Perrotta’s novels have been lavishly praised for their uncanny ability to articulate dark, often uncomfortable emotional truths of American culture, using humor and sharp observational skills to explore profound shifts in how people communicate and coexist. With Perrotta’s active involvement, some of those books have been turned into topflight movies and TV series such as “Election” directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, “Little Children” directed and co-written by Todd Field and the HBO series “The Leftovers” which Perrota co-created with Damon Lindelof. He turned his book “Mrs. Fletcher” into a seven-episode miniseries for HBO in 2019.

Perrotta’s earliest books were written while he was teaching creative writing at Yale University in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. He was an undergraduate English major at Yale, graduating in 1983, then did graduate work at Syracuse University.

A Massachusetts suburbanite for the past several decades, Perrotta’s new book is “Ghost Town,” a concise, disarming, elegantly structured story of a teen boy named Jimmy in mid-1970s New Jersey. Jimmy’s life has a lot of typical elements of that era and of this sort of fiction — riding his bike around town, working with kids at a day camp, falling in with the wrong crowd, entranced by hip radical neighbors, recognizing the overt racism and intolerance of other townsfolk in his white suburban community and having his first sexual and supernatural encounters.

What makes “Ghost Town” a Perrotta novel is that Jimmy’s adventures are shaped by the recent death of his mother and the grief and loss and disorientation that has overwhelmed his family. Another Perrotta touch is that “Ghost Town” is narrated by Jimmy’s adult self, who has turned out somewhat different than his teen years might suggest. “Ghost Town” is a coming-of-age story that also features more than one life-changing trauma.

Perrotta recalls his time in New Haven fondly. He saw some of his favorite bands at Toad’s Place and other clubs, began following local acts like The Gravel Pit, browsed the many bookstores in the area and lived in a few different parts of town.

The Courant spoke to Perrotta about “Ghost Town,” his time in Connecticut, his literary influences and his good fortune in finding collaborators for his film and TV projects.

There are a lot of people in Arlington, Massachusetts who are convinced that a local playground there is the one you describe in “Little Children.” Is there any truth to that?

I don’t want to spoil anybody’s sense of connection to the book. I lived in Watertown when my kids were preschool playground people. In my own mind, I was setting it at this playground in Watertow,n but I love that other people can see their own in it.

Have you been to the Mark Twain House before? Are you a Mark Twain fan?

I’ve been there once. I’m explicitly a “Huck Finn” fan for sure, “Tom Sawyer” to some lesser degree. “Life on the Mississippi”… yeah, I’m a Mark Twain fan. I think there’s a lot of his work that I haven’t read. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” is interesting because that format is still around, like that “Yesteryear” book that just came out. Even with his lesser works, he’s had a big influence on American writers and what an American writer might be in the culture. It’s amazing to think about it now. Here’s a writer, a really good writer, who was a kind of cultural superstar. Maybe Hemingway had a little bit of that, but Twain was on a scale that I don’t think anybody can match.

What are your memories of Yale?

I had three separate stints in New Haven — the four years of undergrad, then I came back in maybe ‘88 to ‘90 and again for a year in ‘93. When I came back from grad school and I was like a writing tutor and adjunct faculty at Yale I lived in Fair Haven Heights across the river, and then when our first kid was born I was living on Nicoll Street. I’ve lived in Massachusetts now for 32 years.

“Ghost Town” obviously has major themes of grieving and loss, but there are also elements that are found in a lot of your other work about how authority figures struggle with responsibility, or how we hope authority figures will be understanding at certain times. Can you speak to that?

Sometimes I get a little tired of being called a suburban writer, but I think one of the reasons I do set a lot of my books in suburban settings is because those are the places where kids get raised and adults are supposedly transmitting their values to the next generation. I think going all the way back to “Bad Haircut,” I was so aware of the difficulty my entire life for one generation to talk to the generation below them. The world’s been changing so fast and people’s values and experiences have changed. I do feel like teachers, coaches and religious figures have struggled to communicate their values and live according to their values. That crisis of authority and moral education is definitely something I’ve explored over and over again, particularly teachers who have failed to set a good example or who have actively violated their own professed reliefs.

Biggest winners at the Tonys have some deep CT theater connections

When some of your books have been adapted to film or television, the plots have often gone off in whole different directions. In other interviews you’ve expressed that you’re OK with that. Can you elaborate?

“The Leftovers” is the most freewheeling adaptation. Here’s the thing: I think I’ve been unusually lucky to have worked with really remarkably talented filmmakers. I think Alexander Payne and Todd Field are two of the great directors of American cinema. I feel pretty confident saying that. Damon Lindelof (who created “The Leftovers” series) is just one of the great TV writers and narrative innovators in that world of quality TV. So I haven’t had that feeling that a lot of writers do when they get badly adapted that some violence has been done to their work or that their work has been diminished by Hollywood hacks. I just haven’t had that experience. It’s humbling. I sometimes appear on these lists of “Adaptations That Are Better Than the Original Book” — “Election” or “The Leftovers” might pop up on that. That’s not a great feeling for me. On the other hand, these adaptations have brought a lot of people to my work. When I watch them, I’m fascinated by them. I don’t agree with every single thing that has been done, but I also understand that talented people are going to exercise their own aesthetic judgements. Like, Alexander Payne insisted on moving “Election” from New Jersey to Nebraska. To me that was a head scratcher but I can see why. He was just really connected to that landscape and had ideas for how to bring it into the story. In the end, I’m like “That’s fine.” It didn’t amount to a profound change. It just was just another flavor of the story.

“Election” felt remarkable because nearly every movie made about teenagers is geared expressly to teenagers and that one respected your work and made it about two generations. Was it hard to get it made that way?

In the most important ways it’s a really faithful adaptation. They kept the multiple voiceover, which was really challenging. I think most screenwriters would make it one voiceover, not multiple characters and multiple perspectives. Alexander and Jim Taylor, the other writer, were very true to the deep structure of the book and the fact that there’s not really a main character, just a bunch of conflicting perspectives.

In the case of “The Leftovers,” some of the book is just hilarious, the way you pulled a lot of the absurdity out of The Rapture. The series by comparison was bleak. How did you feel about that one?

One thing I’ll say there is that the first season, which is the season that’s most closely aligned with the book, is quite grim. There’s not a lot of humor in it. But I will say that we did make a conscious effort in Seasons 2 and 3 to reconnect with the absurdity that’s ever-present in the book. I think we found our way back to it, but that first season, I do feel tonally is quite different from the book.

Now you can safely assume that your books are going to get filmed, has it changed how you write?

The funny thing is, when I was  writing “Election” I wasn’t thinking “This could be a movie.” Even with “Little Children,” when I turned it in, my Hollywood agent said “This is gonna be a tough sell because there’s an ensemble and there’s a pedophile in it.” Todd Field saw something in the book that he connected with and that drove the adaptation. So I feel like I should just keep doing what I do and not try to write something where if I do it one way or another way it might get filmed. It seemed that the best thing to do was just tell a good story and hope that a really talented filmmaker connects with it.

“Ghost Town” is as crystallized and tightly structured as anything you’ve written and compact. Were you going for a different form or style?

I do wonder about that. I think we’re all fighting against the way that phones have shortened our attention spans. I think everybody who writes novels is worried about the future of the form. I’ve noticed that I do like to read short, concentrated books myself now. I feel that if I take too long to read a book my attention might wander from it a little bit, so I wanted to write something that people could read in a couple of days or a week and have a really intense concentrated experience with.

Who were you reading in college, and who stuck with you?

