Lucy Gellman Photos.
Maybe it’s Fanny Brice who pulls you in, her smile radiant as she prepares for her role in the Ziegfeld Follies. Or Maria Tallchief, who brought her Osage roots to the stage as she made ballet history with George Balanchine. Or a beaming Skimbleshanks, the last act to grace the Shubert Theatre before Covid-19 brought the arts to a screeching halt five years ago.
Maybe it’s the single ghostlight, the bulb shining even through the grayscale, like a promise that everything is going to be all right, one way or another.
Those faces—and many others—grace a new mural in Temple Plaza, celebrating the Shubert Theatre’s 110th birthday as it looks toward its future on College Street. A collaboration among the Shubert, Town Green Special Services District, and the artist Eric March, the 12-by-12 foot mural documents the theater’s growth in downtown New Haven, with references from Brice, Duke Ellington and Katherine Hepburn to the contemporary Broadway musical Six.
“This is an amazing piece of art that I do think adds to the community here,” said Anthony McDonald, executive director at the Shubert. “We’re not done yet. This is a snapshot memorizing what we have done,” and suggesting the power of what is to come.
Across a black-and-white stretch of wall, March has captured that history in vivid detail, turning a piece of public art into a game of musical theater I-spy. From the upper lefthand corner, he has depicted Brice in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Ziegfeld Follies, which came to the Shubert in 1935. Directly beneath her, there’s a sultry, seductive-looking Katharine Hepburn, who in 1939 brought Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story to life on the stage, and later the screen. Beside her, Louis Armstrong lifts his trumpet and blows a long, resonant note, his eyes closing with satisfaction at the sound.
Beneath him, the legacy continues: there’s Duke Ellington, playing “Take The A Train,” Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady in 1956, prima ballerina and Balanchine dancer Maria Tallchief, a member of the Osage nation who made history as the first Native American in that role. To her right, there are members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performing Revelations (current audiences may be more familiar with Ailey II, which has graced the theater several times in the past few years).
Above them, there is an actor from the 1943 show Away We Go, which became the beloved musical Oklahoma, and a freeze frame of Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, which premiered at the Shubert just four years later in 1947. There’s a jubilant musician from the percussive, danceable street theater phenomenon Stomp, which has made several stops at the Shubert since its first American tour in 1994. Beneath it, the story continues with a depiction of Skimbleshanks that nods to CATS’ run as the last musical that graced the theater before pandemic shutdowns in 2020.
But the most moving part of the tableau may be the character that is always there, on the stage even when the theater goes dark. Somewhere between Brando’s intimate embrace and Six’s Ann Boleyn, March has rendered a ghost light, to represent the periods between 1976 and 1983 and 2020 and 2021 during which the Shubert was forced to close its doors. The first, caused by financial hardship, resulted in the city taking over the theater in the 1980s. The second, caused by a global pandemic, took place right after a sold-out run of CATS ended at the theater in March 2020.
For McDonald, it’s a symbol of the resilience and strength that it’s taken to run the theater, even in times of financial and political uncertainty. In the theater world, a ghost light is a single light that stays on, even when every other light in the building and on the stage has gone dark. It’s both practical and symbolic, a way to see the stage and a reminder that the theater will be full again, someday, somehow. McDonald, who since 2021 has brought a new vision, $5 million transformation, and new advocacy efforts to the theater, can feel that past informing the present.
“Through wars, through all sorts of ugly things, the Shubert has endured,” McDonald said, pointing out a Broadway-ready Boleyn in the lower righthand corner of the work. In 2022, the theater “teched” Six twice, preparing it for a national tour. This September, the hit musical returns to the theater for a month-long buildout, after which New Haven will be the first stop on its national tour.
March, who this year also finished a mural by the State Street Station, said that honoring that past—and suggesting a bright future—is exactly what he was going for. When he first submitted a proposal to Town Green, he asked himself “how do these lives and these figures fit together,” he remembered. Working with the Shubert, he updated his list of characters to accurately reflect the theater’s long history of innovation (a nod to CATS, for instance, started out as a Lion King character—but The Lion King has never come to the theater).
“I used the structure of the wall itself to create a graphic timeline,” March said. As he worked, the mural also became part of his own long relationship with theater, which goes back to his middle school days in northern Illinois, and a longtime love for the community theater where he and his three siblings grew up.
As a teenager and young adult, March participated in his fair share of plays and musicals; “I even played a character in a Renaissance Faire for a couple summers,” he wrote in a follow-up email. It was a family affair: his siblings all acted too. He's still close to the performing arts: his wife, the dancer Lynn Peterson, is co-artistic director of SYREN Modern Dance.
“It was totally fun but I knew my real calling was in art,” he said in an email. “I can ham it up when the situation calls for it though.”
The grayscale, meanwhile, which appears at times almost blue, was March’s way of respecting artists Bu Lei Tu and Felice Varini, both of whom have large-scale, vibrant works of public art in the same plaza. To the mural’s right, Tu’s 2021 design celebrates New Haven’s 14 native plants, with shades of green, red, black and yellow that drip over the plaza’s stairs. Nearby, Varini’s Square with Four Circles brings a punchy splash of orange to the space. That color is echoed once in March’s work, in a bright band of red meant to depict the original marquee of the Shubert.
As she stood to the side pointing out characters, longtime Shubert volunteer Maggie Edwards beamed at the mural, which commemorates so many of the shows she now holds dear. Two years after moving to New Haven in 1978, Edwards started volunteering at the Shubert as a way to see free theater. At the time, she was in her early 20s, and just as excited about musicals as she is today. Four decades later, she still feels like there’s something momentous afoot every time she walks into the theater.
While Edwards doesn’t act herself, “I play a great part in the audience!” she said with a smile. Over the years, she’s seen countless performances, from children’s theater to opera to cabaret-style jazz nights. Volunteering has opened her eyes to productions she wouldn’t otherwise see or pay for, like a live performance of Fraggle Rock earlier this year. So when she heard that the mural was done, she was excited to check it out.
“It’s just magical to be able to see,” she said.