Democracy and war come to the front this week, as do food, theater and vinyl records.
Monday, November 6
The latest New Haven Restaurant Week, in which 31 local restaurants offer extra value to entice diners to try or return, began yesterday and runs through Friday. With some exceptions, participating restaurants—like 116 Crown, Basta, Elm City Social, Harvest, Miya’s, Olea, Tarry Lodge and Zinc—are serving $17 two-course lunches and $34 three-course dinners from special prix fixe menus. “Advanced reservations are recommended” but not strictly necessary, and “prices do not include beverage, tax or gratuity.”
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Tuesday, November 7 – Election Day
Local elections happen today across the state from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. New Haveners are voting for mayor, board of alders, city clerk, probate judge and, in some districts, board of education. Wherever you live in Connecticut, you can find your polling place here and familiarize yourself with the ballot by clicking on your town or city here.
At the New Haven Museum (114 Whitney Ave, New Haven; 203-562-4183), World War I exhibition The Courier: Tales from the Great War gets a free opening reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Offering a “hyper-local perspective on a worldwide event,” the show features original large-scale work by comic book illustrator Nadir Balan—“a series of dynamic, oversized, graphic-novel style murals, based on the dramatic WWI diary of one New Haven serviceman who witnessed firsthand the adventure, horror and pathos of the front lines”—and “selected photos and annotations from a scrapbook [the serviceman] put together after returning to New Haven in April, 1919.”
Wednesday, November 8
At 6:15 p.m., with refreshments cracked open at 5:30, the New Haven Preservation Trust presents a free lecture on “Preserving & Celebrating African American Historic Places” in a fitting place: “the oldest African American UCC church in the world,” a.k.a. Dixwell Avenue United Church of Christ (217 Dixwell Ave, New Haven). The speaker is Brent Leggs—a senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and an author of a book on the subject at hand—and you can register to attend by emailing info@nhpt.org.
Thursday, November 9
The Institute Library’s two-part participation in this year’s Tellabration!, which describes itself as “a night of storytelling celebrated world-wide on or about the third Saturday in November,” happens tonight and next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Featuring “a program of stories for adults,” tonight’s lineup includes Anna Bninski, Tarn Granucci, Jezrie Marcano-Courtney, Denise Santisteban, Dana Savo and Arlene Szcarba. $10 suggested donation.
At 8 p.m., New Haven Theater Company (839 Chapel St, New Haven) presents its second performance of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, which its producers suggest is at least as much about the famous figure’s flaws as his gifts. Tickets cost $20, with performances on select nights through November 18.
Friday, November 10
There’s more and still more theater tonight. Since Wednesday, the historic Shubert (247 College St, New Haven; 203-562-5666) has been staging a touring production of The Sound of Music, the beloved musical that world-premiered there in 1959. Today there are shows at 2—a special Veterans Day matinee—and 7:30 p.m., with tickets costing between $39 and $126.
Meanwhile, also offering matinee (4 p.m.) and regular (8 p.m.) performances today, the Yale School of Drama presents Perfectly Timed Photos Taken Before a Disaster in the Yale School of Art’s Iseman Theater (1156 Chapel St, New Haven). Following a character named Jody Finkral, a young man with a dying father and a “highly successful career as an author of online fanfiction,” the play “peeks into a world and a family on the brink of collapse, where the boundaries between reality and fiction are not as clear as they once were.” Reservations, which can be made online, are free but appear to be required.
Saturday, November 11 – Veterans Day
With good timing, the Knights of Columbus Museum (1 State St, New Haven; 203-865-0400) hosts Yale history prof and international politics and economics expert Paul Kennedy for a free 2 p.m. talk about “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Probing “the shifts in global power during the last 500 years, with a concentration on World Wars I and II,” Kennedy’s lecture dovetails nicely with the museum’s current primary exhibit, World War I: Beyond the Front Lines, which, along with more traditional artifacts and explanations, features replica soldiers’ garb you can try on for size (pictured above), a shockingly heavy infantry pack you can attempt to lift and a life-sized trench you can walk through.
Sunday, November 12
A “Record Riot”—a vinyl music-heavy hawk-and-talk that pops up in towns and cities throughout the region but was born in Wallingford—happens in the Annex YMA Club (554 Woodward Ave, New Haven) from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Bringing together “dealers from all over the east coast and Canada” and local vinyl, CD and memorabilia seekers, organizers promise “over 40 tables of the rare and not-so-rare in the world of records.” It costs $3 to attend, or $10 if you want to get early access starting at 8 a.m.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image depicts former staff writer Anne Ewbank trying on a replica WWI uniform at the Knights of Columbus Museum. Readers are encouraged to verify times, locations and prices before attending events.
