Author: Michael Witthaus

Slow walk to romance

The Bridges of Madison County musical in Manchester

Even though it won Tonys for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations, The Bridges of Madison County opened on Valentine’s Day in 2014 and closed in mid-May. Dr. Alan Kaplan, the founder and artistic director for the Manchester Community Theatre Players, has an inkling about why this happened and will apply his ideas in an upcoming production of the musical.

“This is a play I’ve been interested in for many years,” he said in a recent phone interview. Kaplan has read the novel, seen the Clint Eastwood-directed movie, and watched the first staging of the show in Williamstown, Mass. He even conversed with Jason Robert Brown, who wrote the Tony-winning music and lyrics.

The story centers on a fated couple and the decisions they must make when their connection becomes undeniable.

Francesca Johnson (Susan Schott) is a beautiful Italian woman who married an American GI as World War II was ending to escape her ravaged country. Twenty years later she’s preparing for a rare stretch of solitude on her Iowa farm while her family is away at the State Fair. Her reverie is interrupted when photographer Robert Kincaid (Don LaDuke) pulls into her driveway, asking for directions to a bridge he’s shooting for a National Geographic story.

The songs are varied and evocative, as good as anything to come from Broadway. “What Do You Call a Man Like That?” is an operatic waltz that perfectly captures the reticent housewife’s growing desire, while “Another Time,” an echo sung by Robert’s former wife, has a folky, Joni Mitchell feel. Sung by Francesca’s husband Bud (Dan Arlen), “Something From a Dream” is an aching ode to a marriage that, unknown to him, may be slipping from his grasp.

Though the music is powerful, it’s the story that brings power to the show. Hovering over forbidden love is the question of what might have been. In Francesca’s case, the man she left in Italy for glamor across the sea that never materialized, and for Robert, a driven nature that left little room for human connection.

For Kaplan, it was this element that attracted him most to directing The Bridges of Madison County.

“Usually with a musical, the music carries the show; the acting should be reasonable, but the music can cover it,” he said. “This is a musical where the actors have to really be on their game, and it gave me the opportunity as a director to really pull the most out of a cast in terms of acting ability.”

One of the challenges in presenting the play is conveying a sense of place and distance. Much of the action happens during phone calls between Francesca and her husband, Bud, as she struggles with her newfound love for Robert and how it might change her future. Some critics found the Broadway staging jarring.

“All the set pieces were on stage all the time,” Kaplan recalled, and juxtaposing cast members hundreds of miles apart was another problem. “You may have a bridge in the middle of a kitchen, or a refrigerator in the middle of an outdoor scene. It was confusing.”

Outdoor scenes more easy to accomplish in a movie were harder to do theatrically. So Kaplan took cues from Eastwood and placed a big screen at the rear of the stage to project scenery. A videographer was commissioned to capture locations in Iowa, and there is footage of Naples, Italy, and the cities Francesca imagined visiting in America.

The main set, Francesca’s kitchen, is on wheels and can be moved as the action demands. It’s an elaborate production for a community theater. That’s something Kaplan tries for whenever MCTP mounts a play, but it was particularly urgent in the case of this show, one so close to his heart.

“We didn’t want to just repeat something that only had a hundred performances on Broadway and then closed after four months,” he said, “I think that the reasons for it, as I mentioned, were pretty obvious. So the hope here is that we have improved on it.”

The Bridges of Madison County
When: Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through May 4
Where: MCTP Theatre at North End Montessori School, 698 Beech St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, $10 for ages 18 and under at mctp.info

Featured photo: The Bridges of Madison County. Courtesy photo.

Musical conversation

Brewery concert series welcomes folk duo Hildaland

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

A wry and oft-repeated maxim at Berklee College of Music is that booking so many gigs that there’s no time for class is a worthy goal, even if it means not graduating. That was fiddler Louise Bichan’s plan when she arrived from Scotland in the mid-2010s, but the connections she made at the Boston school changed her mind.

“I was playing in a band that were kind of doing well and taking off back home when I left for Berklee and I planned to go back and rejoin after a year,” she said in a recent Zoom chat. “It didn’t work out that way; there were so many great people to learn from and to play with … there was so much I wanted to get out of it. So I ended up staying.”

One of the musicians Bichan met was mandolin player Ethan Setiawan. The two became members of Corner House, a four-piece band that formed at Berklee and had their first gig at the 2017 Fresh Grass Festival in the Berkshires. In 2019, they spun off as Hildaland, taking their name from a Scottish folk tale about shape-shifting seals.

