The fall theater season unofficially kicks off this week in Connecticut with big openings at The Bushnell, TheaterWorks Hartford, Yale Repertory Theatre and Goodspeed’s Terris Theatre.
Those four institutions provide an extraordinary dramatic range, but there is a thread that runs through them all: Change. In some, characters age and grow and change. In others, changes behind the scenes have turned established scripts into refreshing new productions or brought pieces from rehearsal rooms or small readings to full-blown world premiere productions. Still others exhibit the changes wrought from adapting a story from one medium into another.
There are shows that have been adapted from books or movies. There are classic plays that have been reworked, revived and in one spectacular case staged for the first time despite the script being 90 years old and written by one of the most famous Black authors of the 20th century.
Stay tuned in coming weeks for Hartford Stage’s season opener “Rope,” Oct. 10 through Nov. 2, the one-person “Where We Stand” from HartBeat Ensemble, Oct. 9-16 at Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center, a regional reworking of Broadway’s “Almost Famous,” Oct. 18 through Nov. 23 at ACT of CT in Ridgefield and Victorian comedy classic “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oct. 28 through Nov. 15 at Westport Country Playhouse.
The Long Wharf Theatre opened its 2025-26 season last week with a production of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s “Torera” that is playing only at the WP Theatre in New York City and not in Connecticut. The Long Wharf is partnering with TheaterWorks Hartford on “English” and will host that same production at SCSU’s Kendall Drama Lab in New Haven from Jan. 16 through Feb. 1, 2026.
A slew of college shows start happening in mid-October, among them Qui Nguyen’s “Living Dead in Denmark,” Oct. 9-19 at UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre, the corporate musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” Oct. 10-18 at SCSU’s Lyman Center, the dark modern “American Psycho the Musical,” Oct. 10-19 at WCSU and David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Wonder of the World,” Oct. 14-19 at ECSU.
Other theaters don’t follow the school-year-style fall-to-spring season model. That includes the Goodspeed musical “The Great Emu War,” as well as “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” Oct. 2-28 at Ivoryton Playhouse, “Frankenstein,” Oct. 3-18 at New Britain’s Hole in the Wall Theater and others.
However you shape it, this is an exceptional something-for-everyone, change-driven Connecticut theater season.
From page to screen to stage: ‘The Notebook’ at The Bushnell
“The Notebook” was a bestselling novel by Nicholas Sparks, then a sleeper hit romantic film directed by Nick Cassavetes. Now it is musical that played on Broadway last year and is coming to The Bushnell in Hartford Oct. 2-5.
Not only did the movie made some significant changes in the plot of the book, Sparks uses some literary techniques that can’t translate well to a visual medium, like talking about supporting characters without letting them speak for themselves or building suspense by not revealing key details in some scenes until much later in the book.
Pop singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson said when she started working with the musical’s book writer Bekah Brunstetter “We knew we didn’t want to just slam the movie onstage. We started with the book. Then the movie seeped in. Then we added things that were not in either. We stayed true to the story but created a new iteration for the theater.”
Michaelson and Brunstetter also expanded on the movie’s concept of having two sets of actors play the central lovestruck couple of Allie and Noah as young adults and when they are elderly.
In the musical there are now three sets of players: Allie and Noah as teenagers, Allie and Noah in their late 20s and Allie and Noah as seniors. “I wouldn’t say it was difficult but we definitely had it in mind that these are the same characters. They shift and grow and change.”
For Michaelson, there was an opportunity to use the musical theater form to tell a love story through the sort of songwriting she likes best: Harmony and choral vocals, which not only enhance the romantic scenes but the late-in-life spiritual ones. “I love arranging vocals,” the composer said. “It’s important to the piece that it is really a memory play. These voices are evocative of memory. You feel things for these characters when they sing.”
“The Notebook” ran for nine months on Broadway. Now that it’s on its first national tour, the creative team was given “the chance to fix the little things that bothered us,” Michaelson said. “As a creative, are you ever really done? The changes are very slight but they are there.”
Kyle Mangold, who plays the teenaged Noah in “The Notebook,” grew up in Connecticut and had some of his first theater experiences here not only as an actor but as an audience member. When “The Notebook” comes to The Bushnell, Mangold will be in the same theater where his family brought him to see “Hamilton” and “Anastasia.” He said he saw the movie of “The Notebook” twice before auditioning for the musical version. He admires that Michaelson and Brunstetter “made changes that adapted it to this form of storytelling. You get moved to the same emotions. Each different age is very genuine. It feels genuine for the audience, too.”