I majored in English at Yale at a time when the curriculum was very traditional. You’d read from Chaucer up to Joyce or T.S. Eliot. By senior year, I came across Raymond Carver’s short story collection “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and really that was the lightning bolt for me. As you know from “Joe College,” I grew up in this working class world and then went to Yale, which was a pretty head-spinning experience. To read Carver, who was a working class writer but with a literary sophistication underneath, was really electrifying to me. I ended up going to Syracuse because I wanted to study with him but I never got to take a class with him because he left on some fellowship then got sick and never returned to teaching. Tobias Wolff was one of the other professors there. At that time there was what people were calling “dirty realism” or “minimalism” but it wasn’t a distinctively working class and accessible form of American writing. A lot of the other writers of my generation, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, then were in much more of a maximalist experimental school of writers, or so it seemed to me. I was very much in this Carver and Wolff and Richard Ford kind of working class style, perhaps somewhat influenced by Hemingway but I like to think of it as a plain language tradition in American writing. Twain can kind of fit into this. I think of Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, some of the hardboiled detective writers who are great stylists. To me it’s a democratic and accessible form of writing. If I see myself as part of some American tradition, it’s that one.

Tom Perrotta talks in a conversation with fellow novelist Jon Clinch on June 18 at 7 p.m. at the Mark Twain House & Museum, Farmington Ave., Hartford. There is a cash bar in the museum lobby. Admission is $15; $30 ($28 for Twain House members) includes a copy of “Ghost Town.” marktwainhouse.org.

It’s the kind of footloose and fancy free comedy romance that always does well with Goodspeed’s core audience of traditional American musical theater enthusiasts. Its songs — “Embraceable You,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Slap That Bass” and “I Can’t Be Bothered Now.” — aren’t just peppy jazzy tunes in a familiar, popular showbiz style, they are indisputable classics of the form.

The theater was just looking for the right moment to go all “Crazy for You.” This season, when Goodspeed was mixing things up with its first rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the world premiere of a new musical, “The Snow Goose,” and a revival of its 1970s megahit “Annie,” a show like “Crazy for You” provided the missing ingredient needed to balance the season — relentlessly upbeat songs and dances from a bygone age.

“Crazy for You” ran for over 1,600 performances on Broadway from February 1992 to January 1996. Its success inspired a surge of rewritten musicals from the 1920s and ‘30s, a trend in which Goodspeed took part with its productions of “Good News,” “Red Hot & Blue” and “They All Laughed.” The original book for “Crazy for You” was by writer/director John McGowan (known for crafting musicals about cultural crazes of the ‘20s such as professional boxing and stunt airplane flying) and playwright Guy Bolton (whose biggest hits were “Anything Goes” and the Gershwin-scored “Lady, Be Good”).

The popular and prolific playwright Ken Ludwig, whose farce “Lend Me a Tenor” was a big Broadway hit in 1989, totally reworked the “Girl Crazy” book. Ludwig is still a reliable comic voice in the American theater, having done dozens of plays and adaptations including “Murder on the Orient Express” (which Hartford Stage staged in 2018) and the upcoming world premiere of “Pride and Prejudice, Part 2: Napoleon at Pemberley” at Westport Country Playhouse.

Only six of the more than 20 songs in “Crazy for You” come from the Gershwin musical it is most closely based on, “Girl Crazy.” The vast catalogue of hits by the Gershwin brothers that this score was drawn from covers over a decade and includes some that were written for movies or variety shows rather than musicals. The songs emanate both from shows like “Oh, Kay!,” which marked the bouncy jollity of the 1920s flapper era, to ones whose frolicsome sentiments were meant to provide escapism during the Great Depression of the ‘30s, with a special interest in songs made popular by Fred Astaire in movies such as “Damsel in Distress” and “Shall We Dance.”

“Since I first joined Goodspeed six or seven years ago, every year we would say “This is the year for ‘Crazy for You,'”  said Michael Fling, who began at the theater as an artistic associate in 2019 and was named the theater’s first associate artistic director in 2024. “It was always on the top of the list. But for various reasons, it never worked out.

Goodspeed may have known it was going to do “Crazy for You” someday, but such surety didn’t include knowing who would direct it. Directors were discussed and some were approached but when the process dragged on unexpectedly, Goodspeed’s leaders independently came to the conclusion that in-house talent would be the best approach. “I’m not shy about pitching myself for projects,” Fling said. “I was in a meeting thinking about suggesting that I could do it when I saw Donna Lynn (Hilton) looking at me. Then she said, ‘Why don’t you do it?'”

So one of the very people who’d long been convinced that “Crazy for You” was an ideal choice for the Goodspeed Opera House became the person directing it, bringing all his highly detailed knowledge of the Goodspeed’s stage, its staff and its audience to bear on the project.

Biggest winners at the Tonys have some deep CT theater connections

Fling, in fact, is the first Goodspeed staff member to direct a show there. The theater had just two executive directors — Michael Price and Michael Gennaro — before shifting to a different business model in 2021, when Hilton became artistic director and was teamed with David Byrd as the managing director. Byrd left in 2024, and Vanessa Logan was named managing director last year. Price, Gennaro and Hilton all had varied backgrounds in theater, but none considered themselves a director.

Fling has not directed a mainstage show at Goodspeed before, but he’s been deeply involved in every production there since one of his roles is as a line producer overseeing all the shows not just at the Opera House but at Goodspeed’s space for new works, the Terris Theatre in Chester. He has directed at other theaters and also directed a magical concert video called “Shakin’ the Blues Away: A Virtual Gala Concert for Goodspeed” during the COVID shutdown. He also oversees the annual Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals, which presents readings of musical theater works-in-progress.

Fling has to wear both his directing and producing hats for “Crazy for You” and said he wishes he could literally wear hats so his collaborators could know whether he’s responding in his director mode or his director one. “Sometimes the director in me has an idea but knows that the producer in me would never go for it.” On the other hand, Fling knows all the resources at his disposal and can take full advantage of them.

The choreographer for “Crazy for You” is someone who, like Fling, knows the Goodspeed Opera House stage through and through. Kelli Barclay is Goodspeed’s go-to person for spectacular old-school tap dance showstoppers. She’s known for lengthy, intricate routines that are so lively and acrobatic that they seem as exhausting for audiences to watch as for the dancers to perform. Among Barclay’s previous choreographer credits are “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” “Will Rogers Follies,” “Anything Goes,” and “My One and Only,” all of which feature songs from, or are set during, the 1920 and ‘30s.

Goodspeed’s ”Crazy for You” stars Will Burton (whose Broadway credits include “Beetlejuice,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “Kiss Me, Kate”) as Bobby Child, an aspiring Broadway hoofer who is sucked back into his family banking business after a lousy audition. Bobby is sent to Nevada to foreclose on a failing theater there. When he falls for Polly, the daughter of the theater’s owner he decides to save the business instead of foreclosing on it. Polly is played by Brittany Zeinstra of Broadway’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “The Prom.” The supporting cast includes Jeremy Davis as Polly’s dad Everett, Edward Juvier as Broadway producer Bela Zangler, Hailey Thomas is Bobby’s New York fiancee Irene, David Andrew Morton plays saloon owner Lank Hawkins and Michele Ragusa plays both Bobby’s mother and the British travel book author Patricia Fodor. All but Zeinstra and Thomas have previous Goodspeed credits, some dating back decades.

The cast also boasts a 12-person ensemble of Claire Avakian, Willie Clyde Beaton II, Colin Bradbury, Courtney Brady, Kailee Regan Brandt, Katie Scarlett Brunson, Samuel Colina, Bradley Gibbins-Klein, Kelly Gleason, Taylor Lane, Brian Shimasaki Liebson and Griffin Wilkins.

“It’s very much in my wheelhouse,” said Fling of “Crazy for You.” He is an avid scholar of old musicals and writes some of the historical essays that run in Goodspeed playbills. He added, however, that “I didn’t actually know the show that well.” He watched old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, as well as versions of ‘Girl Crazy’ — the musical was filmed in 1932 with the comedy team Wheeler and Woolsey and in 1943 with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, neither of them faithful to the original stage show — to acclimate himself to “the root of the style they’re going for.”

