Category: Art & Theater

Shakespeare al fresco returns to Saint Anselm College

For the past two summers, Theatre Kapow’s Shakespeare on the Green has leaned dark. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2024 was filled with shadowy fairy magic. With last year’s Romeo & Juliet, the dusk forming over Saint Anselm College and the following sunset offered a celestial comment on the tragic love story.

With this year’s As You Like It, director Emma Cahoon is changing the weather, Shakespeare-wise.

“It’s a bit more contemplative,” she said by phone recently. “It’s a very considerate play … each of the characters, to me, feel less like caricatures and more like real people, which is something that I just love.”

As You Like It introduced Cahoon to Shakespeare, courtesy of an eighth-grade teacher with an innovative streak. Years later, living abroad in London, it was the first Shakespeare she saw performed live.

“It completely charmed me all over again,” she said. Making it this year’s Shakespeare on the Green production was an easy decision, partly due to its setting.

Much of the action unfolds in the Forest of Arden, where exiled characters shed their old identities and find clarity among the trees, making it perfect for an al fresco stage ringed by real ones.

“Shakespeare on the Green has some great elements for it,” Cahoon said. “It’s kind of ready-made for a play set in the forest.”

One thing is notably absent this time: the Manchester dance company that partnered with Kapow on both previous Green productions. Ballet Misha weaved choreography into Midsummer’s fairy realm and Romeo & Juliet’s doomed romance, but that collaboration isn’t part of this year’s show.

“This is really not a dance type production,” Cahoon explained.

Rather than treat the absence as a loss, she framed it as an opening. The language of As You Like It, uniquely dense with plot and character even by Shakespeare’s standards, rewards the kind of close attention that previous Green efforts didn’t demand. “We’re meeting the absence of Ballet Misha by really digging into the language, which is its own kind of fun.”

An expanded eight-actor cast is made up entirely of returning Kapow company members, many who appeared in the previous two Green shows — from Midsummer, Emma Weller, Molly Litt, Claire Soleil Gardner, Cecilia Lomanno and Samantha Griffin, with Courtney St. Gelais and Jay Doane carrying over from Romeo & Juliet as well.

St. Gelais, who played Oberon in Midsummer and Mercutio/Prince in R&J, takes on Oliver and Jacques this time; Doane, previously R&J’s Benvolio, plays Touchstone, Charles and Jacques de Boys. This continues the company’s gender-blind approach to casting classic texts with a fluid ensemble.

This allows performers to cross the gender lines Shakespeare wrote into characters like Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a young man, Ganymede.

“I am super excited about the cast; it came together in what feels like kind of a miracle to me,” Cahoon said. “It’s a really, really strong group.”

Asked for an early favorite moment, Cahoon was quick to respond, even as rehearsals had just begun. At the play’s first read-through, St. Gelais took on Jacques’ famous “All the World’s a Stage” monologue, arguably the most recognizable speech in the play, and thrilled everyone in a way Cahoon had been hoping for.

“As soon as I picked As You Like It, I was like, I need to hear Court do [that] speech, and … it was the best reading of that monologue I’ve ever heard; it knocked us out of the water,” she said, already picturing how it will land outdoors, delivered beneath open sky with Alumni Hall as a backdrop. “I think it’s going to be beautiful to hear it in that space.”

The production serves as the opening of Theatre Kapow’s 19th season, built around the theme “Elemental.” Each show tied to a classical element, with As You Like It serving as the Earth effort. That’s apt for a play focused on characters getting back in touch with something more grounded than the court politics they’ve left behind — and it’s also being staged in the elements.

Shakespeare on the Green Series 2026: As You Like It
When: Thursday, Friday & Saturday, July 16 – 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Koonz Theatre, 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester
Admission: $25, anselm.edu (children free, no ticket needed)

Featured photo: Cast of As You Like it. Courtesy photo.