“The Notebook” runs Sept. 30 through Oct. 5 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $45.50-$186. bushnell.org.
The cast of the national tour of “The Notebook,” which has a book by Bekah Brunstetter and songs by Ingrid Michaelson, based on the novel by Nicholas Spark and the movie directed by Nick Cassavetes. (Roger Mastroianni)
Premiering 90 years after it was written: ‘Spunk’ at Yale Repertory Theatre
Catherine Sheehy is the chair of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and the resident dramaturg at the school’s affiliated Yale Repertory Theatre. Over her decades at Yale, Sheehy — an expert on American theater from the 1920s and ‘30s among many other subjects — has championed many great plays that have unfairly fallen out of the public consciousness or haven’t gotten the productions they deserved. Often she does this through her teaching, but she is also on the season planning committee at the Rep.
For years, Sheehy has been pushing for Yale to stage “Spunk,” a 1935 script by Zora Neale Hurston that was among a trove of her papers discovered in 1997. She requested a copy from the Library of Congress in 2001 and has been teaching it. When Tamilla Woodard, a 2001 graduate of the School of Drama, was named chair of acting there in 2021, Sheehy shared “Spunk” with her and immediately gained another advocate for doing a full production of this lost play. Another dramaturg, Eric M. Glover, was brought on board because, as Sheehy explained, she is an expert in comedy of this era while Glover is expert in Black theater writing of the time.
The Yale Rep production is the play’s world premiere, and should not be confused with an adaptation of other works by Hurston, also titled “Spunk,” that was done by New York’s Public Theater in 1990.
Sheehy says “Spunk” may have been overlooked when it was written because it didn’t fit in with the “Harlem Renaissance” cultural phenomenon. The Harlem Renaissance was an acknowledgement of extraordinary work being done by Black artists in New York City. Many of those works had urban themes or reflected changing times in early 20th century America. But with “Spunk,” Sheehy said, Hurston “was writing about the South. It’s about a Black community but not the one others were writing about.”
A couple of years after she wrote “Spunk,” Hurston published the novel for which she is now best known “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” While it, too, was underappreciated in its own time, the book is now considered one of the fundamental works of the Harlem Renaissance period.
When shows from the ‘20s and ‘30s are produced in later decades, they are often thoroughly rewritten and reworked under the impression that modern audiences won’t appreciate them in their original form. At Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, multiple revivals of old musicals such as “Good News” and “Red Hot & Blue” underwent extensive rewrites when they were revived. Surprisingly, Sheehy said that in the cast of “Spunk” “we’ve done almost nothing to it. It just needs to be onstage. People need to see it.”
“Spunk” runs Oct. 3-25 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. $15-$65. yalerep.org
The cast of “English,” the Pulitzer-winning play by Sanaz Toossi which runs Oct. 2 through Nov. 2 at TheaterWorks Hartford. The play takes place in an Iranian classroom where students are learning English as a second language. (Julian Barlow)
Once again, still with feeling: ‘English’ at TheaterWorks Hartford
Arya Shahi has a special attachment to “English,” the Sanaz Toossi play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023. Shahi directed an acclaimed production of “English” at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, one of several regional productions that followed the play’s off-Broadway premiere at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2022. When “English” went to Broadway earlier this year with the same cast and production team, including director Knud Adams, that it had at the Atlantic, Shahi was brought aboard as the assistant director.
When TheaterWorks Hartford decided to open its 2025-26 season with the Connecticut premiere of “English,” the theater — and its partner for this production, Long Wharf Theatre, which will present it in New Haven in January 2026 — specifically sought out Shahi to direct it. He accepted, though it has been a particularly busy year for the director.
Shahi is a founding member of PigPen Theatre, a company that has over 20 years has developed a unique style of musical theater that draws from concert styles and also includes video projections. Last year, the musical version of Sara Gruen’s circus novel “Water for Elephants,” for which PigPen wrote the songs and score, was on Broadway and is now on tour, with a stop at The Bushnell in June 2026.
Yet “every opportunity I get to support and direct this play, I want to do it,” Shahi said. “This is a strange moment in time for Irani-American artists. We’ve never had a show like this. The community of artists that gets to do this play has been underserved for so many years.”
“English’ is set in a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) classroom in the Iranian city of Kara in 2008. The characters are a teacher and four students.
Shahi’s been involved with “English” twice before this, but Shahi came to TheaterWorks with fresh ideas rather than replicating previous productions. “What was nice about my production at the Old Globe was that it was the first one to happen in the round. We had to cut the white board in the classroom. That’s not happening here.”