“This is a wonderfully big show. It’s big for every department. There’s the Gershwin score, the set, the costumes, the wigs …,” he said.

Fling said working on new musicals for much of his career has influenced how he approaches older ones. “You ask all the same questions in either case: What’s the best way to tell the story? What is this song doing for the story? What is this dance doing for the story? ‘Crazy for You’ has a story but it’s not a Rodgers & Hammerstein story. In some ways it’s a big Broadway musical of the ‘90s. It’s important to me to ground it in a contemporary sensibility. It’s a love letter to musicals but it should feel real. The only real conceptual difference I’ve brought to this production is a point of view shift. This is not a cheesy ‘90s musical but an earnest, endearing show where you care about the characters. For me, the heart of the show is when Bobby and Polly kiss at the end of the song ‘Shall We Dance.’

“The way the show progresses, it is brilliantly constructed,” Fling continued. “The original creative team in the ‘90s threw out Act 2 and built something much better. Ken Ludwig’s script fits the material. It’s very funny, a laugh a minute. In this production, Will and Brittany are dreams to work with. They bring a goofy heat at the center of the show. It’s naturally funny.”

“There are few ballads better than ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ‘I Got Rhythm’ can’t be beat. ‘I Can’t Be Bothered Now’ is so joyful and fun,” he said. “One of our board members described it as a musical theater orgasm. People are not quite ready for how much they will like this show.”

“Crazy for You,” with music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, book by Ken Ludwig, co-conception by Ludwig and Mike Ockrent, inspired by material by Guy Bolton and John McGowan, runs June 19 through Aug. 9 at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St. in East Haddam. Performances are Wednesday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., with added Sunday evening performances at 6:30 p.m. on June 21 and 28 and July 5, 12 and 19 and added Thursday matinees at 2 p.m. on July 23 and 30 and Aug. 6. $35-$126. goodspeed.org.

These companies are all longstanding Connecticut arts institutions.

The Goodspeed, founded in 1963 to preserve and further the art of American musical theater, resides on a grassy riverfront expanse in East Haddam. If you haven’t been in a year or two, you will see the major renovations to the theater’s front entranceway, parking lot and paths. There’s even a statue honoring Sandy the dog from “Annie,” one of the many hit musicals Goodspeed has sent to Broadway. Annie’s trainer Bill Berloni is a Connecticut-based theater institution himself. “Crazy for You” runs at the Goodspeed June 19 through Aug. 9, followed by the new musical “The Snow Goose” Aug. 28 through Oct. 18 and a revival of “Annie” Oct. 30 through Dec. 27.

Connecticut Ballet, founded in 1981 under the name Ballet Today, has outlived many other ambitious dance companies. Based in both Hartford and Stamford, it has a statewide reach with both its classes and its performances. When it does “The Nutcracker” in wintertime, it assembles different groups of children for each city it serves. Its indoor shows, which each year include a major springtime ballet and a Valentine’s Day event, take place in both Stamford and Hartford. Last week, Connecticut Ballet performed their version of “Giselle,” the classic Adolphe Adam ballet about a peasant teen, a nobleman who falls for her plus a bunch of busybody ghosts, at the Stamford Palace. On the evening of June 20, the company is dancing “Giselle” at The Bushnell with Oksana Maslova and Sterling Baca of the Philadelphia Ballet in the lead roles.

On the same day at The Bushnell, there is a special “Family Matinee at the Ballet” event fashioned after the sort of classical-music-for-kids concerts that maestro Leonard Bernstein did with the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1973. The 75-minute family matinee, “suitable for children aged 4-14,” is meant to introduce young audiences to the wonders of ballet by making it less intimidating. Connecticut Ballet founder and artistic director will explain how ballets are made, members of the company will dance to excerpts from “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” the Bix Beiderbecke-scored jazz dance “Goose Pimples” and of course “Giselle,” and there’s also a Q&A and a meet and greet in the lobby.

Pilobolus was formed in 1971 by students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, but for most of its existence, the troupe has been based in Washington Depot. It ran its own arts festival for a while in that part of the state and also did elaborate outdoor events during the COVID shutdown. Pilobolus performs around the world. A few day after the troupe performs some of its “Other Worlds Collection” at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, it does two separate programs called “Trips” during a residency at the Joyce Theater, a New York City venue devoted to modern dance.

Connecticut has been a mecca for dance ever since Martha Graham created the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in 1948. The festival ran until 1971. Today, over a dozen professional dance companies call Connecticut home. This is an exceptional week to remind yourself of the dance legacy of Connecticut.

Jane Don’t

The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Season 18 stand-out Jane Don’t brings her concert act to TheaterWorks for a Pride Month “Celebrate Drag” event. TheaterWorks Hartford, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. June 14 at 7 p.m. $48-$73. twhartford.org.

The Sadies

The eclectic Canadian instrumental act The Sadies is conversant in surf, garage, roots rock, psychedelia and many other sounds. New Zealand’s swinging rock act Labretta Suede and the Motel 6 open. Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield. June 14 at 8 p.m. $36-$39, $34 for FTC members. fairfieldtheatre.org.

Bad Cop Bad Cop

The sharp, loud female punks Bad Cop Bad Cop are in Connecticut on a fairly rare national tour from their native California. The band has been around since 2011, long enough that some previous visits were part of Warped Tours. The lineup now has two founding members, Stacey Dee and Myra Gallarza, plus Linh Le and Alexandra Windsor. A new Bad Cop Bad Cop album, “Lighten Up,” came out last year. Pretty Bitter and Evan Greer are also on the bill. Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden. June 16 at 7 p.m. $32.34, $26.69 in advance. spaceballroom.com.

The Bad Plus

Classical/jazz visionary The Bad Plus, who can make you rethink any kind of music through its arch, vivid reinterpretations, has decided to call it quits after this final tour. Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, 300 Main St., Old Saybrook. June 16 at 7:30 p.m. $45. thekate.org.

The Wood Brothers

The Wood Brothers, Chris and Oliver, with Jano Rix rounding out the trio, make another of their happily frequent trips to Connecticut. The duo of singers/multi-instrumentalists Viv & Riley open. District Music Hall, 71 Wall St., Norwalk. June 16 at 8 p.m. $54.99-$85.89. districtmusichall.com.

Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers

Two revered Southern rock acts — the Black Crowes from Atlanta, Georgia and Whisky Myers from Texas — are on a “Southern Hospitality Tour” that is so hospitable there’s a third act, Southhall, on the bill. Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, 500 Broad St., Bridgeport. June 17 at 6:30 p.m. $60.50-$504.40. hartfordhealthcareamp.com.

Mick Foley

The pro wrestler turned raconteur Mick Foley entertains with his wry wrestling story show “Forty Years of Foley.” Funny Bone Comedy Club, 194 Buckland Hills Dr., Suite 1054, Manchester. June 17 at 7 p.m. $50-$160. hartford.funnybone.com.

National Playwrights Conference

One of the most important and longest running development programs for new plays happens every summer in a bucolic grassy waterfront area in Waterford. The plays-in-progress receiving readings this year are: “Possessed (of the Crazy African Girl Play)” by Gloria Majule on June 17 at 7 p.m. and June 21 at 3 p.m.; “Rachel, Nevada” by jose sebastian alberdi on June 23 and 27 at 7 p.m.; “Ms. Cleary’s Last Supper” by R. Forest Malley on June 24 at 7 p.m. and June 28 at 3 p.m.; and “Last Nun at Lake Leaf Monastery” by Mat Smart on July 1 at 7 p.m. and July 5 at 3 p.m. Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford. $33. There are also pay-what-you-can student “Theatermaker” performances on June 15, 22 and 29 at 7 p.m. theoneill.org.

