Category: Art & Theater

Sci-fi series Resonance develops in Derry

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

A few weeks ago, New London Barn Playhouse presented a four-day run of Wakeman, the first staging of a musical about a woman who presents as a man to fight in the Civil War. Audience response to the powerful work seemed to promise that it wouldn’t be the last. One imagines a future Tony acceptance speech thanking New Hampshire for giving it a chance.

An hour’s drive away in Derry, another potential Granite State creative triumph is quietly taking shape.

The unassuming exterior of StudioLab, in an industrial park near Tupelo Music Hall, masks the wizardry going on inside. It includes LED panel walls that use the same kind of technology Lucasfilm popularized for The Mandalorian, with LiDAR renderings that create photorealistic sets.

It’s where Rob Livie, an Emmy-winning veteran of corporate video and motion graphics, is building Resonance, a 1980s-set science-fiction series. Born from memories of living in the shadow of the Cold War, it’s something he’s imagined since his days as a teenager drawing comic books with apocalypse-themed mushroom clouds.

Last year, Livie launched Human Originals, a story studio and production company “dedicated to creating original worlds and characters that resonate on a deeper level,” beginning with Resonance. Livie’s leap of faith meant leaving Connection, Inc., the company he’d worked for since 2017, and setting up shop in StudioLab, with its state-of-the-art equipment.

He’d connected with the facility during his time providing services to Events United, a production company owned by Tim Messina, who operates StudioLab. When Livie pitched Messina his long-held idea, he didn’t hire him outright but offered whatever help he could: studio space, crew, and a network built over years in corporate production work.

A LiDAR-generated warehouse, with windows looking out at a gritty New York City street, opens the film. Livie has shot the first 10 minutes. “A proof of concept,” he called it. “We’re using this to try to find a champion for the project, whether that’s an executive producer, a showrunner, or an actor. Someone that helps create a snowball effect.”

That footage got a public airing at the recent Granite State Comicon, where organizer Chris Proulx urged Livie to “show people what’s being done here in New Hampshire.” The screening was followed by a live Q&A with the mostly local cast and crew. The latter is a crucial element of Resonance.

Livie is emphatic about using a Granite State cast, though some hail from the region, like the Springfield, Mass., actor on screen when the film opens. The net’s been widened when necessary. For example, James Hilliard is a California-based actor and former Connection colleague of Livie’s who also emceed the Comicon panel.

The show’s premise leans hard into Cold War-era anxiety as well as New Hampshire’s own strange corner of UFO lore. Its inciting incident is pegged to Sept. 26, 1983, the actual date a false alarm on a Soviet missile-defense system nearly triggered a retaliatory nuclear strike. It was averted only because the officer on duty didn’t believe the data.

In Resonance, that glitch becomes the moment the aliens crash to Earth. While Area 51 exists in the show’s mythology, it is used for misdirection; the actual black ops site is a fictional Area 52, located in New Hampshire. It’s a wink at the state’s own abduction lore, rooted in the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case near Exeter.

A shelf in Livie’s office has comic books and a primitive 8mm movie camera he used to make stop-action animation as a teenager. He plans to shoot a future episode entirely on period-appropriate equipment like this, aiming for a lived-in era feel rather than pastiche. “I don’t want to yell that it’s the ’80s,” he said. “I just want to show it.”

Livie’s ambitions carry well past the screen. He’s sketched out an interactive extension of his story, with walkable, LED-enhanced sets. There’s also a theme-park vision of Resonance that’s spread across five locations in New Hampshire and tied to the show’s five alien worlds.

What’s next is the unglamorous, essential work of packaging: a finished script, a pitch deck, a show bible and an informal advisory network. There’s also a Keene-based CEO helping with the business plan and veteran line producers helping him suss out a budget, all assembled mostly over email.

It’s the stage where most independent projects quietly die for lack of know-how. Whether Resonance breaks through is an open question. But after decades spent, as Livie puts it, “adjacent to Hollywood, but not within Hollywood,” he has a 10-minute opening and a local team that believes in it, along with a story that starts, as he envisioned, close to home.

