From Mozart to a mindreader, a string quartet to The Streams, Harry Potter rock bands to Shakespearean hip-hop. It’s a topsy-turvy week of wonderment in New Haven.
Monday, April 2
Tiff Jimber knows how to work a piano. She’s fun to watch, and she mixes her sensitive original tunes with reworked covers of everything from Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park” to Guns N Roses’ “Civil War.” That latter tune’s a souvenir of Jimber’s experience playing with Duff McKagan on the VH-1 show Rock N Roll Fantasy Camp. Tonight you’ll find her at The Outer Space (295 Treadwell St. #18, Hamden; 203-288-6400). Doors open 5 p.m. $5.
Tuesday, April 3
From Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Erich Wolfgang Korngold to John Adams, the St. Lawrence String Quartet challenges your sense of strings. The foursome, based at Stanford University in California, heads east to play Yale’s Sprague Hall at 8 p.m. tonight. 470 College St., New Haven; 203-432-4158.
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Wednesday, April 4
Mind reader Joshua Seth brings his show “Beyond Belief: An Intimate Evening of Psychological Illusion” to Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center at 8 p.m. tonight. Now why doesn’t a useful guy like this visit closer to exam time? Admission is $10 or free for SCSU staff and students; SCSU students can even bring up to two guests in free as well. Lyman Center is on the university’s campus at 501 Crescent St., New Haven. (203) 392-6154.
Thursday, April 5
“The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.” Harry Potter may be all grown up, his story ended. But the netherworld of pop bands devoted to the Potter mythos lingers on. The genre is called “Wizard Rock,” and half a dozen practitioners ride their broomsticks to a Weasleystock festival tonight at The Space (295 Treadwell St. #18, Hamden; 203-288-6400). Put on your round spectacles and “wrock” out to no less than three Weasley acts from Rhode Island (Lauren Fairweather, Justin Finch-Fletchley & the Sugar Quills and The Whomping Willows), two from Connecticut (Bella and le Strangers, George’s Left Ear) plus The Blibbering Humdingers all the way from North Carolina. The magic starts at 6 p.m. $10.
Friday, April 6
David Brooks reunited his old band The Streams in December nearly two decades after they’d last played. An album of remastered, largely unreleased tracks from the old days also appeared and got lots of local radio airplay. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait another 20 years for The Streams to play again. The band is at Café Nine tonight, with other veterans of the New Haven music scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s: The Shellye Valauskas Experience, featuring Dean Falcone, and some local all-stars backing Spike Priggen (whose band back in the day was Hello Strangers).
Saturday, April 7
“Holla, you clown!,” quoth Touchstone in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The bard gets a hip-hop remix tonight from Yale’s Teeth Slam Poets, who’ve crafted contemporary responses to famous Shakespearean quotations and deliver the results, for free, in a “Slamlet,” 7:30 p.m. April 7 at the Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St., New Haven).
There’s further blendings of age-old and newfangled traditions tonight at Café Nine (250 State St., New Haven; 203-789-8281), where the twisted local troupe Circus Delecti is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Besides amazing astounding performances, there’s a raffle, plus live music from DJ Znuh and They Hate Us. 9 p.m. $5 (“$3 if dressed to impress”).
Sunday, April 8
Easter Sunday, so watch out for rabbits.
If you want the pious spirit of the day tempered with a little bad-guy comedy, Square Foot Theatre ends its weekend run of Bugsy Malone Jr. with a 2 p.m. matinee this afternoon. The show is a stage version of the 1976 Alan Parker film (starring Scott Baio and Jodie Foster) in which a typical 1920s gangster film scenario is enacted by children with toys and cream pies. There are also performances April 8-10 at 8 p.m. $15; $12 in advance. In the Hamden Plaza, 2100 Dixwell Ave., Hamden. (203) 464-8212.
Written by Christopher Arnott.