Charley Crockett

A modern offshoot of the outlaw country style of Willie Nelson or Wayon Jennings, Charley Crockett’s 17th album “Clovis” was released this year. The married Minnesota Americana act Wild Horses is the opening act. College Street Music Hall, 238 College St., New Haven. June 17 at 7:30 p.m. $54.90-$96.19. collegestreetmusichall.com.

‘Aesthetic Illusions: An afternoon of Poetry and Literary Prose’

A poetry/jazz event with New Haven poet/professor Randall Horton and the ensemble Radical Reversal. A Q&A session follows the performances. Garde Arts Center, 325 State St., New London. June 18 at 4 p.m. Free. gardearts.org.

moe. and Umphrey’s McGee

Two exemplars of the 1990s jam rock scene, moe. and Umphrey’s McGee, have teamed up on tour. College Street Music Hall, 238 College St., New Haven. June 18 at 7 p.m. $57.05-$80.22. collegestreetmusichall.com.

Lauren Daigle

Singer/songwriter Lauren Daigle, whose hits on the Christian airplay charts include “First,” “Trust in You,” and “O’Lord.” Mohegan Sun Arena, 1 Mohegan Sun Blvd., Uncasville. June 18 at 7:30 p.m. $222.60-$260.76; some “verified resale tickets” are available for $170 and up. mohegansun.com.

Pilobolus: Other Worlds

The Connecticut-based dance/movement company Pilobolus presents an installment in its “Other Worlds Collection” of collaborations with other artists, among them playwright Aaron Posner, composers Start Bogie and Paul Sullivan and choreographer Gaspard Louis. Part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. June 18 at 8 p.m. $57.10-$102.30. shubert.com.

Booker T. Jones

Hammond B3 organist Booker T. Jones, who went by his first name and middle initial as the leader of the Stax label band Booker T. & the M.G.s, famous for the instrumental “Green Onions,” is still pounding the keys at 81. Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield. June 18 at 8 p.m. $79-$99, $76-$96 FTC members. fairfieldtheatre.org.

Summer Slamfest

An hours-long, two-stage summer clubfest of nearly a dozen local bands is the kind of thing Toad’s Place has been really good at for decades. The lineup includes Always on Edge, Dissident, Eggshells, He Was a God, Internet Tears, Moss and Tranquilized on the mainstage and Elizabory, Syro Valley, Untied Show and one act yet to be announced on the Lily’s Pad stage. Toad’s Place, 300 York St., New Haven. June 19 at 6 p.m. $20, $15 in advance. toadsplace.com.

Joe Avati

Seasoned stand-up Joe Avati talks about his Australian upbringing and Italian heritage. Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. June 19 at 7 p.m. $38.70-$68.50. shubert.com.

Jon Stewart

“The Daily Show” anchor and “The Weekly Show” podcast host brings his combo of stand-up, social commentary on the day’s events, fulsome rage and adorable bewilderment to The Bushnell for two shows on June 19. The 7 p.m. show is sold out. There may be a few tickets for the 9:30 p.m. one. The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. $69-$116. bushnell.org.

Ty Myers

Ty Myers, Brent Cobb and Benn G., some of the hottest young singer/songwriters whose work has been described as “country soul,” converge in Bridgeport. Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, 500 Broad St., Bridgeport. June 19 at 7:30 p.m. $83.75-$136. hartfordhealthcareamp.com.

Greg Hawkes with Eddie Japan

The recent book “The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told” by BIll Janovitz reveals keyboardist Greg Hawkes to be the most easygoing member of The Cars, the one that was able to collaborate most closely for the longest time with bandleader Ric Ocasek. Hawkes is joined by the stylish Boston band Eddie Japan to recreate Cars classics live. Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield. June 19 at 8 p.m. $57-$62, $54-$59 FTC members. fairfieldtheatre.org.

The Baby Bats Parade

A dark gloomy Goth/deathrock/art rock tour includes Christian Death, Gene Loves Jezebel, Descartes a Kant and Black Season Witch. The Webster, 32 Webster St., Hartford. June 19 at 8 p.m. $31.15. thewebsterct.com.

‘Requiem for an Electric Chair’

Toto Kisaku’s intense one-man show is about his own harrowing experiences being persecuted and nearly executing for doing theater in Democratic Republic of Congo. Nancy Marine Studio, Warner Theatre, 84 Main St., Torrington. June 20 at 3:30 p.m. $58. warnertheatre.org.

Connecticut Ballet

Connecticut Ballet has two events at The Bushnell on June 20: A special 75-minute ‘Family Matinee” intro the ballet event at 2:30 p.m. led by artistic director Bret Raphael and featuring dancers from the company ($35) and a performance of “Giselle” at 7:30 p.m. starring Oksana Maslova and Sterling Baca of the Philadelphia Ballet. The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. $49.50-$116. connecticutballet.org.

Jo Dee Messina

Country star Jo Dee Messina’s hits include “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” “You’re Not in Kansas Anymore,” “Bye, Bye” and “Stand Beside Me.” Foxwoods Resort Casino, Great Cedar Showroom, 350 Trolley Line Blvd., Mashantucket. June 20 at 8 p.m. $74.50-$117.65. foxwoods.com.

Luis Figueroa

Puerto Rican singer/songwriter Luis Figueroa is shifting the sounds of salsa for a new generation. Infinity Music Hall, 2 Front St., Hartford. June 20 at 8 p.m. $41.24-$75.77. infinityhall.com.

The Kate presents its Spirit of Katharine Hepburn Award every year to “an individual who embodies the spirit, independence and character of the legendary actress.” Most of the recipients have been female movie stars, but others come from broadcasting, sports or the stage.

Bening will receive the award during a gala fundraiser at The Kate on Aug. 29.

Hepburn and Bening appeared together in the film “Love Affair” in 1994. It was the final film appearance for Hepburn, who died in 2003 at the age of 96. Bening has appeared in over 40 films, among them “The Grifters,” “American Beauty,” “Being Julia,” “The American President,” “Regarding Henry,” “Mars Attacks!,” “The Kids Are All Right,” “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” (in which she played Hollywood star Gloria Grahame), “Nyad” (as champion swimmer Diana Nyad) and “Valmont.” She has been in four movies with her husband Warren Beatty: “Love Affair,” “Bugsy,” “The Book That Wrote Itself” and “Rules Don’t Apply.”

Biggest winners at the Tonys have some deep CT theater connections

Bening started her career on the stage and appeared on Broadway in Tina Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances” in 1988 and Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” in 2019. Her TV credits range from playing herself in an episode of “The Sopranos” in 2004, hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 2006 and starring as Beulah Jackson in the new “Yellowstone” spin-off “Dutton Ranch.”

Previous Spirit of Katharine Hepburn Award honorees include, Jane Fonda, Laura Linney, Candice Bergen, Martina Navratilova, Sam Waterston, Cher, Christine Baranski, longtime WTNH broadcaster Ann Nyberg, Glenn Close and Dick Cavett.

Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, acted at local theaters such as the Ivoryton Playhouse and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, and regularly visited her family estate in Old Saybrook throughout her long Hollywood career, retiring there in the 1990s until her death in 2003.

Unlike previous executive directors (except for the interim appointments), okoro is already well established in the New Haven arts community. She teaches at Gateway Community College, has also taught at the Yale School of Art and the University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School and was the first executive director of the New Haven-based nonprofit arts and community organization NXTHVN. She is the founder and CEO of the self-styled “arts innovation platform” The Building Fund.

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas festival has been run by interim directors since Shelley Quiala left in 2024 for personal reasons after serving as executive director for four years. Longtime board member “Rev Kev” Ewing oversaw the 2025 festival. This year’s festival was arranged by managing director Melissa Huber, lead programmer Thérèse LaGamma, community impact manager Shannon Miller and longtime festival employee Tiffany Hopkins.