Made in New Hampshire
Follow the progress of Resonance at humanoriginals.com

Featured photo: Granite State Comicon. Courtesy photo.

At 24th Granite State Comicon, downtown’s role grows

Chris Proulx is already planning next year’s Granite State Comicon, even though this year’s doors haven’t opened yet.

“It’s a lot of work, and sometimes a lot of crazy coordinating,” Proulx, who opened Double Midnight Comics in 2003 and held the inaugural Granitecon that year as a one-room comic book show, said in a recent Zoom interview.

It’s grown into its 24th edition, happening in Manchester Sept. 18 through Sept. 20 at the DoubleTree Hotel and SNHU Arena. With next year marking the event’s 25th anniversary, Proulx is already promising “some big things.” This year’s edition leans into an idea that’s been building since the state’s biggest arena joined the fun three years ago.

“We’ve kind of been working on making Manchester the third venue,” Proulx said. “How do we keep the fun going while we can expand things?” The answer has been letting downtown businesses in on the action. What started with Diz’s throwing a themed night a few years back has grown into more after-hours programming than ever for the event.

There’s a comedy show at Harpoon Brewery (covered elsewhere in this edition), a drag night at Hop Knot, cartoon-themed karaoke at the Shaskeen and crafting at Make It Pop Studios. It’s capped by the new Dirty Shirley Pub Crawl, organized by Bookery and built around the buzzy Dungeon Crawler Carl franchise.

Organizers are also coordinating with the Amherst Street Arts Festival.

“We want our event to raise all ships,” Proulx said.

Growth brings logistical demands. As food trucks will line the hotel, organizers asked city officials about closing part of Pleasant Street. Police couldn’t shut the block down — “it’s one of the busiest times downtown,” Proulx was told — but accommodations were promised and will be a big help.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remains an annual fixture.

Kevin Eastman, who created the comic with Peter Laird, is on a Saturday Mighty Mutanimals panel, after a Q&A with cast members from the 1990 film Kevin Clash (puppeteer for Master Splinter) and James Saito (Shredder). All weekend long in the gaming lounge, a new TMNT tabletop RPG is showcased.

Along with the half-shell heroes, there’s more homegrown talent in the spotlight this year.

Sci-fi streaming series Resonance, currently being produced at StudioLab in Derry, will debut its first 10 minutes at a panel that includes the all-local cast and crew in a Q&A. Proulx heard about the project through SNHU and urged director Rob Livie to attend GraniteCon.

“Show people what is being done here in New Hampshire,” he told him. “It’ll kind of blow your mind.”

For Livie, a television and digital media veteran who recently relocated to Manchester after he and his wife became empty nesters, it’s a dream project.

“Resonance is a story I’ve wanted to tell since I was a kid,” he wrote in an email. “An epic ’80s sci-fi adventure about five people from very different worlds who come to Earth hoping it holds the key to saving their own.”

Its central theme, he continued, “is this: ‘You are not my enemy.’” Another local effort is an indie animated series, Player vs. Trinity. A panel focuses on how the project developed from an idea to a YouTube premiere. It will offer insider guidance for anyone looking to make their own mark on the industry.

Celebrity panels this year include “Queen of the Nerds” Felicia Day and actor Lou Diamond Phillips, known for La Bamba and Young Guns. Photo ops and autographs can be booked at a price set by each guest’s team. While selfies are free, demand is intense. Last year, voice actor Roger Clark’s line grew so long that a queue system had to be built on the fly.

The weekend after GraniteCon, the national Local Comic Shop Day event happens, at Double Midnight and other locations, including Jetpack Comics in Rochester. The event, once modeled with a nod to Record Store Day and its exclusive releases, is shifting its identity toward community over collectibles, Proulx said.

“It’s more about how to get people in the shop for their first time and show off everything that we do.”

Granite State Comicon
When: Friday, Sept. 18, 3-8 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 19, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 20, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Where: Downtown Manchester, including DoubleTree by Hilton (700 Elm St.) and SNHU Arena (555 Elm St.)
Tickets: $21-$157 at granitecon.com

Featured photo: Granite State Comicon. Courtesy photo.