Puppeteers for Fears return with AI-themed Robopocalypse

The premise of Robopocalypse: The Musical! sounds, on paper, like a high-speed collision of several ideas.

A tech billionaire invents a self-driving car that accidentally kills his wife, a tragedy that estranges him from his teenage daughter. Unable to communicate, each begins work on AI projects. Neither finishes, but their creations merge accidentally and go rogue, threatening the world, and the only ones who can stop it are two people who can’t talk to each other.

Oh, and there are puppets — wonderfully weird, and futuristic in a zany, retro way.

“It’s a wholly irrational project by any reasonable measure … it shouldn’t exist,” Puppeteers for Fears founder Josh Gross said in a recent Zoom interview. Yet it does, and with sufficient momentum to carry the Portland, Oregon-based hand-and-rod troupe through a 30-city national tour that includes a stop at BNH Stage in Concord on July 14.

Gross first wrote and performed Robopocalypse in 2018, and the world caught up to him some time later. The musical addresses AI at a moment when it’s become, as he puts it, “not science fiction anymore — just science.” When tools like ChatGPT launched a couple years ago, he continued, the company decided it was time to take the show nationwide.

Gross’s production has evolved, but it remains grounded in a philosophical tension between two AI schools of thought.

“One is that it’s a tool; another is that people are actually trying to create life,” he said. “But the thing about all life and consciousness is that a key component is a sense of self-preservation. If something is created as a tool but then achieves consciousness, it’s going to understand that a tool is property. And property doesn’t have control over its own outcomes.”

What’s changed about the show is what it’s wrapped in — a story that’s ultimately about what a parent owes to the life he helped create, and what it owes him. A father is trying to invent his way back to happiness after a tragedy, as his daughter tries to earn his attention by matching him on his own terms.

That two people can’t heal until they’re forced to face something they can only stop together is “a human story that anyone can relate to,” Gross said. “And putting it in the context of what we’re all facing right now, where people have very strong opinions on AI. It’s happening whether we want it to or not; we’ve got to figure out what to do.”

Puppeteers for Fears’ fun characters, Gross believes, are ideal for conveying the hard messages in Robopocalypse. “Puppets exist somewhere between reality and simulation. You can see them doing things, but we also know it’s a performance … someone putting on a mask. We make the conscious decision to accept that this thing lives in between.”

That liminality mirrors the many questions being grappled with when it comes to AI itself, like is it real consciousness or simulated? Is virtual reality real because it’s experienced as such, or manufactured because it’s made of ones and zeros? Hearing it all from talking cars and other next-level creations softens the blow.

The entire score for Robopocalypse was written on analog synthesizer, which Gross learned for the first time from how-to VHS tapes uploaded to YouTube. The Arturia MiniBrute he purchased from Portland vintage store Control Voltage wasn’t easy to tame, he said. “It’s not exactly an instrument you play so much as a runaway train you’re trying to hold on to.”

Gross is quick to say that his puppet musical isn’t for children — but not because of the usual reasons.

“Kids don’t have the attention span for a feature-length show about the nature of grief and technology,” he said. “There are a few f-bombs and some mature content, but the biggest thing is it’s just a bit long.”

That said, BNH Stage lists the performance as 18+.

Puppeteers for Fears is self-contained on the road, traveling with its own screen, lighting trusses, and sound. A recent grant from the Oregon Community Foundation to upgrade what Gross called “technology we’d been holding together with duct tape and shoelaces for a while” really helped elevate Robopocalypse to national tour-worthiness.

It’s a long way from their debut in Ashland, Oregon, on Halloween 2015 in a Renaissance Faire-themed bar that held 30 people but drew over five times that and inspired them to continue. “It continues to astonish me,” Gross said. “I’ve played a lot of empty rooms in other projects.”

Puppeteers for Fears presents Robopocalypse: The Musical!
When: Tuesday, July 14, at 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Admission: $26, ccanh.com 18+

Featured photo: Robopocalypse. Courtesy photo.

