Category: Art & Theater

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

NH Maker Fest celebrates creativity

A 3D printer hums a colorful plate into existence; handmade hula hoops and a DJ spin in tandem while hands get messy on a nearby pottery wheel. Those are just a few things planned for NH Maker Fest, the New Hampshire Children’s Museum’s annual gathering of builders, tinkerers and creators in downtown Dover.

Launched as the Dover Mini Maker Faire in 2012, the event is packed with engaging activities and is constantly evolving.

“It’s such a hard pitch to make,” Neve Cole, the museum’s communications director, said recently when asked to describe the upcoming fest. “Every year it’s such a different group of people.”

This time around, more than 35 makers from across the region, representing a dizzying range of disciplines, are on hand. There’s ceramics and coding, escape room design and entomology, bubble choreography, along with 501st New England Garrison cosplayers roaming about in handmade Star Wars regalia.

Among the fresh additions this year is Mud City Clay, with pottery wheel demonstrations and hand-building sessions.

“We haven’t had clay in a while,” Cole said. “That’s going to be super fun.” 3D printing company Flamingo Magic is also new to the fest, selling reusable plates that visitors can watch being printed on the spot.

A hula hoop dance party will also be interesting. “Three like-minded individuals got together,” Cole said — sponsor Unravel NH, as part of its Petals + People gardening activity, DJ Avery Sol playing house music, and spinning creations from SMart Circles that are so much cooler than the mass-manufactured Wham-O toys of yesteryear.

A scientist will bring his collection of elements to the festival and walk visitors through the properties of actual physical samples, some radioactive, some mundane, all fascinating. Young authors will be on hand as well, who’ve written books or created arts and crafts to sell and teach.

Another intriguing new entry is a husband-and-wife team in the middle of developing an escape room, allowing festival-goers a fun peek behind the curtain of a creative project mid-construction.

“They’re bringing some of their props and the puzzles that they’ve created that will eventually be part of their escape room,” Cole said.

Longtime attendees may remember the foam party, but this year the museum is pivoting to a bubble dance party instead. It’s still interactive, still delightfully chaotic, but with a slightly different texture. “It won’t be quite as foamy,” Cole said, with the conviction of someone who’s possibly thought through the foam-versus-bubbles paradigm.

Cole has been with the Children’s Museum for close to a decade, and part of each Maker Fest is in her tenure. When Covid happened, the events were done online, and the pandemic experience provided clarity for moving forward. The museum now runs structured morning and afternoon play sessions, separated by a midday break.

Before the shift, Cole recalled, popular exhibits were sometimes five families deep on busy days, with no room to explore. Now, everyone has space.

“We wanted to make sure people had their best experience … plus it’s good for staff morale to have a break in the middle of the day, reset the museum, and start fresh again.”

The museum is growing, with a major addition due this fall. A 40-foot Luckey Climber, the same kind of dramatic net structure as the one located in the lobby of Boston’s Children’s Museum, will open in October. The project cost $750,000, all raised by the museum, and includes LED-lit platforms integrated into the safety netting.

Cole offered a caveat for prospective visitors: Maker Fest is a different kind of day at the museum. Some exhibits will be open, but the galleries won’t be running at full capacity. The event has more of a block party energy than a typical museum visit — louder, more crowded, organized around doing rather than observing.

There are also extras like multiple food trucks for an event that happens both inside and outside. “So if you’re looking for a regular day of playing in a museum, this might not be the best one,” Cole said. “But it’s also really fun, and you’ll get a lot of unique experiences.”

NH Maker Fest
When: Saturday, June 6, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
Where: Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, 6 Washington St., Dover
Tickets: $5, childrens-museum.org

Featured photo: NH Maker Fest. Courtesy photo.

The Phil presents wide-ranging music

Folk Voices and Fantasies, an upcoming afternoon of classical music from the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by The Phil’s Music Director Mark Latham, offers three works from three composers, each from a distinctly different corner of the world.

What binds together Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía India isn’t style or era but instinct, Latham explained in a recent Zoom interview.

“The main connecting thread is composers using folk music from their native traditions,” he said.

For Petrushka, Stravinsky borrowed Russian folk songs and even a few German waltzes; most of its melodies weren’t his to begin with. Bruch did the same with Scottish reels and airs, and Chávez went even further, working not from memory or nostalgia but from within a living indigenous Mexican tradition.

To honor that, an orchestra member hand-built a traditional güiro for the performance. The notched hollowed-out gourd is usually played with tines and produces a ratchet sound. “Because the percussion element in the Chavez is very strong and uses a lot of Mexican instruments,” Latham said. “It’s trying as much as we can to use those instruments.”

It reflects a late 19th- and early 20th-century trend of composers “very interested to explore what was going on musically in their native arena,” Latham offered. “Bartok, for instance, was going out into the countryside before the advent of recorded sounds, actually notating local folk songs and that kind of thing … very early musicology.”

The concert begins with Stravinsky’s tale of a carnival puppet who turns out to feel things too deeply for his own good. It’s an exhilarating choice for an opener, and it concludes not with a bang but with a ghost: Petrushka, apparently killed, reappears hovering over the theater in the final bars, leaving the question of his humanity forever unresolved.

A superimposed C major and F-sharp major, called the Petrushka Chord, recurs throughout the work. It denotes the main character’s many dualities: puppet and person, ridiculous and suffering, knowable and unknown. The motif became a go-to for composers like John Williams, who used it for his “Theme From Jaws.”

Fifteen-year-old violin prodigy William Yeh solos on Scottish Fantasy. Yeh is a student at the Juilliard School in New York and last year’s Sempre Musick Competition winner. The Phil has collaborated with Sempre Musick for the past few years, Latham said. “These days, the Grand Winner plays their piece with the New Hampshire Philharmonic the next season.”

The piece is a back-and-forth that Latham described as a conversation. With the young soloist still developing his voice, it has its own particular texture — the orchestra takes its tempo from listening to Yeh, and shapes its phrases around his. “The soloist provides the main musical impetus, and then we answer.”

The evening ends with Chávez’s percussion finale and its offbeat sparks that, Latham said, “aren’t quite agreeing with the rhythm,” and a frenetic ending that inspires both audience and orchestra. “It’s like a rock drummer … ‘Let’s just go for it at the very end,’ right? It’s percussion going crazy.”

Latham has made the case throughout The Phil’s current season that classical music belongs to everyone. Folk traditions aren’t less powerful when they’re arranged for an orchestra, and the barriers people feel entering a concert hall are mostly imaginary.

“If people at a classical music concert would be more like a rock concert,” Latham said, “that’d be fantastic.”

Beyond that, he believes music is a salve for challenging times, remembering Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache’s observation in an interview with a French journalist 30 or 40 years ago. “Beauty is a stepping stone to freedom,” he recalled him saying.

Latham added that the act of creation is, more often than not, a political one.

“Some people say, ‘art for art’s sake’ — I’m not one of them,” he said, citing Leonard Bernstein’s words in the aftermath of his close friend John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “This will be our reply to violence; to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Folk Voices and Fantasies: Music Rooted in Culture and Imagination
When: Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m.
Where: Seifert Performing Arts Center, 44 Geremonty Drive, Salem
Tickets: $5-$35, nhphil.org

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.