Author: Michael Witthaus

NH Audubon in Concord showcases artist Jackie Hanson

Starting Tuesday, March 12, the artwork of New Hampshire native Jackie Hanson will be on display at the Susan N. McLane Audubon Center at 84 Silk Road.

“It is a really nice space,” Hanson said, describing the venue. “Great natural light, plenty of wall space — I feel like I need to make a few more pieces before I hang the show.”

Hanson, a 2022 Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from New England College (after the New Hampshire Art Institute merged with the school) was thrilled to be asked by the New Hampshire Audubon to exhibit her collection titled “Human/Nature.”

“I do a lot of landscapes and other nature-based things,” Hanson said. This will be her third showing since September.

“I had my art hang at two different public libraries last year,” she said. “The first one was Nashua Public Library. That was in September and October. Then my work went to Amherst Town Library in December.”

The NH Audubon describes this collection on their website as “immersive landscapes that feature both well-known and overlooked vantages.”

Hanson likes to pick and choose how to express an image.

“This show will all be in soft pastel,” Hanson said, “which is kind of like a chalk. That’s what that series of work is, but apart from that I also like to use watercolors, acrylic, wash … I like to jump around in different mediums. I find that if I do switch now and then, then I am better at all of them when I switch again.”

The collection for this show is solid. “I believe I have around 15 or 20 pieces. The biggest one that I have is called ‘Annie C Maguire Shipwrecked Here 1886.’” The painting measures 30 by 62 inches installed.“It is a four-panel, I guess quadriptych, of a panoramic view at Portland headlight in Maine. I named it that because there is a rock that you can see that they have to repaint it every few months because of the tide, but it says the name of a shipwreck that happened there.”

Hanson, as the NH Audubon points out, enjoys the vantage points less traveled.

“I have done a few pieces in this way, where I went to an iconic landscape in New England and I kind of turned away from the classic view, which in this case would be the lighthouse,” Hanson said. “I had it behind me and I was taking a view of the little cove next to it instead. And you can actually see the place that most people stand to take their photo of the lighthouse in my painting.”

Hanson grew up in an artistic family; her mother is an artist and has “always been doing artwork,” she said. “My family and my mom have shaped my idea of what’s beautiful in the world. So I like to promote that with other people, to look for beauty in everyday moments. ”

“I have a full-time job and it can be tricky,” she said; Hanson makes the most of her time, though, “painting at night and on the weekends. As we get into the warmer months, I do a lot of art and craft fairs on the weekends. You can find me all around the state and sometimes into Maine or Massachusetts, bringing my art and prints and cards and stickers of my art to different places. I like to do pop-ups, making it accessible to everyday people to have artwork in their homes. That’s a lot of how I get my art income. I do have my work at a store in Contoocook called Maple Street Mercantile as well.” The majority of her pieces will be for sale at the McLane Center.

Be on the lookout for future shows from Hanson.

“I just finished up an unrelated series that’s in mostly acrylic but some mixed media that’s botanicals, mostly house plants. I wanted to make sure that they had a distinctly feminine aesthetic.” As she sees it, “a lot of the high art world and some of the academic art world doesn’t think that things considered feminine are necessarily worthy…. So, a lot of pink, a lot of vibrant colors. I was thinking: art by a woman for women.”

Human/Nature
Where: McLane Audubon Center, 84 Silk Farm Road, Concord
When: March 12 through May 17; the gallery is open Tuesdays through Fridays 11 a.m to 5 p.m.
An artist reception will be held Saturday, March 23, from 2 to 4 p.m.

More info: “Looking Back: Owl’s Head” by Jackie Hansonart. Courtesy Photo.

Palace performs The Prom

A quartet of Broadway actors in need of a reputation reboot and a gay high school student looking to disrupt the status quo in her small town are at the center of The Prom, a musical that’s at turns heartwarming and hilarious. The latest production from the Palace Theatre, it will run Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through March 24.

Creative Director Carl Rajotte decided to do the show after watching a Netflix adaptation of it with Palace staff during the pandemic.

“We just all loved it,” he said in a recent phone interview. “People cried, we all laughed; we thought this should be something that we put in our season once we reopened.”

The story begins as diva actors Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman are finishing opening night of Eleanor: The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. The musical is immediately panned by the critics for missing the point. Both actors are slammed for being narcissistic and out of touch. Dee Dee is played by Michelle Rajotte, seen most recently in Dancing Queens. Jay Falzone plays Barry; it’s the ninth production for the Palace veteran.

Crestfallen, the two decide to combine altruism and public relations and look for a cause. With help from Trent Oliver, an underemployed Juilliard graduate (Richard Gomez), and Angie Dickinson, an actress who wants to move beyond 20 years in the Chicago chorus line (Katie Harvey), they learn about Emma (played by Palace newcomer Juliana Chimenti), whose attempt to take her girlfriend to the prom caused the whole thing to be canceled.

To the soundtrack of the un-self-aware anthem “Changing Lives,” the four hatch a plan to love-bomb the prom back into existence. Hopping on the bus with Trent, who’s in a non-union touring company of Godspell, they head to Indiana and an incredulous reception. The object of their crusade (mixing in Godspell is a lovely touch) is among the most bewildered.

Of course, the well-meaning bunch is undeterred. Like four bedazzled bulls in a China shop, they push their Big Apple agenda, as it were (“I’m a liberal from New York who’s come to save you!” Trent shouts at one point), on a cornfield community. Gratefully, life lessons outnumber caricatures, and The Prom’s heart shines through in the end.

The Prom’s greatest strength is taking a serious topic and leavening it with outsized humor, while weaving in compelling subplots to move the action along. The Broadway-loving (and Emma ally) high school principal who has a lifelong crush on Dee Dee, and Barry vicariously living his dashed high school prom hopes through Emma, are among the entanglements that carry things forward — along with great songs.