Centuries of absurdity, just in time for the 250th

There’s a moment Lawrence Lesher keeps returning to when he talks about directing the latest Winnipesaukee Playhouse production, The Complete History of America (Abridged), running July 3 through July 11 in Meredith. It’s the Lewis and Clark section, a vaudeville-style bit in which two explorers debate their destination until someone gets hit with a rubber hammer.

“Absurdly stupid jokes,” Lesher said with a grin during a recent Zoom meeting. “But they captured exactly that energy with complete commitment right off the bat, and I was embarrassed by how much I enjoyed it.” That’s the sweet spot the show, written by Adam Long, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, is designed to occupy.

Three actors, 90 minutes with intermission, and 600 years of American history are distilled in the play, initially performed by Reduced Shakespeare Company, a troupe famous for what the New York Times dubbed “intellectual vaudeville.” That it’s playing during the nation’s big birthday celebration is almost too perfect.

Lesher, surprisingly, claimed the semiquincentennial had slipped his mind until reminded of it, thanking the interviewer as he considered how to include it on opening weekend.

“I’m so focused on the show I didn’t even think about it, but yes,” he said, “we’re going to open with some rousing acknowledgment.”

That’s one of the play’s biggest charms — it’s less a script than a jumping off point. In fact, it’s been revised as recently as late last year. For example, it now includes a lot more about Alexander Hamilton than when Lesher first saw it during the George W. Bush presidency.

Lesher was a tour guide in New York City some time ago, and one stop was at Hamiton’s grave. “I’d have to explain who he was; now they tell me. That’s the power of pop culture when it’s applied to history,” he said, and promised a Lin-Manuel Miranda callback in his production — no spoilers, though. “It’s a cameo … a really funny one, and it’s a musical reference.”

This is Lesher’s first Winnipesaukee Playhouse gig, and it came partly because of his track record. He’s also an actor and was part of RSC’s national tour of Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). He did have some concerns about this play’s politics-tinged jabs. “My first question when I was hired was, ‘Can we laugh at ourselves anymore?’”

The answer, after a week-plus in rehearsal with a three-person cast of Owen Minor, Travis Tingvall and Amanda Wagner, is a clear yes.

“They’re so funny and light that I think even with our very real rancorous differences in politics today, we can set it aside and enjoy the gentle ribbing,” he said. “We tar everybody.”

The show skates nimbly across the full sweep of American history, or at least a highly compressed, cheerfully distorted version of it. There’s pre-Revolutionary America, the founding era, westward expansion, two world wars, Watergate and Covid, along with figures ranging from George Washington to both Bushes and the current White House resident.

Real-time topicality is baked into the play’s DNA, and Lesher has leaned into it.

“If something happens in the political world the day before we open, we might throw that in,” he said, adding the script almost demands the reflexes of a stand-up comic. “Being able to play off each other and what the audience gives you … it will be different every night.”

There are audience Q&A sections, a game show sequence where an actor goes into the crowd with a fake microphone, and occasional snark aimed at latecomers. It all lives or dies by the cast’s deft read-and-respond skills. Though it’s information-packed, Lesher is emphatic the show is accessible even for audiences who slept through eighth-grade social studies.

“You don’t need to know American history … it’s enjoyable on the level of pure, sheer zany comedy,” he said. “But those who do know their history will find another level in the references.” Seriousness sometimes does elbow its way in, with moments touching on national tragedies like Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

Fortunately, it’s all handled with an irreverence that earns its right to the material.

“It does make you go home and think,” Lesher said, nodding in agreement when reminded that one of history’s funniest bits concerns Mrs. Lincoln’s night at the Ford Theatre. “It’s rooted in something very real, but still one of the funniest things.”

