Levine directs and is working with Crowe, Kitt and Bryan Perri—music supervisor of the original Broadway run who returns to that post for the A.C.T. production—to "breathe new life into this rock-and-roll love letter." Levine calls this new, revised version "intimate, raw, and electric" and hopes to give audiences "the definitive version of Almost Famous."
The third-year directors in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale in New Haven are each given the opportunity to stage a play, drawing on the actors and technicians and resources of the School. Two of the offerings occur in fall semester, and a third in spring semester. First up is Les Liaisons Dangereuses, October 18 through October 24, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, directed by Destyne R. Miller, whose production of Jen Silverman's Witch was a memorable success in last year's Yale Cabaret season. Laclos's novel has been the basis of a number of films, with the most successful based on Hampton's play. The story explores a highly competitive world "where status is everything—and losing it is deadly." Next is Utopia, November 15 through November 21, by contemporary Russian playwright Mikhail Durnenkov, recently a visiting fellow at the University of Maryland, in a translation by Sasha Dugdale, and directed by Andreas Andreou, who directed Efthimis Filippou's enigmatic and wonderfully theatrical Apologiae 4&5 at the Yale Cabaret last season. Utopia, a family-run restaurant now closed due to the breakup of the family, has an opportunity to revive in the early days of post-Soviet Russia, thanks to new capitalist interest. But can a lost paradise be regained?
The time-honored and veteran venue, Westport Country Playhouse in Westport commences its 95th season with Oscar Wilde's comedy classic The Importance of Being Earnest, October 29 through November 15. Notable for its sumptuous staging of drawing-room comedy and free-form farces, Westport pairs well with Wilde who seemingly invented the socially abrasive one-liner, creating dialogue that sparkles and eviscerates in about equal measure. Melissa Rain Anderson, noted for directing lively entertainments from Dial M for Murder to The Wizard of Oz and The Play That Goes Wrong, as well as Shakespearean tragedies, will be at the helm. Then, December 13 through December 21, Artistic Director Mark Shanahan's contemporary holiday classic A Sherlock Carol returns—in its third year—to chart Sherlock Holmes' investigation into the mysterious demise of a certain reformed miser in Victorian England.