Setiawan, during the same Zoom call, said the intimacy of a duo appealed to them. “We can be more improvisational and spontaneous within the framework that we’ve created in these songs and tunes because there’s one line of communication.” A band, on the other hand? “It’s exponential.”

Bichan, a native of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, and Indiana-born Setiawan carry on a lovely musical conversation. In 2019 they recorded an EP, less a debut than an attempt at defining themselves.

“We don’t really sound much like that anymore,” Setiawan said. “It was very experimental … just kind of us playing around.”

Synthesizing those rough beginnings with a few years playing together led to Sule Skerry, an 11-song album that includes reworked traditional tunes like the lovely title track, and uplifting originals. “Silver Dollar,” Bichan’s instrumental tribute to her aunt and uncle’s 25th wedding anniversary, is a standout.

Another gem is Setiawan’s “Weezy & Vera,” with ebullient interplay between the two. There are also covers of Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” and “Fall On My Knees,” a standard that’s been done by Red Clay Ramblers, The Freight Hoppers and others, along with a lush interpretation of the 19th-century Scottish love poem “Ettrick.”

“Our main inspiration comes from my Scottish roots and Ethan’s roots in old-time American and maybe a little bluegrass — and Ethan also is a great jazz musician,” Bichan said. “And the more we’ve worked up new material and played together, the more we’ve refined what our sound is.”

Innovative Celtic harpist and Berklee instructor Maeve Gilchrist was a helpful mentor early on. They worked together in the studio on Corner House’s debut LP.

“Maeve is such a complete musician; we talked about many different aspects of tune writing,” Setiawan said. “She has such a grasp of harmony, and a great sense of playing a melody.”

Hildaland will perform at Blasty Bough Brewing in Epsom on April 18, part of the ongoing Blasty Trad roots music series spearheaded by brewery head Dave Stewart. Bichan performed there a few years back with another band. Surprisingly, she learned about the local series, which began in 2018, while playing overseas.

“David’s daughter Madeline is a great fiddle player; we met in Glasgow, where I used to live,” she said. “We did a live session at BBC Radio Scotland. It was four of us, each in a corner of a big studio; we went around the room and everyone played something. That’s how we met.”

Bichan and Setiawan, who live together in Cornish, Maine, are working on an EP to follow up Sule Skerry.

“It goes back to our tune playing roots,” Setiawan said of the songs, which have developed during their live shows. “That will be coming out later this year. Then we definitely have an eye towards the next sort of full record that will have some more songs and a mix of things.”

Hildaland

When: Friday, April 18, 7 p.m.
Where: Blasty Bough Brewing Co., 3 Griffin Road, Epsom
Tickets: $30 and up at cocoatickets.com

Featured photo. Hildaland. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/04/17

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

• Folk duo: Celebrating 10 years since releasing their debut album, A Wolf in the Doorway, The Ballroom Thieves are in the region for a few shows, including one at a music-friendly Lakes Region winery. The duo of Caitlin Peters and Martin Early offers lovely harmonies accompanied by guitar and cello. 2024’s “self-portrait” LP Sundust was a meditation on the nature of tenderness. Thursday, April 17, 7 p.m., Hermit Woods Winery, 72 Main St., Meredith, $45 at eventbrite.com.

• Five strings: Though she began her musical career in bluegrass — Alison Brown was for a brief moment in the late ’80s a member of Alison Krauss & Union Station — she’s taken the banjo to another place in recent years. Her eponymous quintet performs a local show. Brown weaves jazz, Celtic and other influences into “a sonic tapestry.” Friday, April 18, 7 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $33 at palacetheatre.org.

• Funny guy: Still going strong in his fifth decade telling jokes, Lenny Clarke began as the open mic host at Cambridge’s Ding Ho Restaurant in the early ’80s, when the scene was booming. Clarke went on to acting success, appearing in films like There’s Something About Mary and starring in his own sitcom, Lenny. Friday, April 18, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $35 at tupelohall.com.

• Indie night: An eclectic evening of music downtown, with The Doldrums atop the bill, a raucous band with Green Day and Killers punk ’n’ polish energy belying its name. For something completely different, Regals is a country rock quintet owing a debt to Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons. Still Sleeping makes its debut, and Birds, In Theory is a sonically furious powerhouse with smart lyrics. Saturday, April 19, 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $10 at the door, 21+.

• Two tone: Defying the odds, Canadian ska punk band The Planet Smashers are still alive and well after 32 years — at one point, the group disbanded because they couldn’t find their drummer. In 2016, lead singer Matt Collyer fractured his neck and wrote a love song about it. It’s on their ninth album, 2024’s Too Much Information. Collyer is the only founding member still in the band. Wednesday, April 23, 7 p.m., Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester, $21 at dice.fm.

