Author: Michael Witthaus

Kelly MacFarland headlines at Chunky’s

For Kelly MacFarland, succeeding as a female comedian isn’t more or less difficult than succeeding in any other profession.

“There are unique challenges for women in general, so take all of those and just apply them to this job as well,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m scrappy, and I learned early on that I might have to work a little harder in some ways. … [But] if I can do the job well, being a woman is going to serve me.”

MacFarland’s ethic is borne out; she regularly headlines, has appeared on Comedy Central, NBC’s Last Comic Standing and the 2019 Comics Come Home benefit show in Boston and has new sets on the Hulu show Up Early Tonight and Dry Bar Comedy.

“I always just focused on being the best comedian that I could be, and I still do that,” she said. “In that way, hopefully I’m just undeniable … [and] it won’t matter what my gender is.”

Though she loved TV funny women, MacFarland’s early influences were men: Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy.

“I’m not super-delicate,” she said. “To me, it was that male energy.”

This would change in hindsight.

“Looking back on it, a lot of those female comics had a male energy that I liked as I was getting older,” she said, citing Joan Rivers and Rosie O’Donnell as examples. “That aggressive kind of comedy that is … unapologetic, I guess, is the best way to say it.”

On stage, MacFarland riffs a lot on her home life. She married in 2016 and isn’t coy about the union’s many non-romantic benefits.

“When he said, ‘Do you wanna marry me?’ I was like, ‘I do, because I want to put out another album.’ The one I just released is all about him and my stepson. So, thanks. I need to put the divorce album out. I’m really excited,” she laughed. “No, we’re not gonna do that.”

When it comes to Covid-19, the opposite’s true.

“At first, I loved talking about the pandemic; now I’m done,” she said. “I write from an emotional place, which seems really silly, because I’m a comedian. But as soon as the world started to open up again, I actually found my writer’s block kind of go away. In 2021, I want to discover a whole new thing to talk about. I’m excited about that.”

After spending much of the last year doing podcasts, including the well-received I’m Fine with fellow comic Dan Crohn, MacFarland is pleased to be back performing to equally enthusiastic (albeit socially distanced) crowds.

“The audience is so grateful that you’re willing to come out, and you’re so grateful,” she said. “It’s a love fest; how would you be angry? You just risked catching the virus to come here, and paid money, so be on your best behavior.”

She’s especially fond of Granite State comedy fans.

“I love the people in New Hampshire; they want to have a good time,” she said. “One of the things I love about standup is that for any audience I want them to feel like they’re having a moment in time that they haven’t had before and that I haven’t had before. … New Hampshire really delivers on that. I don’t know if it’s that they realize what I’m doing and or if it’s just that New England way of being very engaged.”

MacFarland uses a pre-pandemic analogy to illustrate her point.

“If you sit down at a bar in New England, you’re going to talk to the person next to you; it’s just how it works here,” she said. “You’ll find out their name and where they’re from and whatever. Playing in New Hampshire is like bellying up to the bar with a new friend, and that’s so fun to me.”

As mass vaccinations offer hope for herd immunity, MacFarland is thinking of a cultural renaissance akin to the one that followed the flu epidemic of 1918; however, she goes a step further.

“They keep saying that’s how the Roaring Twenties happened,” she said. “I don’t care about the roar; I care about cash. [I want] people to want to go out. Please come to a show and support live performance.”

Kelly MacFarland
When: Saturday, March 27, 8 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema & Pub, 150 Bridge St., Pelham
Tickets: $15 at headlinerscomedyclub.com

Featured photo: Kelly MacFarland. Courtesy photo.

Take3 on a mission to the mainstream

Classical music is rigorous and demanding, its top purveyors virtuosic — but it’s box office anathema. Charity, not ticket sales, provides the majority of revenue for most American orchestras.

Enter Lindsay Deutsch. She launched her group Take3 to change the genre’s perception. The violin, piano and cello trio performs modern songs like “Despacito” and “Yellow” with the same musical discipline Deutsch learned when she was classically trained at The Colburn School in Los Angeles.

It’s an approach familiar to fans of Netflix’s Bridgerton, which offered string quartet renditions of Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 hits, among others, but Deutsch arguably got there first. Beyond that, her kinetic stage presence is singularly unique. She’s to the violin what Ian Anderson is on the flute with Jethro Tull, stalking the boards like a dervish.

The idea for reimagining pop songs as classical pieces came from frustration with the medium’s strict rules.

“The thing about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven is you have to play in a box, so to speak,” Deutsch said in a recent phone interview. “As an artist, I felt like … I have this huge voice, and people keep asking me not to use my voice, but to try and figure out what this dead, old white guy wants.”

Deutsch’s light bulb moment came when she traveled to Saudi Arabia for a last-minute spot playing with Yanni. The New Age superstar had found her on YouTube; she’d never heard of him until he called to say his regular violinist was leaving to have a baby. She had three weeks to learn the material; it would be her first time performing with amplification and in-ear monitors.

During her initial solo, Deutsch couldn’t hear anything and feared the worst was happening.

“I’m just fingering the violin, I can’t hear one note, I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “My thought is, OK, this is my first and last performance with Yanni, because I’m gonna for sure be fired.”

When she glanced at the bandleader, however, he was smiling broadly at her.

“I look up further and see a sea of people on their feet, cheering. That’s when I realized my in-ear monitors are fine; it’s the sound of the crowd that is so loud.”

For Deutsch, it was a revelation.