Previous executive directors include Paul Collard, who was from England, Mary Miller ,who was from Scotland and longest-serving artistic director Mary Lou Aleskie, who was originally from New Jersey and had previously led the La Jolla Music Society in California. All the International Festival of Arts & Ideas executive directors had previous experience presenting or producing cultural arts events, sometimes as one element of larger jobs.

In a statement announcing okoro’s appointment, Creative Evolutions, Arts & Ideas board co-chair Risë Nelson said, “Her vision of the festival as a platform for cultural expression and engagement that is ‘locally rooted, regionally supported, and globally oriented’ resonated deeply with us. As we look to the future, we are excited to welcome a leader whose experience, values, and deep appreciation for our community will help strengthen the Festival’s role as a vibrant gathering place for artists, audiences, and neighbors alike.”

The leadership transition has already begun for okoro, who will officially begin her new position on Aug. 1.

One of CT’s longest-running LGBTQ film festivals is getting bigger and shorter

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas was created after New Haven’s hosting of the Special Olympics World Games in 1995 proved that the city could benefit from a large-scale summer festival. Key events such as free outdoor concerts and the Ideas series of lectures, seminars and conferences take place in mid- to late June, where the festival has become a needed tourism boost at a precarious time of year for local businesses, between the departure of college students in May and the vacation period that begins later in the summer. Over time, the festival became more of a year-round endeavor. While it had begun as a way of bringing international acts to New Haven, from the start it also involved Connecticut artists, whether by encouraging local fringe festivals, booking local bands (and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra) for free concerts on New Haven Green, or commissioning shows by New Haven-based theater companies.

okoro spoke to both the local and global aspects of the festival in a statement accompanying the announcement of her hiring: “The word ‘international’ in our name is a call to action, to build spaces of belonging that hold each of us in our full complexity and transform difference into shared possibility. I envision a festival that deepens its roots in New Haven, while boldly reimagining our city as a living nexus — a global gathering place where the artists, thinkers, and movements that shape our world converge and collide to spark the civic imagination.”

For more information on the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, including tickets to events happening this month, go to artidea.org.

When John Lithgow accepted his Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role on Sunday night for playing author Roald Dahl in the biodrama “Giant,”  the actor recalled the first time he’d won a Tony 53 years ago. That first win was “The Changing Room,” which had its U.S. premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven before transferring to Broadway with the same cast. Lithgow distinguished himself among a strong cast of 22 actors in David Storey’s ensemble piece about a rugby team to win a Tony for Best Supporting Actor. In his autobiography and in a one-man show, Lithgow has credited Long Wharf for starting his professional acting career. He returned to Long Wharf in 1984 to star in “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and visited again with one of his solo shows in 2014.

Bess Wohl, who won for writing the ensemble play “Liberation,” set during the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, wrote her first play, “Cats Talk Back!” while she was a student in the acting program at the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale). She graduated from the drama school in 2002. Her breakthrough drama “Small Mouth Sounds” played Long Wharf Theatre on its national tour in 2017. Her play “Make Believe” (a dark drama which had a cast of young children performing its entire first act) had its world premiere at Hartford Stage in 2018, directed by fellow Yale drama school alum Jackson Gay. Earlier this year “Liberation” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Connecticut has a strong connection to dozens of 2026 Tony nominees. Here are some familiar faces

Wohl’s “Cats Talk Back!” was a satire based around imagined feelings of the performers in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running Broadway phenomenon “Cats,” deconstructing the musical and seeing it from other cultural and religious perspectives. Those who remember seeing “Cats Talk Back!’ when it was done at the student-run Yale Cabaret around a quarter century ago find it amusing that another big Tony winner this year was “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” It similarly found a new framework in which to examine the musical that Lloyd Webber based on the poetry book “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” by T.S. Eliot.

“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” was co-directed by Bill Rauch, who had just one previous Broadway directing credit (for “All the Way” in 2014) but has been a legendary figure in the regional theater world for decades. Rauch’s itinerant Cornerstone Theater Company, which adapted classic plays to fit and involve the communities in which they performed them, devised “The Good Person of New Haven” (based on Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechuan”) for Long Wharf Theatre in 2000. James Bundy, who just left his position as dean of the Geffen School of Drama at Yale last month after 22 years, worked with Rauch when they were both undergraduates at Harvard University and later in Cornerstone. When Bundy became dean in 2002, the first show he produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre was Rauch’s landmark mash-up “Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella.” Rauch also directed Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” for Yale Rep in 2005.

Another connection between “Cats,” “Liberation” and Connecticut is costume designer Qween Jean, who was nominated for her designs for both “Liberation” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” and won for the latter. Jean designed the costumes for the Yale Rep presentation of “Macbeth in Stride” in 2024, which was written and performed by “Liberation” director Whitney White.

The most lauded revival at the Tonys this year was of “Death of a Salesman,” which won for Best Revival of a Play, Best Direction of a Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play, Best Scenic Design of a Play, Best Lighting Design of a Play and Best Sound Design of a Play. Arthur Miller wrote the immortal American tragedy in a writing studio he built himself at his longtime home in Roxbury. That writing studio is currently the subject of a preservation campaign. The Connecticut theater with which Miller was most closely associated in his lifetime was the Long Wharf, which did major revivals of several of his plays and also world-premiered one of his last, “Broken Glass.” In recent years, Hartford Stage has done productions of Miller’s “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman,” while Long Wharf Theatre staged Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” on the New Haven waterfront.

The directing career of Joe Mantello, who directed the “Death of a Salesman” revival, is largely New York-centered, but he did helm the world premiere of a curious collaboration between solo theater artists David Cale and Dael Orlandersmith, “The Blue Album,” for the Long Wharf in 2007. Many of Mantello’s Broadway hits have visited Connecticut on tour, “Wicked” foremost among them.

The scenic design for “Death of a Salesman” was by Chloe Lamford, whose design for the outrageous choral play “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour” by Lee Hall was seen in New Haven when it had its U.S. premiere at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2015.

Mikaal Sulaiman’s win for Best Sound Design for a Play for “Death of a Salesman” made him the first Black sound designer to win that award. Sulaiman served as the head of the sound design concentration at the Geffen School of Drama at Yale and sound design advisor at Yale Repertory Theatre from 2021 to 2024.

“Schmigadoon,” the parodic musical comedy based on the theatrical fantasy Apple TV series of the same name, won the Tony for Best Musical as well as Best Book and Best Score for its main creative force, 1986 Yale University grad Cinco Paul. “Schmigadoon” was also was honored for its tricky orchestrations, which must exert a contemporary power while paying homage to classic musical stylings of the mid-20th century. Those orchestrations won a Tony for Mike Morris, who was director of music at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School from 1999 to 2017, and his regular collaborator Doug Besterman. Morris has worked with Ivoryton Playhouse, TheaterWorks Hartford and Goodspeed Musicals. Besterman did the arrangements, orchestrations and musical supervision for the world premiere of the stage adaptation of “Summer Stock” at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2024.

All four people who won Tonys for the hit vampire musical “The Lost Boys” have notable Connecticut theater credits. Shoshana Bean, who won for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, did a solo concert in 2021 that was televised as part of the PBS series “Stars On Stage From Westport Country Playhouse. Bean also visited Connecticut with national tours of Broadway shows, as far back as “Leader of the Pack” in 2021, plus some gigs singing with the esoteric New York musical ensemble Postmodern Jukebox. Ali Louis Bourzgui, who won for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical, played four separate roles as young men seduced by the father character in “Fun Home” at TheaterWorks Hartford in 2022 and was also at The Bushnell in the national tour of the musical “The Band’s Visit.” Dane Laffrey, winner for Best Scenic Design for a Musical for “The Lost Boys,” designed the world premieres of “Deathless” in 2017 and “Theory of Relativity” at Goodspeed Musicals’ Terris Theatre. Jen Schriever, who won a Tony for co-creating the musical’s lighting design with the show’s director Michael Arden, also workers on “Theory of Relativity” at the Terris Theatre and has two other Goodspeed credits, “A Connecticut Christmas Carol” and “Jim Henson’s Emmet Otter.”