Andres Institute of Art month-long symposium opens

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” is a quote often attributed to Michaelangelo, who also said when talking about a particular piece of work, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Such made manifest spirit is present as one wanders through the sculpture park at Andres Institute of Art in Brookline, taking in the many works on display there. The experience comes with the cost of a donation, but that’s not mandatory, Institute co-founder John Weidman explained by phone recently.

“You shouldn’t have to pay to hear a bird sing, or look at art,” he said.

Weidman, a master sculptor, opened the Institute in 1998 with its namesake, philanthropist Paul Andres. The next year the first sculpture symposium happened, and it’s been an annual event ever since, apart from a two-year pandemic hiatus. The next one opens on Sept. 12, with three sculptors from Cuba, Syria and Japan, who are all now U.S.-based.

For three weeks each will create a new addition to Andres’s sculpture park while welcoming onlookers to observe their works in progress. The theme for this year’s event is Curiosity. “Which is the driving thing of just about everybody, but especially artists,” Weidman said. “Because you want to see what’s next, and it’s a learning process.”

Grandeur is eschewed for “good designs,” Weidman continued, adding that past artists have adapted to those guidelines in inventive ways. “Some we’ve had normally did very large works, 40 feet high and so on … one in particular had never worked in stone, and he learned to … on a 6-foot figure, and just had a very good time with it.”

This year’s sculptors reflect the gathering’s Bridges and Connections moniker, but selection in 2026 was challenging. “Normally we try to have two from afar and one more local, but it’s been difficult to get artists from overseas,” Andres President Kristi St. Laurent said by phone. “This time we have three sculptors with very distinct cultural heritages.”

Havana-born Fermin Castro now lives in Somerville. His artist statement describes a style that extends from his Caribbean roots and is “influenced by master visual artists and Afro-Cuban sculptors, connecting both primitive and modern Latin American and African artistic expression.”

Castro works in a figurative, imaginative artistic motif that treats form itself as a kind of speech. “Sculpture originated as a primal representation of language, in which form and volume were manifested in this genuine act of human expression,” he writes in bold type on his website. Two of his more evocative pieces were carved from a tree trunk and a deceased elm.

Dankha Zomaya, an Assyrian now living in Illinois, is a returning sculptor at this year’s symposium. Zomaya first came to the park for the 2022 gathering, where he created a pair of goats. The two abstract metal animals are a permanent part of, in St. Laurent’s words, “The Hill.”

Also a painter as well as a multidisciplinary sculptor comfortable across wood, stone, bronze, direct metal, and copper, Zomaya has built a career participating in international sculpture symposia around the world. His return four years after his first residency offers a chance for visitors to see how an artist’s relationship with the park evolves.

Okinawa-born Marin Murakoshi makes her works in a Concord, Mass., facility called Studio 凸凹. The characters translate as “dekoboko” or “bumpy, lumpy, or irregular,” which Murakoshi has offered as something close to a working definition of sculpture itself.

Her practice spans stone and wood carving alongside creations built from recycled and reclaimed materials which includes an ongoing body of work called the “Rubbish Revival Project.” Ranging from precise traditional carving to resourceful reuse makes Murakoshi one of the more unpredictable additions to this year’s symposium lineup.

Those looking to get involved are encouraged to sign up on the Andres website for patronage opportunities.

“Bring a bottle of wine, sit down for two hours at dinner, really get to know the sculptors,” St. Laurent said. “Hear about their different adventures with symposia all over the world, works they’ve created, people they’ve met, and some of their favorite experiences. It’s just really an extension of the whole Bridges and Connections idea.”

Bridges and Connections Sculpture Symposium
When: Saturday, Sept. 12 – Sunday, Oct. 4
Where: Andres Institute of Art, 106 Route 13, Brookline
More: andresinstitute.org/aia-symposium

Featured photo: Attendees at a previous festival. Courtesy photo.

Wakeman is latest New London Barn NEST production

New London Barn Playhouse has long staged revivals of Chicago, Fiddler on the Roof, Oklahoma! and other classics in its 260-seat Main Street playhouse. Three years ago, it launched NEST, a program dedicated to new works. The latest opens Sept. 3, the world premiere of an original folk-rock musical set during the Civil War.