Ultimately, it succeeds because of what’s stumbled upon in an errant pursuit of redemption.

“It’s a comedy but it has so much heart too, it’s so charming,” Rajotte said. “Elites from the big city come thinking that they’ll bowl over the small town and they begin to learn where the soul of this place is, and they learn about themselves as well in the process.”

In preparing for the show, Rajotte was surprised to learn that playwright Jack Viertel got the idea for The Prom from a real event. “In Mississippi in 2010, a girl went to her school and asked to bring her girlfriend, and she wanted to wear a tux and they ended up canceling the whole prom,” he said. “That kind of hit me hard; that’s why this show is just so important.”

A few years back, Rajotte helped with a prom for teenagers in the Palace’s Youth Theatre program; it opened his eyes. “I thought … we’ll put some music up, dance a little bit,” he said. “But then I talked to the kids; one came to me, and this hit me like a brick wall. He said, ‘thank you so much for doing this…. I love it here more than school because I’m able to dance and be myself, and no one will make fun of me.’”

The moment reminded him why the show’s message matters. “Being inclusive and taking a moment to step in someone else’s shoes for a second before you judge … see it from another point of view and see how much someone can be hurt because of that,” he said. With The Prom, “we’re trying to get that message across, of course, with a ton of humor.”

The Prom
When: Fridays, March 8, March 15 and March 22, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays, March 9, March 16 and March 23, at 2 and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays, March 10, March 17 and March 24, at 2 p.m.
Where: Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $28 and up at palactheatre.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Cue Zero production explores Lizzie Borden case

One century before O.J. Simpson’s televised court proceeding captivated a nation, a murder case in Fall River, Mass., was the country’s first big media trial. In it, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of killing her parents with an ax, but she remained forever guilty in the court of public opinion. Blood Relations, written by Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock and due to be performed by Cue Zero Theatre Co., explores the many questions that still remain.

Brian Dembkoski has long been drawn to the Lizzie Borden legend.

“Being a homegrown New England boy, it’s always been intriguing,” Dembkoski said in a recent phone interview. He decided to direct Blood Relations after seeing two very different performances of the play, in different parts of the country. “When I got to read it myself, I just kind of fell in love with it. Every single scene is a power struggle between characters, and it’s just so well-written.”

Billed as Lizzie’s side of the story, it’s structured as a play within a play. The main character, Miss Lizzie, played by Cass Durand, talks with her friend The Actress, played by Heidi Krantz, who wants to learn what really happened on the night of the murder.

“She basically says, ‘OK, you want to know if I did it? Let’s play a game,’” Dembkoski said. “Her friend then becomes the younger version of herself, and Miss Lizzie takes her through the scenario, puts her in the same situation … for her to make her own decisions.”

What ensues may or may not be a confession, he continued, noting that Borden is “a bit of an unreliable narrator, which is just one of the really neat, fascinating things about it…. We still have that ambiguity at the end; did she or didn’t she? Are we any closer to an answer than we were in the beginning? Hard to say.”

Along with playing the lead, Durand also acts as the play’s intimacy coordinator, a role Dembkoski felt was needed to help actors navigate a stiff-as-starch family dynamic. “It’s not so much because we’re having a lot of steamy scenes or anything; very much the opposite — rather, looking at what happens with people when they don’t have that basic intimacy…. It helps in exploring the idea of touch starvation or skin hunger.”

The cast includes Nate Faro playing “the ill-fated Andrew Borden” and Christie Conticchio as “the even more ill-fated Abby Borden.” Both have appeared in previous Cue Zero efforts. Faro was in Radium Girls and Conticchio directed the Harry Potter send-up Puffs two years ago. Dembkoski also appeared in that production, his initial Cue Zero foray.

Adding to the play’s meta multiplicity, Lizzie’s sister Emma is represented twice; Crystal Welch plays her late in life, and Chrissy Kelly, in a role created specifically for this production, plays a “modern-day Emma Borden, the actual sister much like Miss Lizzie is the actual Lizzie,” Dembkoski explained.

Rounding out the ensemble are Joshua Benham as Harry Wingate, Lizzie’s step-uncle and a pivotal character in her plot — if, of course, she was really guilty. The role of Dr. Patrick, Lizzie’s close ally, is played by Matthew Brides, who played the lead in Cue Zero’s 2023 production of Macbeth.

This is Dembkoski’s first directing job at Cue Zero. In the 1990s he studied theater arts at Plymouth State and then earned a master’s from Humboldt State, now Cal Poly Humboldt. After working in Southern California in the early 2000s, he left the theater world; he moved back to New Hampshire in 2007. When he began teaching at Nashua Community College in 2016, he was recruited to be an adviser with the school’s Theatre Arts Guild.

“That was my first kind of dipping my toes back into it … helping the younger folk and sharing some of my knowledge,” he said. As the pandemic was ending, Hatbox Theatre in Concord asked him to appear in its production of A Christmas Carol; there, he met Conticchio, which led him to Cue Zero.

There, he met Executive Director Dan Pelletier, who would agree to his pitch to do Blood Relations.

“A saying I’ve always clung to when it comes to doing anything in our field is ‘things lead to things,’ because doing Christmas Carol led me into Puffs,” he said. “Step forward a few more times to putting forth the idea to direct Blood Relations. Dan was happy to let me do it…. It was a great example of things leading to things.”

Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations
When: Friday, March 1, and Saturday, March 2, 7:30 p.m.,
and Sunday, March 3, 2 p.m.
Location: Arts Academy of New Hampshire, 19 Keewaydin Dr., No. 4, Salem
Tickets: $15 at cztheatre.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.