Awards not presented at the main televised Tonys ceremony include the honorary awards given for lifetime achievement. One of those honorees was James Lapine, the playwright and director known for his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim (“Into the Woods”) and William Finn (“Falsettos”). Lapine directed the world premiere of his play “Fran’s Bed” at Long Wharf in 2003. One of the stars of that production, Harris Yulin, who died in June 2025, was among those remembered in the 2026 Tonys telecast’s “In Memoriam” segment.

Mary Mitchell-Campbell, who received the Tonys’ Isabelle Stevenson Award for philanthropic or advocacy work, is a respected musical arranger and music director. Mitchell-Campbell, who was honored for co-founding Musicians United for Social Equity and co-founding Artists Striving to End Poverty among other activities, worked on Julie Andrews’ “The Great American Mousical” at Goodspeed’s Terris Theatre in 2012. The many Broadway shows she contributed to that have toured to Connecticut include “Water for Elephants,” which was at The Bushnell just last week and will be at the Waterbury Palace in January.

The Tonys are chiefly meant to honor Broadway theaters but for the past 50 years has also given a Special Tony Award for Regional Theater. Connecticut theaters which have won the award include Hartford Stage, Goodspeed Musicals, Long Wharf, Yale Rep and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. This year, the regional theater award went to the League of Regional Theaters, a national organization which unites, promotes and advocates for regional theaters around the country, including in collective bargaining agreements. Hartford Stage, Goodspeed, Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Westport Country Playhouse are all member theaters of LORT.

The theater is known for goofy, campy, original musical theater shows that riotously riff on fairy tales, folklore, TV shows and other familiar cultural tropes. It is also one of remarkably few theaters — in Connecticut or in America in general — to embrace the British holiday tradition of rowdy “panto” variety shows, known for call-and-response routines involving the audience, bad puns, lavish costumes and over-the-top performances.

Pantochino has developed a deeply appreciative, fun-loving audience for what it does. Its shows routinely sell out but it’s too happy at the MAC right now to move to larger quarters. The shows are carefully created to suit all ages — the kind of shows where some lines go over kids’ heads and hit the funnybones of an older crowd.

“We have an amazing fan base of adults who come see our shows,” said Pantochino co-founder Bert Bernardi, who writes all the company’s original shows, including the three in the 2026-27 season. “They come from Hartford, Danbury, the Shoreline, all over. We’re always asking them, ‘How did you find us?’”

Bernardi called the style that Pantochino has honed for its shows “family-friendly, within reason. Our audiences will go for whatever we do.”

A committed fan base means that Pantochino can do the shows it wants to do the way it wants to do them. “Ideas can come from many different places,” Bernardi said. “They can come from things I’ve read in the newspaper. Our show ‘The Waffle House Five,’ about some friends who said they’d share the winnings from a lottery ticket, then didn’t, was based on a true story. We can get a little edgy.”

Besides its MAC mainstage season, another wildly popular program the company runs is a summer youth theater summer camp in Milford in which a new musical is written by the company and performed by children each week. This year, all 160 spots in the program were filled by eight minutes after the registration period opened, Bernardi said.

Pantochino Productions grew out of a children’s theater company that Bernardi ran for nearly 30 years at Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport. In 2010, the Pantochino company was created to continue doing children’s theater but also extend the company’s singular style to other theater formats. The founders were Bernardi and his husband/muse Jimmy Johansmeyer, who played most of the bad guy roles in the Downtown Cabaret children’s theater and who has become a busy actor beyond his prolific work with Bernardi. Johansmeyer has acted in several shows at the Legacy Theatre in Branford, as well as at theaters in New York state and Maine. He also has a behind-the-scenes theater career as a costume designer.

The third key person in the Pantochino company is composer Justin Rugg, who writes all the company’s original musicals alongside Bernardi. “We met Justin at the first audition for the first show we did, “Cinderella Skeleton,” Bernardi recalled.

“We were originally renting space in New Haven. Then we were invited by the Milford Arts Council to perform there.”

Pantochino also has a rehearsal, scene shop and storage space in the Connecticut Post Mall, where it can develop its shows. “We can’t perform there, but it’s perfect for rehearsals,” Bernardi said,

“Oue rehearsals are very workshoppy,” he explains. “’What can we do? How can we change it?’ We have such a great time putting it together.”

The way the company usually operates is that Bernardi writes a script, then gives it to Rugg who offers suggestions while starting to gather ideas for the score, and then involved Johansmeyer. “Justin has a sharp vision for what it can be,” Bernardi says. “Jimmy has a lot of ideas of how things can be improved. Something the scripts go untouched, other times they change a lot.”

Bernardi rarely performs in the shows he writes, though he might occasionally make an appearance as Victoria Sautee, a Dame Edna-type drag character he created years ago and who hosted a semiweekly streaming program called “Let’s Learn Stuff” during the COVID shutdown. Sautee has been a fairy godmother, a genie and other fairy tale characters.

A grander inspiration for Bernardi’s work than Dame Edna is the legendary writer and actor Charles Busch, known for such disparate works as the Broadway hit “Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” the Broadway adaptation of the musical “Taboo” and the cult theater classics “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” “Psycho Beach Party” and “Red Scare on Sunset.” Busch himself, who once made a special concert appearance at the MAC thanks to Pantochino, will be in Connecticut this month performing his cabaret show “My Leading Ladies” on June 28 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.

Pantochino Productions has announced four shows for its 2026-27 season at Milford Arts Council:

“The Real Housewives of Sleepy Hollow,” Oct. 9-25, blends the Washington Irving short story about a horrific moonlit ride set in New York State’s Hudson Valley area with the ubiquitous outrageous “housewives” types from modern reality TV. “It’s a love story,” Bernardi said. “I love seeing those characters from ‘Sleepy Hollow’ like Ichabod Crane and Katrina von Tassel through the eyes of these catty women.”

“Christmas Carol, the Panto,” Dec. 4-20 is a rare return engagement for Pantochino. Bernardi prefers to craft a new panto each year but the enthusiastic response to the company’s irreverent 2022 reworking of the Charles Dickens classic, both from audiences and from the actors who were in it, led to this revival. He also appears as Victoria Sautee in a cameo role in the show. “It will be very similar to the last time. We had such a fun time, and it really is something everyone loves to see,” Bernardi said.

Pantochino’s Teen Theatre company will perform “Urinetown, the Musical” Feb. 26-28, 2027. For the teen company, Pantochino licenses existing musical theater shows rather than writing new ones. Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’ political satire about a repressive government that charges citizens for the right to relieve themselves was an unlikely Broadway hit in 2001 and has since become a staple at small theaters and college theaters.

“At This Performance,” April 23 through May 9, 2027, is about what happens on the opening night of a star-studded new Broadway show when the leading lady does not show up and the show must go on.

“‘At This Performance’ is loosely based on a situation I was involved with,” Bernardi said, telling a tale that sounds too ridiculous to be true about “when a star couldn’t go at the last minute and the director went on instead. The director was male and the role was Evita. I was amused by what could happen if that happened on a Broadway scale.”

Tickets for all Pantochino Productions shows in the 2026-27 season go on sale Aug. 1. The shows are presented in a cabaret style with some table seating at the Milford Arts Council space inside the Milford train station building at 40 Railroad Ave. South in Milford. More information is at pantochino.com or milfordarts.org.

When you lean in to appreciate the detail, you find that most of these intricately interrelated shapes and colors and symbols are more abstract than they at first appear. Instead of an encroaching reality, you get prompts for the creative imagination. That’s an extraordinary talent, deconstructing the world into a dream and entrancing viewers who might have expected something very different.

