The Tony Award has been good to Side Man. Since winning that theatre prize for best play in 1999, Warren Leight's drama has sped across the regional circuit. Now, the jazz world drama is coming to Connecticut. The Stamford Theatre Works will present Side Man Nov. 1-19. Dennis Delaney will direct. Other theatres which have presented Side Man over the past 12 months include the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, San Jose Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Arizona Theatre Company, the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Philadelphia Theatre Company and the Unicorn Theatre Company in Kansas City, MO. In addition, the play has bowed in London's West End and at an arts festival in Galway, Ireland.

In Side Man, Leight tells the partly autobiographical tale of Clifford, and his trials growing up with a father who is a distant jazz trumpeter and a temperamental mother slowly driven mad by her inattentive husband.

--By Robert Simonson