Two-lane runway

Book recounts the roots of Manchester Airport

By Michael Witthaus

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Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was followed by a surge of interest in aviation. This so-called “Lindbergh Boom” inspired construction of a pair of runways on what’s now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. A hangar and administrative building were added in the 1930s, and it became an Army base as World War II approached.

Today few physical traces of this history remain. Leah Dearborn, an Associate Director at Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, set out to find and document memories of Grenier Field, as the facility came to be known. Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front was published late last year.

Dearborn will talk about her book and take questions during an April 18 appearance at the Bookery in Manchester. In a recent phone interview she shared her motivations for writing it, along with some of the fascinating things learned during her research.

“It’s an interesting era in history, and also one that’s slipping by us very quickly,” she said. “I think part of this project was driven by the urgency of some of this history. If we don’t do something about it right now, the remaining people who can tell us about it might not be able to in the near future.”

The story begins with a humorous twist: Civic rivalry is a big reason why the airfield came to be in the first place.

“Charles Lindbergh was doing a tour across the United States, and when he got to Manchester there wasn’t an airport,” Dearborn said. “So he had to skip Manchester and go to Concord. That spurred the movement for Manchester Airport to be built; I like to call it a spite airport.”

Many of those interviewed for the book were children during the war years, and their recollections were surprising. Flying was still relatively new, and accidents were frequent. In fact, American fatalities in flight training were significantly higher than those sustained in air combat.

“By 1943, there were six fatal training accidents per day,” Dearborn said.

Many crashes happened at Grenier, she continued. “Local kids would bike out to them, just out of curiosity … and they’d pull little souvenirs off the plane. Just learning about the childhood of these local kids who spent all their time at the base or around it, watching from afar, was pretty interesting.”

The base was named for Second Lieutenant Jean Grenier, a Manchester native who crashed in Utah while scouting a flight route. He was one of many Army pilots who quickly took over commercial mail delivery following the so-called Airmail Scandal in 1934. A rapid handoff of responsibilities, coupled with a brutal winter, resulted in many flying deaths.

“This was being done mainly by pilots with very limited experience, in open cockpit aircraft, in some of the worst weather in decades,” Dearborn said. “A lot of them lost their lives in the few months that this was planned, and Jean Grenier was, unfortunately, one of those.”

As Dearborn researched her book, a group of museum volunteers were engaged in reprocessing the archives. “When they found something in their effort that might connect back to what I was doing, they would leave it on my desk,” she recalled. “I’d walk in in the morning and find this stack of paper … that was really helpful.”

Among the valuable finds was a trove of newspaper clippings spanning the war’s early years to the 1950s. “Somebody at Grenier in the military was keeping tabs on the war abroad,” Dearborn said. “Anytime a New Hampshire soldier … made the news, somebody at a desk was taking a pair of scissors and cutting these out.”

At the Bookery, Dearborn will dive into favorite Grenier memories and display some photos. However, the best moments frequently happen after her presentation.

“People come with their own stories, and sometimes that’s where I get the best leads for new writing projects,” she said. “I ended up talking to a man who fought during the Battle of the Bulge for this book, and that’s exactly how I met him. I gave a talk on the history of ballooning, and a friend of his came up at the end and said, ‘You really ought to talk to this guy, he witnessed the Hindenburg fly over New England.’ Stuff like that is pretty invaluable.”

Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front w/ author Leah Dearborn

When: Friday, April 18, 5-7 p.m.
Where: Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester,
Tickets: free; reserve at bookerymht.com

Featured photo: Leah Dearborn. Courtesy photo.

Remembering Brooks Young

Friends and bandmates to perform tribute show

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

The New England music scene suffered a huge loss last October, when Brooks Young was killed in a car accident. The guitarist, singer and songwriter was celebrating a wave of success that included tours with George Thorogood, Sammy Hagar and Three Dog Night, and shows sharing the stage with stars like Bryan Adams and B.B. King.

Young’s career was fueled equally by talent and tenacity.

“If someone called and wanted him for a good gig, he was saying yes,” Mike Liane, a bandmate of Young’s organizing a memorial show in Concord, recalled recently. “He didn’t care, and I say this in a loving way, if the group of people around him were going to be able to do it. He knew he was going to do that gig.”

Occasionally, he’d book a show and learn some members of his band had prior commitments, Liane continued. That didn’t matter; Young would put together a quick pickup group or, failing that, do the show solo. “Brooks wasn’t going to lose an opportunity for anyone … he just had this confidence and bravery. ”

Young was a genre-bending rocker who began in the blues. He met B.B. King in his late teens, after the legendary guitarist performed in Manchester on September 11, 2001. Eight years later Young’s band opened for King in Concord. Over his career Young would range into rock and pop, without losing his early inspiration, Liane recalled.