The preparation for these new works created especially for this exhibit has the same unexpected blend of extreme real-world detail and imaginative bursts of artistic invention. Capanna’s art is about connections, but it defies easy patterns.

Capanna lives and works in Philadelphia. Process is important to her work, and it shows. She apparently likes to have movies or videos on while she paints. She paints fast and freely in oils enhanced with wax and marble dust that gives her work an extra shine.

MATRIX artists are given special latitude about how their work is displayed in the space and are also given special access to The Wadsworth and its collection to inspire them. For this exhibit, Capanna used canvases of the same size as the entrance of the gallery, then based a series of new works on well-known pieces from The Wadsworth’s permanent American Art collection including mid-20th century works by Florine Stettheimer and Bob Thompson, as well John Trumbull, who died in 1843.

Program notes explained that Capanna found movies she felt responded to the art that inspired her and had them on while she painted. Titles such as “Flowers, Ladders, Fires, Flags” reflect her range of influences. The room is capped off by a patterned frame for the entranceway whose dimensions provided a format for the paintings. That fabricated panel of plaster and red earth pigment is amusingly titled “Sinopia for an Egress.”

The exhibit works just as well if you don’t have information about its origins as it does if you do. The sense of something fitting a space well can be felt without being overstressed with text and diagrams.

Capanna’s work is lively, colorful, fresh and inviting. It is also layered in ways that term does not usually cover. These works have layers of life, art, research and lived-in appreciation for the place where it’s hanging. Whether you access these layered through your own study and preparation or just sense them, you feel well taken care of by this art.

Fourth-floor exhibits at Yale Art Gallery are separate and independent but line up beautifully

Mariel Capanna’s MATRIX 198 exhibit is on view through July 26 at The Wadsworth, 600 Main St., Hartford. Hours are Wednesday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Museum admission is $22, $18 for seniors, $10 for youth and students and free for Hartford residents. thewadsworth.org.

This year’s event runs June 12-20 and features nine days of in-person screenings followed by a several days of streaming films. Except for the closing night screening at the Connecticut Science Center at 250 Columbus Blvd. in Hartford, all the in-person screenings are at Cinestudio on the Trinity College campus, located at 300 Summit St. in Hartford.

The festival is one of the oldest still-running film festivals in the state. For years, its director and president has been Shane Engstrom, who has served the organization for over a quarter of a century under various titles. The films are selected by a committee whose members each watch hundreds of films a years. There can be over 700 submissions to the festival each year. From those titles, under a hundred make the cut, most shown in public with others available to stream.

The festival happened in June for decades, but when many Hartford-based Pride activities shifted to October due to a surfeit of parades, festivals and other events in June, the 2023 event took place in the fall. June has been known as Pride Month for over a half a century, since the New York City Gay Pride parade tradition began in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising of June 28, 1969. The Connecticut LGBTQ Film Festival returned to a June schedule in 2024 and remains there.

There are always films with a Connecticut connection at the festival. Last year, one of the main features was a documentary about the couple that ran the vegan restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport. This year there are at least seven films with local talent either acting or directing. They include “My Friend Kim” (made by Connecticut residents about other Connecticut residents and filmed at local landmarks like TheaterWorks Hartford, The Buttonwood Tree and Wind Hill Farm), “The New Gardener” (whose writer/producer grew up in Connecticut), “Speechless” (filmed at Dudleytown Brewing Co. in Windsor with actors from that area), “Welcome Home, Jeremy Diaz” (by Bridgeport-based directed Jason Coombs who is actively involved with the Bridgeport Film Fest and the Bridgeport Pride Center), “You First” (a student film made at Wesleyan University) and “About Face” (made in Hartford by Hartford native Robin Cloud).

This year, there is a special focus on short films. While the Connecticut LGBTQ Film Festival has always had a focus on short films, there are more of them this year, including shorts programs nightly for most of the festival’s first week and many more shorts online. Part of the reason for the shorts theme is that the festival recently became one of the organizations that can submit films for consideration for the Iris Award, an international queer cinema competition based in Wales, which awards 40,000 British pounds to the winning short.

None of the films in the 2026 Connecticut LGBTQ Film Festival is more than a couple of years old and most released this year. There are some amusing pairings of films with similar titles: “On the Road” and “On the Sea” both playing on June 13, and  “Dreams” and “Dreamers” both playing on June 14.

The lineup includes six features, most of them accompanied by an opening short film or two, being screened in the festival’s opening weekend June 12-14. There are then separate short film programs Monday through Thursday, and one feature (and opening short) on June 19 and 20.

The feature films being screened are, in chronological order:

“In a Whisper,” June 12 at 7:30 p.m. The opening night screening, followed by an opening night party, is Leyla Bouzid’s drama about a woman investigating her uncle’s death while dealing with her own family issues. The opening short is “Ronita Rambo.”

“We Are Pat,” June 13 at 4 p.m. The controversial “Saturday Night Live” character Pat, whose gender was the object of speculation by others, is explored through a contemporary trans/nonbinary lens by director Rowan Haber and features the involvement of Julia Sweeney, who played Pat.

“On the Sea,” June 13 at  7 p.m. Helen Walsh directed this British feature about a mussel farmer who encounters a young drifter. The opening short is “A Cold One.”

“On the Road,” June 13 at 9:30 p.m.  Not the Jack Kerouac title but a Spanish-language Mexican film about a hustler and a truck driver. The festival notes that “On the Road” contains explicit sexual and violent content. The opening short is “Fragile.”

“Dreams,” June 14 at 4 p.m. A Norwegian feature about a girl whose journal writings out her to her mother and grandmother. The opening short is “Salsa!” and there is also a pizza party following this screening.

“Dreamers,” June 14 at 7:30 p.m. A British film concerning a Nigerian woman struggling with the immigration system. There are two opening shorts, “Dandelion” and “Always Azizam” plus a pizza party before the screening.

“Eva,” June 19 at 7 p.m. A French/Arabic production directed by William Reyes about a trans woman and her family. The opening short is “Zari.”

“My Brother’s Killer,” June 19 at 9:30 p.m. Rachel Mason’s film examines the death of gay porn actor/producer Billy London, a murder that went unsolved for over 30 years. There are two opening shorts, “Witness & Exhausted” and “Sore.”

“Departures,” June 20 at 7 p.m. The closing night film, screening at the Connecticut Science Center, is about two British airline passengers who get to know each other intimately. The opening short is “Kiloran Bay.”

The shorts programs are “Men in Briefs: Gay Shorts,” June 15 at 7:30 p.m., “Friends of Carol: Lesbian Shorts” June 16 at 7:30 p.m., “And the Winner Is: Award-winning Shorts” June 17 at 7:30 p.m. and “Authenticity: Trans and Nonbinary Shorts” June 18 at 7:30 p.m. There is a reception before the “And the Winner Is” program at 6:30 p.m. on June 17.

There is also an online streaming Virtual Encore series running for a week after the main public festival has ended. Those titles include: Joonho Parks’ “3670,” set in the Korean gay community (screened with the short “Fairy Play”; Ivona Juka’s Croatian post-World War II drama “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” with opening short “Apnea”; Donncha Gilmore’s “Girls & Boys,” a relationship story set in Dublin with opening shorts “Precious Fantasy” and “Anyway, I Piss Sitting Down”; Jeffrey McHale’s “It’s Dorothy” about “The Wizard of Oz”’s gay icon Dorothy Gale with opening short “Arman”; Alice Douard’s “Love Letters” about a lesbian couple having legal issues regarding their soon-to-be-born child with opening short “The Loon”; Xiaodan He’s “Montreal, My Beautiful” about a forlorn Chinese woman in Canada with opening short “Close to September”; Terry Loane’s “Tomorrow’s Too Late” about a transitioning celebrity with opening shorts “Period and “The Ties That Bind” plus the shorts programs “Global Entry: Shorts from Around the World:” “Truth Be Told: Documentary Shorts” and a selection of personal favorites shorts from the selection committee members,

Tickets to single in-person screenings are $13 or $11 for seniors or $30 ($25 seniors) for the opening night and closing night screenings and receptions. All in-person screenings are free to students with ID. Ticket for streaming offerings are $13, $11 for seniors and $5 for students. A pass to the entire festival, including the public and virtual screenings and the various receptions, is $125, $200 for a household. Five-show passes good for either in-person or online screenings are $50, $90 household. A Virtual Encore Pass for the streaming events in the second week of the festival is $60.