“In classical music, we don’t have audiences that make that kind of noise,” she said. “It was something that I realized I was really missing. … I became kind of addicted to that passion and to that fire the audience was giving me in response to this crossover style. After that moment, I just never looked back.”

Though the group’s material is accessible, it remains musically challenging.

“Take3 never felt that just playing the tune was good enough, because we had the chops to play big concerti with an orchestra,” Deutsch said. “We were not going to be happy with just playing single notes and easy renditions. So we made this stuff super hard, and we added double stops all over the place and cool techniques. … We wanted to really show off what we learned.”

After a few lineup changes, Take3 is currently Deutsch, Juilliard-trained pianist Jason Stoll and fellow L.A.-based cellist Mikala Schmitz, who studied at Cleveland Institute of Music.

“It’s very rare to find serious classical musicians that have the chops needed who can also let their hair down and have fun. … It’s been beaten into us since we were 5 years old to read the music, play exactly you see,” Deutsch said. “I’m saying the music is a guide, and if you want to diverge from that, have a little fun and do something different, by all means go for it. We’re on stage to have a good time.”

Though she’s playing a violin that’s over two centuries old, Deutsch knows she’s competing with 21^st-century distractions like movies and video games.

“These amazing things that people are used to seeing … if I just walk out on stage and plop myself down in a chair, it doesn’t matter how good it sounds, I’m never going to compete with modern-day entertainment.”

A livestreamed show sponsored by the Palace Theatre in Manchester on March 26 will feature Take3 performing a wide selection of material.

“It’s just all our favorite tunes that we’ve been playing over the last three years,” Deutsch said. “Anything from Justin Bieber to The Beatles to Coldplay, Pirates of the Caribbean and Game of Thrones. All good stuff.”

Take3 Virtual Stream
When: Friday, March 26, 8 p.m.
Where: Hosted by The Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Take3. Courtesy photo.

Ryan Montbleau unveils first of four new EPs

On the first track of his latest record, Ryan Montbleau celebrates imperfection. “If things don’t have to be perfect, it’s a lot easier for them to be right,” Montbleau sings, quoting his therapist.

There’s a lot of self-care on the new EP Wood, the first in a series to be followed by Fire, Water and Air. Montbleau tends to look on the bright side of things, like his upcoming gig at Portsmouth’s Music Hall on March 19. True, social distancing rules will reduce crowd size, but performing in the storied Historic Theatre instead of the smaller Loft space is a big plus.

“I’ve always wanted to play there; all it took was them limiting capacity to 20 percent,” Montbleau said with a laugh in a recent phone interview.

Similarly, the Massachusetts-born singer-songwriter managed to turn his pandemic year into a growth experience.

“It kind of sped up the process of life,’ he said. “It’s weird, but in some ways I’ve almost never been happier.”

Montbleau purchased his first house, in Burlington, Vermont. He took piano lessons, did weekly Facebook Live sets and the odd solo gig, and appeared on a local music talk show.

“I’ve been very lucky through all this; it’s kind of allowed me to stay in one place for once and start to build a home life,” he said.

Spotify and other streaming services provided a cushion as well.

“I’ve been building this thing for 20 years, and I don’t have to tour my face off like I used to,” he said.

One bit of good fortune: He completed the basic tracks for the new music in summer 2019, playing with a rotating cast that included jazz jam legend Martin Medeski. Montbleau worked with producer Adam Landry (Deer Tick, Rayland Baxter) at Guilford Studio in southern Vermont.

“I had just amazing people coming in and out,” he said. “Turning it into a record [is] what’s taken the last year and a half … a lot of tweaking, taking things out and putting them in.”

He divided the collection’s 15 tracks into four themes. Wood is rustic and down to earth, while Fire rocks hard. Water is calm, reflective, with songs inspired by time Montbleau spent doing medicine work in Peru.

“I would sit in the jungle in a tent for 10 days and work with different plants,” he said, calling the experience “pretty life-altering. … It points you in a different direction. … I feel like some of those songs were gifts; that’s why they ended up on Water.”

The final chapter, Air, offers a sense of closure and peace. It ends with “The Dust” and Montbleau singing, “just know that you are not alone, and that’s all you get to know now.”

Wood, Fire, Water and Air’s songs reflect a long and sometimes difficult period for Montbleau.

“My old band split up around 2013 and I lost my management at the time; I had a long relationship end and I’d been on the road for 10 years,” he said. “I had a lot of growing to do. Since then, I’ve been searching for who I am, how to heal and how to be better.”

Wood was scheduled to be released on March 12; the others are expected to arrive over the next three to four months.

The just-released EP includes the charming “Ankles,” an autobiographical song that touches upon his first tour, where he suffered a burst appendix and a busted van. Montbleau soldiered on in spite of that nightmare, becoming a festival staple along the way.

“If I could survive this, I could survive anything,” he decided.

“On the road I found my muses, off the road I lost my mind,” he sings, concluding with, “off the road I lost my uses, on the road I found my shine.” For most touring musicians, Montbleau explained, standing still is where the trouble begins.

It’s also where his growth had to start.

“You get so used to being on stage and having people appreciate what you do… when you get home finally and you’re just sitting alone in a room, it’s really daunting,” he said. “What is my purpose? What are my uses? Back on the road, I would find my shine under the lights, and find my purpose again. So I think the years leading up to now have been me digging deep and figuring out who I am, and who I was before I started doing this.”

An Evening With Ryan Montbleau
When: Friday, March 19, 8 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $38 at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Ryan Montbleau. Photo by Shervin Lainez.