TheaterWorks’ thrust stage has its own special considerations but resembles a classroom shape Shahi is looking for this time. “It feels a little like a college seminar room. We make it into a corner classroom based on buildings we know of in Iran,” he said. Shahi also likes that the stage is so close to the audience.
Shahi has brought back the set designer he worked with at the Old Globe, Sadra Tehrani, not because he wanted a similar set but because the TheaterWorks set-up will allow them to do things they weren’t able to do in San Diego. “Because of the challenges of that other design, I wanted to bring him in again,” ” Shahi said.
As for the cast, Shahi has not worked with any of the actors before, and only one of them has done “English” previously. Neagheen Homaifar, who plays the teacher Marjan, played the same role at Ohio’s Cincinnati Playhouse this past spring. The students in the TheaterWorks production are played by Sahar Milani, Afsheen Misaghi, Anachita Monfared and Pantea Ommi. The interactions between the teacher, who insists on a “speak English only” classroom policy and the students fuels the comedy and drama in the play.
“The reason this play won the Pulitzer is not strife in the Middle East, it’s because it’s universal,” Shahi said. “It takes place in a room where students transform. It’s about why people learn other languages.”
“English” runs Oct. 2 through Nov. 2 at TheaterWorks Hartford, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m., with added daytime shows Oct. 25 at noon and 4 p.m., Oct. 29 at 10:30 a.m. and Oct. 30 at 1 p.m. $33-$78. twhartford.org. “English” will also run Jan. 16 through Feb.1, 2026 in performances held by Long Wharf Theatre at Kendall Drama Lab at SCSU’s Lyman Center, 501 Crescent St., New Haven. Information for those performances is at longwharf.org.
Jeremy Davis, Taylor Matthew and LaRaisha DiEvelyn Dionne, as emus, rehearsing the new musical “The Great Emu War.” The new show by Australian writers/songwriters Cal Silberstein and Paul Hodge is at Goodspeed Musicals’ Terris Theatre Oct. 3-26. (Diane Sobolewski)
Taking flight: ‘The Great Emu War’ at Goodspeed’s Terris Theatre
The latest world premiere musical at Goodspeed Musical’s workshop-friendly Terris Theatre in Chester calls itself an “emusical” — not as in email or e-book but as is the obstreperous feathered pest that inhabits the land where “The Great Emu War” is set and where its co-creators hail from.
The show (which is part of the theater’s two-show 2025 season) has been done by the Goodspeed before, as a reading at the company’s 2023 Festival of New Musicals. Giving it a full production with a three-piece band, costumes, lighting effects and more is a big shift, but so is the ongoing process of “seeing how this will play for Americans,” according to Paul Hodge, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics and co-wrote its book with Cal Silberstein.
The musical is based on a true and bizarre chapter of Australian history in which the country’s armed forces were marshaled in 1932 to eviscerate tens of thousands of emus who were destroying crops and creating other nuisances. The emu is second only to the ostrich as the world’s largest bird. In “The Great Emu War,” some of the story is told from the emus’ point of views. “The characters are larger than life,” Silberstein said. “We just felt like it had to be a musical comedy.” Indeed, a completely different musical theater project, “The Emu War,” was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland last year and occasionally gets confused with this one.
“There’s definitely a wackiness in it,” Hodge said, to which Silberstein added, “It feels like an animated sitcom. The comedy has a lot of variety.” This premiere production is directed by Amy Anders Corcoran, who helmed the world premiere of a different new musical at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2022, “Christmas in Connecticut.”
Hodge and Silberstein are both from Australia but they met in New York in 2018 through a Facebook group for Australian theater writers. The play’s first reading took place in the Australian city of Perth. TYhey were still figuring out the size of the cast so Silberstein — who is also a professional actor and singer — took a role, but the team otherwise had not written the musical as something they would perform in. “It was not built for us,” Silberstein said. This version of the show has a cast of six, three of which are “on the emu track,” according to the creators, “and two on the human track, but with a lot of doubling.”
Hodge and Silberstein have been at all the rehearsals, offering rewrites and insights and focusing intently on adding jokes and clarity to the musical. They even spent a recent day off at an emu farm a few miles from the theater.
“It’s remarkable how different the show is today versus last week,” Silberstein said. “In a few weeks it has gone from something no one’s seen except from behind a music stand (in its readings) to this.”
The Great Emu War runs Oct. 3-26 at the Terris Theatre, 33 North Main St., Chester. Performances are Wednesdays and Thursdays at both 2 and 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. $25-$41. goodspeed.org.