“The thing that paints an accurate picture in my mind of what he really liked to do is when we’d play ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ The reason I say that is because it has very true, deep blues roots, but we’d do it in a way that was muscular and a little rock … he would take all his influences and combine them into every performance.”

The April 13 event at BNH Stage is a fundraiser to benefit Young’s three children. House band performers span the Brooks Young Band’s history, including drummer Blake Wyman, a member of the group’s first incarnation. Three other drummers will be on hand as well: Adam Soucy, Rob McCarthy and Dave Lombard, who was behind the kit longest.

“Usually the hardest band member to find is a good drummer, but in this instance we’ve got four that raised their hand,” Liane said. “But outside of the drummers, the lineup’s pretty consistent. Charles Mitchell’s on bass … there’s myself and Mike Gallant on guitars, and Jeff LeRoy, who played keys with Brooks basically his entire career … a great band.”

Also performing is Charlie Farren, who contributed to Young’s second album. “They had a relationship since then, and we’re delighted that he’s going to play,” Liane said. “He’s going to do a few songs, and hopefully I can get him on stage to sing some harmony with us or something like that during the set with the Brooks Young Band.”

Also appearing are Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart and Valerie Baretto, and there will likely be additional guests.

Liane was a band member late in the game, accompanying him on Three Dog Night and George Thorogood tours from 2016 to 2020, but he’d known Young since high school. He recalls when the two enrolled in an introductory guitar class, even though both were pretty good players at that point.

“We just wanted to play guitar, but we also knew we could get a really good grade,” he recalled. “While everyone else was learning ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ he would show me a Clapton lick, and then I would show him an Angus Young lick. We did that during class.”

His old friend never lost the joy of being a musician, Liane continued, recalling another memory that happened a lot.

“Every night standing side stage, he’d put his hands on my shoulders right before we walked out and he’d look me right in the eye and he’d say, Mike, we’re going to have a good time tonight,” he said. “Every single time that he did this, and it was hundreds of times, but every single time he did this, he was excited, he had a huge smile on his face, and it’s the only place on Earth he wanted to be in that moment.”

Memorial Concert for Brooks Young

When: Sunday, April 13, 4 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20 and up at ccanh.com
Appearing are Brooks Young Band, with Charlie Farren, Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart, Mikey G and Valerie Baretto

Featured photo. Brooks Young. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/04/10

• Join the band: On a tour that includes stops at five New England high schools, Dallas Brass performs music ranging from classical to Broadway, swing and American standards. The ensemble has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and other vaunted venues. For a show in Derry, they’ll welcome Pinkerton Academy students to play, along with local middle schoolers. Thursday, April 10, 7 p.m., Stockbridge Theatre, 5 Pinkerton St., Derry, $15 and up, 437-5210.

• Crowd work pro: Few comedians incorporate an audience into their act quite like Paula Poundstone. She has a knack for finding something to talk about with just about anyone, anywhere; her act has a handful of jokes and a lot of back and forth. She moves easily from topic to topic like a Beetle at a car rally, keeping her sets as fresh as the fans that regularly return to see her perform. Friday, April 11, 7:30 p.m., Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $25 and up at ccanh.com.

• Mixed up music: One of the more unique tribute acts on the scene, Pink Talking Fish imagines what a mashup of three bands — Pink Floyd, Talking Heads and Phish — might sound like. For an upcoming show they’re playing it a bit straight. For the 50th anniversary of Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, they’ll recreate the album in the first set, and do their thing to it the next set. Friday, April 11, 8 p.m., Rochester Opera House, 31 Wakefield St., Rochester, $20 at rochesteroperahouse.com.

• Return to base: A Concord favorite and current ex-pat working in Nashville, Senie Hunt returns for a brief regional tour that includes a show with his electric blues rock Project in a downtown showcase. Known for his percussive guitar sound, Hunt’s heavier effort is a blend of originals and covers, drawing inspiration from The Allman Brothers Band, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix. Saturday, April 12, 7:30 p.m., BNH Stage, 60 S. Main St., Concord, $24 at ccanh.com.

• Back and forth: Lean and limber blues rock trio The Record Company would have been right at home in a ’70s milieu that produced Cactus, ZZ Top and Three Man Army. Foundational blues influences like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon are filtered through the lens of no-nonsense rock for a muscular sound. Their latest effort, 2023’s The Fourth Album, is a fierce rendering of this approach. Sunday, April 13, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $45 at tupelohall.com.

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