The Complete History of America (abridged)
When: Friday, July 3, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, July 4, at 2 p.m.; Sunday, July 5, at 2 p.m.; Tuesday, July 7, at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday, July 8, at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, July 9, at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Friday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Winnipesaukee Playhouse, 33 Footlight Circle, Meredith
Admission: $40 and up, winnipesaukeeplayhouse.org

Featured photo: Owen Minor, Travis Tingvall and Amanda Wagner. Photo by Lawrence Lesher.

Snapshots and Harleys at Currier’s Summer of Photography

Instagram didn’t invent self-curation, a point brought home by a pair of commingling exhibits currently at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art. Long before “personal brand” was an everyday term, people arranged themselves for the lens, deciding which version got preserved. The platforms changed, but the impulse did not.

“Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection” offers the sorts of family photos never intended for public viewing. “The Bikeriders,” conversely, is Danny Lyon’s celebrated collection of documentary photographs, taken in the 1960s while he was an actual member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

Initially the two were separate, until Currier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Anastasia Kinigopoulo decided to join the exhibits “in conversation.” With a history of showing his work in museums, Lyon’s photos are more artistic, but Kinigopoulo realized they had much in common with the snapshots in Cohen’s collection.

“One of the things that Danny Lyon pioneered was a style of photography that feels very personal; in some ways, he was taking cues from vernacular photographs,” she said by phone recently. Joining them made sense. “For a long time, they wouldn’t have been found in museums alongside each other, but that’s very much changing now.”

What sharpens the pairing is a constraint both bodies of work shared, but one nobody currently under 30 ever lived with — not knowing right away how a photo came out. Shoot 100 pictures, discard 99 and keep the perfect shot is today’s rule. With vernacular photos, however, the process was snap the shutter, then wait to see what developed.

For example, there’s a Lyon photo of a biker’s reflection caught in a rearview mirror. It’s a shot that couldn’t be restaged after the fact. This was the mid-1960s, and no biker in Hell would be expected to take direction from a photographer seeking the perfect pose. “Mr. Barger, could you move over just a skosh?” Not happening.

The snapshot collection’s timeline runs roughly from 1880 to 1980 — a century of ordinary people, none of them artists, working from the same instinct that fills social feeds today: photograph the picnic, the road trip, the friends piled into a human pyramid, or a dog stuck in the motorcycle sidecar as a joke.

The Cohen collection is grouped in thematic “frames” of photos, all arranged by Kinigopoulo. For one, she paired a wall of open-road imagery with vernacular motorcycle photos. The choice pushes back against the violence-filled mythology of motorcycle gangs by showing ordinary people on bikes.

“I love the juxtaposition of this cultural symbol that permeated families and people’s lives in very different ways besides just as a sort of focal point of this very intense subculture,” she said, describing a photo of a father giving his daughter a ride, women on motorcycles, and bikes as punchlines instead of threats.

For a glimpse of Instagram’s vanity roots, she grouped snapshots of people performing for the camera. “An entire wall of photos of individuals essentially strutting their stuff … posing and building an identity through photographs,” she said. “People have always done that … they’ve always put on a persona for the camera.”

Lyon was Hunter S. Thompson with a camera, defining the difference between a documentary photographer and a tourist with a press pass. Kinigopoulo pointed to a portrait of a biker’s wife, Kathy, caught directly and then twice more in a pair of mirrors, a triple-exposed glimpse few could have gotten that close to.

Something Kinigopoulo has enjoyed during the “Summer of Photography” exhibition, which opened in May and ends Aug. 16, is seeing visitors linger on an object’s relatability. A group visiting during Bike Week marveled at how Lyon’s work reminded them of rides they’d taken and bikers they knew.

To her delight, everyday people will often see themselves or a loved one in a century-old shot.

“One of the things I really love about vernacular photography is its amazing universality,” she said. “People … look at those images and say, ‘I keep expecting to see an image of my grandmother or my aunt, or, ‘my God, look at this person, it looks so much like someone that I’m related to.’ That’s one of the magical things about the show.”