Wakeman is the true story of a 19-year-old New York woman who cut her hair, took a new name, and joined the Union Army. With words and music by singer-songwriter Jenn Grinels, it was selected for last year’s NAMT Festival of New Musicals and was a 2024 Kleban Prize finalist for lyrics. The Barn production will be its most fully realized.

The real Sarah Rosetta Wakeman enlisted in 1862 and served with the 153rd New York Infantry until dysentery killed her in 1864, with her fellow soldiers never learning her gender. Wakeman was one of an estimated 400 women believed to have served in disguise during the war.

She wrote regularly to her family, and her letters home survived in the book An Uncommon Soldier. Their tone surprised Grinels.

“We think of people in the Civil War writing in [a] romantic, descriptive, poetic way,” she said in a recent Zoom interview. “Sarah Rosetta Wakeman did not write like that.”

What she found instead, she said, was conversational and startlingly familiar. “This angsty teenager,” in Grinels’ words, asking her father, mother and sister for forgiveness, as she furtively pushed against gender expectations. “I loved seeing this much less idealized person … in full color, in all of their complicated, messy humanness.”

Rather than attempt “an emotional interpretation” of her life and travails,” Grinels was determined to let Wakeman’s words stand alone. “I want to hear their voice verbatim,” she said. So she built a spreadsheet that sorted phrases in every letter by category — money, family, self, military — and used “critical fabulation” to bridge the gaps.

Grinels’ score, drawing on bluegrass, Civil War-era song forms and contemporary Americana, remained remarkably stable through years of readings and workshops.

“I haven’t rewritten a song yet,” she said. A Stephen Sondheim maxim, “I hate writing the wrong song,” echoed in her head throughout the process.

What has changed frequently through readings is how Wakeman’s own words are woven into an actively theatrical show. In New London, movement and choreography will be added for the first time.

“Certainly a big … step forward,” Grinels said. “This is so much more ambitious than I was expecting.”

Wakeman found its way to New London after Managing Director Elliott Cunningham spotted it last fall at NAMT’s annual festival in New York City and quickly called Executive Director Keith Coughlin. I said, ‘I found our show for next year, it’s really that good,’” Cunningham recalled.

He and Coughlin then spent months courting Grinels, including a trip to her November concert at 54 Below in Manhattan, a favorite performance space for Broadway’s denizens, before finally persuading her to bring the show to New Hampshire. “It was basically just us bugging Jenn and saying, ‘Please come to New London,’” Cunningham said.

Wakeman bookends a season that began with Symphony New Hampshire performing Man of La Mancha, the latter part of a collaboration now in its third year. Along with NEST, it’s designed to give Barn audiences something new and different alongside the crowd-pleasing shows that fill the summer months.

For artists like Grinels, the new works program is a safe place to evolve their work. The Barn has a long history of doing just that, dating back to the late 1960s when Stephen Schwartz wrote drafts of his future smash Godspell while serving as Music Director for the summer stock season.

“Not to be cheeky, but the idea of the NEST is about being a place of support,” Coughlin said. “We take a lot of pride in the fact that our community has embraced it and that we can offer it to artists like Jenn to take this wonderful piece that has seen a lot of work already, and take it to its next step.”

Should Wakeman go on to win a Tony, New London Barn Playhouse can claim bragging rights for hosting its debut. The cast, made up of seasoned actors and led by Six the Musical touring company member Reese Cameron, is “phenomenal,” Coughlin insisted. That’s consistent with the Barn’s tradition of luring top talent to the bucolic town year after year.

“This is Broadway in your backyard, happening right here on Main Street in New London,” he said. “These are artists on the stage, behind the table and beyond the footlights that are top notch. I walked into the rehearsal room the other day and I’m just blown away by what’s being created.”

Wakeman – A New Folk-Rock Musical
When: Thursday, Sept. 3, and Friday, Sept. 4, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 5, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 6, 5 p.m.
Where: New London Barn Playhouse, 84 S. Main St., New London
Tickets: $50, ovationtix.com