Arts & Culture | WNHH | Shubert Theatre
Courtesy the Shubert Theatre.
The stage is set, and the magic has started brewing in the wings. In the audience, hundreds of pairs of wide, bright eyes look up in wonder. Seats rustle; nothing and no one is completely still this time around. At the center of the action, five furry friends begin to dance. As he glows like a gemstone beneath the lights, Elmo raises his arms, and begins to conduct the whole audience in an educational ballet.
That scene will arrive at the Shubert Theatre this Friday, as “Elmo’s Got The Moves” blooms across the organization’s College Street stage for a single, ebullient performance. Produced by the Pittsburgh-based production company Round Room Live in partnership with the educational engine Sesame Street Live!, the performance foregrounds different modalities of movement—including for those who move differently or have limited mobility—as a way to nurture child development and social and emotional learning.
“It’s such dedicated work. It’s really complicated work. From a performer standpoint, I think it’s really underrated work,” said Becca Smith, a creative producer with Round Room Live, in an interview on WNHH Community Radio’s “Arts Respond,” a collaboration with the Arts Paper. “What these kind of performers do is very involved. It’s like riding a bike and rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time, all at once, while wrapped in fur.”
“We feel like we have this great honor to tell these stories and bring these stories to children,” she added. “There is nothing more overwhelming, in a positive way, than walking into a crowd of children just screaming to see Elmo. Like, it will make your day.”
For Smith, that goes back to childhood itself. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, where she now works, she grew up surrounded by live performance, including an iteration of “Sesame Street Live” that rocked the city’s Mellon Arena during her childhood (the arena, like the much-beloved Coliseum, no longer exists). The more performances she saw, the more she realized that live performance was what she wanted to do with her life.
Long before a life-changing production of Alan Jay Lerner’s “My Fair Lady” sealed the deal, it was the familiarity of characters like Big Bird, Grover and Elmo, who seemed to step out of the television and into real life on the stage. They delighted and enthralled her, so much so that she ultimately realized that she wanted to do the same thing for the next generation of tiny learners.
“They’ve just been characters that have really taught me so many life lessons about friendship and growing up and community, and being part of a community, and all the different roles that we play,” she said.
In New Haven, the performance is part of the theater’s longstanding (and as of late, growing) commitment to educational programming, from early childhood all the way up to high school and early adulthood. Last year, the Shubert brought performances including “Fraggle Rock,” “The Hip-Hop Nutcracker,” and “Mean Girls” into the wider New Haven community, with programs that worked with local high schools, chapters of the Girl Scouts of America, and two branches of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL).
With the organization Read To Grow, a nonprofit that is dedicated to literacy and early childhood education, and new funding from Lindy Lee Gold and the Amour Propre Fund, Wuzzardo was able to ensure that every kid who came through the NHFPL was able to leave with a book.
In the past year, meanwhile, the Shubert has also been able to start building out “Shubert In Motion,” a collaboration with drama students at Southern Connecticut State University that has birthed an original, devised piece of theater made specifically for children. During the spring, students toured the production at three New Haven Public Schools, with more on the horizon.
“I want to make sure that as many kids have access to these beautiful moments that we’ve been talking about as possible, because there really is no better thing than watching a kid with their first experience of live performance,” said Kelly Wuzzardo, director of education and engagement at the Shubert (for a full schedule of educational programming, click here). “And as much as possible, I would love for every kid to come to the Shubert … but I also know that there are barriers and reasons kids can’t come. So we also try to get out into the community and into schools to bring things to them.”
"We're trying to provide programming for kids all the way up," she added. "I want to make sure that every kid, when they see a live performance, sees themselves reflected in that show somewhere."
Like Smith—and millions of Americans across at least three generations—Wuzzardo also has a personal relationship with Sesame Street, and its many muppet-kid (and human) characters. Growing up outside Philadelphia, she remembers seeing performances of “Sesame Street on Ice,” which predated the staged versions of “Sesame Street Live” that Smith (and this reporter) grew up with. It was her first window into live performance, and became a door through which she could walk into the world of performance and arts education.
She remembers, too, when her mom sat her down 1983, and made her watch the episode “Farewell, Mr. Hooper,” which aired close to a year after actor Will Lee died of a heart attack. At the time of his death, Lee had played the store owner Harold Hooper since 1969, when the show first made its debut. By then, she was a little too old be be part of the show’s target demographic—and still understood that it was necessary to watch, because it taught humans of all ages how to talk about grief.
Now, she's excited for young audiences to feel that same kind of empathy, and the full range of learning that comes with it.
“It was like a full circle, this is your family, we have to talk about it,” she said. “We have to talk about Mr. Hooper. ‘Sesame Street’ is all about education, and integrating [the] arts.”
A free workshop will take place at the Mitchell Branch Library, 37 Harrison St. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, on Wednesday Oct. 7 at 4 p.m. For more information and to RSVP, click here. Listen to the full WNHH episode above.