Summer of Photography: “Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders” and “Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection”
When: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., ending Aug. 16
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
Admission: $5 – $20, currier.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Cue Zero stages Sondheim’s Company

In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company seismically shifted the theater world. One of the first concept musicals, it was also groundbreaking for lacking a linear plot, and for being one of Broadway’s first productions to deal candidly with modern relationships, dating, marriage and divorce.

The play follows Bobby, a bachelor turning 35, as he visits the marriages of his closest friends, observing, deflecting, then gradually confronting what he actually wants from life. It won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Score, while receiving a record 14 nominations.

Company contains several Sondheim classics, including “Ladies Who Lunch,” “Someone Is Waiting” and “Being Alive.” One song in particular is a favorite of Dan Pelletier, founder of Cue Zero Theatre Company. He’s directing a three-show run of the musical opening June 19 in Salem.

“Sorry-Grateful” is a song built on contradiction — the idea that love is both burden and gift, and neither cancels the other out. For Pelletier, it lands differently at 35, both his age and Bobby’s at the surprise birthday party thrown by his friends that opens the show, than it did in his early 20s.

In a recent phone interview he talked about seeing the show in college.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he recalled thinking at the time. “One of my professors told me, ‘This is a show you’ll want to come back to in 10 or 15 years’ … and now, it all makes so much more sense.”

Pelletier is no stranger to Sondheim. This is his third time directing the composer’s work; he’s also helmed productions of Into the Woods and Assassins at Cue Zero. However, Company is probably the most personally resonant for him.

“I got married this past October,” he said. “So, kind of very relevant to me.”

Pelletier takes a minimalist approach to set design for the Cue Zero production, with the stage and its furnishings all black and white.

“This represents Bobby’s perception of relationships and marriage at the beginning of the play,” he said. “Then the characters have a lot more color and nuance to them. It shows what he needs to realize, that it’s not that simple.”

Cue Zero’s three-quarter thrust floor configuration at the Arts Academy of New Hampshire is a key production element. It’s an intimate black-box-style space seating 115, with no audience member more than 20 feet from the performers. Thus, the crowd isn’t just watching the main character’s interior life; they’re part of it.

“We want the audience to be treated as an extension of Bobby’s mind,” Pelletier explained. “So when the actors are saying certain things, they can convince all of the other people in the room of whatever it is they’re trying to get across.” By using them as co-conspirators, he continued, the audience believes it’s helping Bobby come into agreement.

As for whether Bobby’s problem is simple commitment aversion, Pelletier sees something more layered.

“A lot of it has to do with a misunderstanding of what it really means to be in an adult committed relationship,” he said, “and what it means to be open and vulnerable with another human being.”

Matt Brides, who plays Bobby, and Pelletier have worked through the vignettes carefully, treating each not as scenes in chronological order but as the moments that hit Bobby hardest on his inward journey.

“Who he thinks he is and who he actually is,” Pelletier said, “are not perfectly in alignment.”

More than once, Company was tweaked to reflect changing times, first by Sondheim and Furth in the early 2000s. Recent Broadway revivals have swapped Robert for a female character named Bobbie in the lead role. Pelletier also had thoughts about modernizing it, but changed his mind.

“I had this vision of the opening number as a Zoom call, like Bobby trying to FaceTime 13 different people all at the same time,” he said. “But I just don’t think we’ve got the resources and the time to do that. Maybe in another five to 10 years I’ll come back to it. Who knows what social media will look like then?”

Company by Stephen Sondheim & George Furth
When: Friday, June 19, and Saturday, June 20, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, June 21, at 2 p.m.
Where: Arts Academy of New Hampshire, 19 Keewaydin Drive, No. 4, Salem
Tickets: $20, cztheatre.com

Featured photo: Company. Courtesy photo.