For more information about ticket sales and events, go to outfilmct.org.

These types of concerts are part of a tradition that’s older than Broadway. Expect classics from the American songbook, wily new interpretations of contemporary pop songs, Broadway standards and lots of sweet between-song patter.

There are several other acts adding personal twists to surefire musical formats this week. The midwestern ensemble Greensky Bluegrass adds modern jam smarts to old folk instrumental traditions. Indie folk artist Melissa Ferrick has stood out from the New England folk crowd for decades. Besides creating her own distinctive solo style she teaches songwriting and “psychology of creativity” classes as a faculty member at Northeastern University and previously taught at Berklee School of Music. Joyce Manor broke out of the cookie-cutter second generation punk rock scene in California and is still touring and recording with the vitality of a new band. You could say almost the same thing about Young the Giant except it’s less punky. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy has taken a love for the sort of rocking swing band jazz found on groovy LPs from the ‘60s and has made it their own sound for the past several decades. They dress cool, too.

The band whipping through Connecticut this week that really can’t be said to have burst from a large previously existing musical genre. Devo’s early live shows are the stuff of legend. By the time of their second major label album “Duty Now for the Future” in 1979, the band was playing large theaters on the East Coast. A concert would begin with a preshow soundtrack of unearthly throbbing sonic vibrations which the band announced were designed to make the audience defecate in their pants. It didn’t quite do that, but you could feel it in your stomach. The music was always entrancing, if polarizing.

Not only does Devo stand out on any given week in any given year or decade, a Connecticut show is a rare sighting. Devo has not played Connecticut since July 1980 on the “Freedom of Choice” tour. That show was at the now defunct Stage West in West Hartford, the site of the better-known venue the Agora Ballroom. A casino show by Devo seems like a whole new opportunity for the band to practice its experiments on political, social and capitalist systems. The band’s current motto (and tour title) is “mutate, don’t stagnate,” and it’s one Devo has lived by for half a century of dedicated devolution.

Matt Doyle

Matt Doyle has appeared on Broadway in “Company,” “Book of Mormon,” “Spring Awakening” and “War Horse.” He’s the June attraction at John McDaniel’s bimonthly Sunday Broadway Concert Series. Legacy Theatre, 128 Thimble Islands Road, Branford. June 7 at 2 p.m. $41.50-$61.50. legacytheatrect.org.

Bridging the Gaps: An Afternoon of Poetry

The Mark Twain House & Museum, a bastion of literary virtues, holds a benefit poetry reading for the Nook Farm Writers Collaborative, a summer writing program for teens, at the museum. Those reading include Sean F. Forbes, Iris Hida, Joyce Hida, Emily Hockaday, Tom Lagasse, Steven Straight, Elizabeth Thomas and T’challa Williams. The hosts are Victoria Nordlund and Karen Warinsky. Mark Twain House & Museum, 351 Farmington Ave., Hartford. June 7 at 3 p.m. Suggested donations are $5, $10 or $25. marktwainhouse.org.

Joyce Manor

The California punk band Joyce Manor formed in 2008. Two founding members, vocalist/guitarist Barry Johnson and Chase Knobbe, are still in the band, as well as bassist Matt Ebert, who joined in 2010. The drummer, that’s what changes. A new Joyce Manor album, “I Used to Go to This Bar,” was released this year. Toad’s Place, 300 York St., New Haven. June 7 at 7:30 p.m. $59.25, $48.25 in advance. toadsplace.com.

Melissa Herrick

The indie rock folk singer Melissa Ferrick, a legend in the Boston music scene, released nearly 20 albums between 1993 and 2015, a number of them on her own record label Right On. Fairfield Theater Company, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield. June 9 at 7:30 p.m. $43-$51. fairfieldtheatre.org.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

The rocking swing jazz ensemble, a longtime favorite at the Connecticut casinos, has a couple of nice club and theater dates upcoming: June 10 at 8 p.m. at Infinity Music Hall, 32 Front St., Hartford. ($47.42-$82.99; infinityhall.com) and June 15 at 7:30 p.m. at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, 300 Main St., Old Saybrook. ($69; thekate.org).

Greensky Bluegrass

The Michigan-rooted bluegrass jam band Greensky Bluegrass plays a big outdoor show on June 11 at 7 p.m. at Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts, 40 Jesup Road, Westport. $110, $50 lawn; discounts for pavilion members. levittpavilion.com.

Marcus King Band

Marcus King has been playing guitar for a quarter century now, and he’s only 29 years old. The rock/soul/blues axeman and his band will be performing at Foxwoods Resort Casino’s Premier Theater, 350 Trolley Line Blvd., Mashantucket. June 11 at 8 p.m. Penelope Road opens. $39.95-$121.75. foxwoods.com.

Inner Groove

The Old State House’s Summer Music Series began last week and continues with Inner Groove, a classic rock cover band with diverse tastes and even a few original songs. Connecticut’s Old State House, 800 Main St., Hartford. June 12 at noon. Free. wp.cga.ct.gov/osh.

Jordan Davis

Jordan Davis, whose earliest hits were “Singles You Up,” “Take It From Me” and “Slow Dance in a Parking Lot,” released his third album last year. Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, 500 Broad St., Bridgeport. June 12 at 7 p.m. hartfordhealthcareamp.com.

Megan Hilty

The Broadway (“Death Becomes Her”) and TV (“Smash”) star brings her concert show to the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. June 12 at 8 p.m. $46.40-$119. shubert.com.

Curtis Hasselbring’s The Curhachestra

The singular jazz ensemble The Curhachestra is led by a trombonist, backed by lap steel guitar, electric bass and drums. Firehouse 12, 45 Crown St., New Haven. June 12 at 8:30 and 10 p.m. $20. firehouse12.com.

Nook Farm Lawn Party

The Stowe Center holds its annual outdoor lawn party, noting that this year marks the 215th anniversary of Stowe’s birth and the 150th anniversary of her neighbor Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” There are activities, refreshments, info booths and talks. Stowe Center for Literary Activism, 77 Forest St., Hartford. June 13 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free. stowecenter.org.

Young the Giant

The California rock band Young the Giant formed in 2004, put out its first album in 2010 and its sixth album “Victory Garden” just this year. With Cold War Kids. Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, 500 Broad St., Bridgeport. June 13 at 6:30 p.m. $53.50-$816.25. hartfordhealthcareamp.com.

Latino Comedy Fest

Angel Rentas and four or five other stand-ups comedians will perform to benefit the 2026 Hartford Latino Fest. The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. June 13 at 7 p.m. $40. bushnell.org.

Giselle

Connecticut Ballet stages the classic 1841 ballet composed by Adolphe Adam. There are two performances: June 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford ($53.40-$120.05; palacestamford.org) and June 20 at 7:30 p.m. at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford ($49.50-$116; bushnell.org).

Devo

The Ohio band/art movement/social prognosticators Devo make its first Connecticut appearance in decades. Foxwoods Resort Casino’s Premier Theater, 350 Trolley Line Blvd., Mashantucket. June 13 at 8 p.m. $49.35-$132.15. foxwoods.com.