Learn art in downtown Manchester

For anyone who’s wanted to draw or paint but didn’t know where to begin, or lapsed artists looking for a new start, Art House Studios School for Drawing and Painting, located in a well-lit second-floor space next to the Palace Theatre on Hanover Street in Manchester, will fill the bill.

Run by an artist, Plymouth State professor and Currier Museum teacher, it offers classes in drawing, painting, abstraction, portraiture, and mixed-media assemblage, along with open studio sessions and figure drawing. Prices start at $35 for a workshop, materials included.

Jason Bagatta grew up a half hour away from New York City, later attending the Fashion Institute of Technology there. “But I didn’t study fashion,” he said while sitting at a table in the spacious studio, surrounded by easels, paint and other art supplies, along with a chop saw in a corner of the room.

Bagatta came to Manchester when an academic job called, and he’s been here ever since. He started Art House when the nearby college where he taught was bought by another institution. “That particular administration wasn’t doing it justice,” he said. Seeing a gap, he decided to fill it.

Bagatta’s teaching philosophy is built on three words. “A way in,” he said. “This is how we can start, then it’s up to you how you interpret it. I’m not looking for a cookie-cutter, copy-me. I show you a technique and you interpret it for yourself, and that allows people to bring their own personality.”

While in graduate school, Bagatta read Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by social anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, and found the idea that changed how he thinks about his work. “Art-making is biological, and it’s a response to existing,” he recalled. “It is the act of making things special.”

The insight cut through the over-intellectualizing that he saw surrounding art education and replaced it with a simpler and more inclusive point of view. Dissanayake’s definition, he believes, opens up art’s possibilities. “Anything can be artfully done,” he said, tracing a line back to monastic culture. “A certain amount of integrity can be put into sweeping a floor.”

This philosophy also shaped how he thought about his students. A creative background, he realized, can range “from how you decorate your living space, to how you make a bed or a sandwich, how you garden … and then to more traditional drawing and painting and sculpture and poetry.”

Those attending classes span an equally wide range of ages and experience.

“I get the child prodigy, the 12-year-old who is way over-accomplishing and needs a creative outlet aside from academics,” Bagatta said. “But mostly it’s adult learners, people in their 30s, married people, a lot of people who have retired. The range is 14 to people in their 90s.”

What motivates them isn’t commercial aims, although artists looking to sell their works are referred to the nearby Mosaic Art Collective — who soon won’t be a next-door neighbor. On June 13, Mosaic will move from its second-floor space to a street level storefront at 410 Chestnut St., joined by longtime co-tenant See Saw Art.

Frequently, students are driven by a need to anchor a newfound urge to create, whether to fill in something that’s missing or return to an abandoned muse. Having a deadline, it turns out, matters. “For people who like to make stuff but won’t do it unless they come to a structured situation,” Bagatta said. “They need a time and a place designated for that.”

Among Bagatta’s favorite experiences at Art House is working with a New Americans ESL group, where the language barrier turned out not to matter. “It’s a visual interaction,” he said. “I can show them what I want them to do as well as explain it, and they can do it because they could see me doing it. The visual language transcends the verbal.”

In mid-June, Art House Studios will host a three-day art intensive for students ages 13 to 17. It’s a minicamp, with three four-hour sessions on consecutive days, 12 hours in all. Both drawing and painting will be covered in a collaborative framework, guided by an interactive discussion on day one. “I want to see what these kids want,” Bagatta said.

His academic approach, Bagatta continued, never loses sight of what he calls “serious play.” That the classroom can feed and inspire him as much as it does his students is something he’s sheepishly pleased to admit.

“Someone’s always doing something I wouldn’t have thought of,” he said with the hint of a guilty smile. “I’m open to receive as much as possible.”

Art House Studios School for Drawing and Painting
Where: 66 Hanover St., Suite 202, Manchester
More: arthousestudios.org

Featured photo: Jason Bagatta. Photo by Michael Witthaus