Category: Art & Theater

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.

Nashua International Sculpture Symposium offers access to artists

In front of a revitalized Civil War-era cotton mill, four sculptors are doing something unique: creating their work in full view of the public. Through early June, Pauline Berger of Germany, Margaux LaSalle of France, Anna Moultoni of Italy and Sean Williams of Barre, Vermont, are shaping stone into permanent public sculpture.

For close to two decades it’s been a rite of spring, and the longevity of the Nashua International Sculpture Symposium has changed the scope of the event’s debt to the city. This year the organization behind it has a new name: the Nashua Sculpture Project. It’s a subtle but telling shift in identity.

“We had 56 sculptures as of last year,” Executive Director Gail Moriarty said in a recent phone interview. “When I looked at them, it became pretty clear to me that we need to change our focus from just being three weeks in May to the care and preservation of our collection.”

So much outdoor sculpture, spread across Nashua’s parks and public spaces, represents an enormous civic investment and an equally large maintenance responsibility. The new organizational framework puts stewardship of its legacy alongside the annual event itself.

The Symposium remains the same, Moriarty continued, but what’s different is a focus on care and restoration for the rest of the year. It means expanded programming, including fundraising events, family classes, stone-carving workshops and the like.

“Art is everything,” she said. “The Nashua Sculpture Project is about art in every form.”

Annual sculptor selection was a peer-driven process, led by Artistic Director Jim Larson. It began with last year’s artists recommending sculptors for the current year. From a compiled list, the board considered individual portfolios, along with what Larson called “less quantifiable considerations.”

Speaking by phone recently, Larson explained what that meant. “We try to consider what Nashua needs, how these artists might enmesh into our community, and how they’ll serve Nashua. We try to create a group that will work well together … have similar perspectives in some ways, but also varying perspectives.”

This year’s guiding theme for the four sculptors is “Gathering Momentum.” It was chosen as a principle, not a prescription. Artists are free to interpret the phrase wherever their instincts lead them. For Larson, though, they are impactful words that reflect his convictions about art’s role in the present age.

“I and many other sculptors share this idea that artists today should be working at a scale that matches the level of destruction we see in the world right now,” he said. “If we are going to keep up with that, we need as much momentum and as much power and forward movement as we can muster. That’s what it’s about.”

All four sculptors this year will work in stone. It’s a deliberate choice and, for Larson, also philosophical for a symposium that requires materials built to last. A hundred-year maintenance-free lifespan is their stated goal, but the reasoning goes deeper than durability, Larson believes.

“We’re not making luxury objects for Nashua, we’re not trying to boost property values,” he said. “We are trying to make livable, meaningful artwork for people. That means we have to work with humble materials that are accessible, and stone is the most humble material we have. It’s just a piece of the ground.”

Larson encourages the curious to come out to see it happen, to experience what he considers a rare opportunity.

“It’s so hard to just have a conversation with an artist, because they’re not out in public working, and this is the chance,” he said. “If you want to go talk to an artist, just show up and they’ll talk to you. If you really want a long conversation, bring a meal and sit down and have dinner with them.”

For details on buying a meal for a sculptor, visit the Project’s website, or contact the organization for information on other ways to support the effort. Larson offered a final thought on why watching enduring art come to life is a valuable and truly enlightening experience.

“In America, manual [and] demanding labor is really rare to see. The widespread view of hard physical labor right now is that it’s an unfortunate byproduct of having to afford an expensive American life. But for these artists, this version of work is one of the most joyous things that they get to do.”

19th Nashua International Sculpture Symposium
When: Mondays through Saturdays, through June 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Picker Artists Studios, 3 Pine St., Nashua
More: nashuasculpturesymposium.org
Closing ceremony – Saturday, June 6, at 1 p.m.

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

Amoskeag Quilters Guild gathers for biennial bash

Every other year the Amoskeag Quilters Guild holds a two-day event to showcase the creative skills of its 160 members. On May 16 and May 17 at Manchester’s Memorial High School, 220 quilts will be on display, ranging from heirloom-quality masterworks to the earnest first efforts of brand-new quilters.

The latter aspect is important. It’s not a juried show — every skill level is welcome, among participants and viewers. This is a celebration of a community and its shared passion, according to the event’s chairperson; a joyous occasion for an organization that formed back in 1988.

“We’ve encouraged every member to put in a quilt,” quilter Kristi Parker said by phone recently. “We’ve got some people who’ve been quilting for 40-plus years and are very skilled, and there are others who’ve only been quilting six months. We’ve welcomed all levels of ability.”

That intentional inclusivity is part of what sets a Guild show apart from prestigious competitions. “When you go to a juried show, it’s like going to a professional basketball game,” Parker said. “You appreciate the players, you love being there, but most people aren’t ever going to attain that level.”

A Guild event, she continued, is an experience grounded in the possible. “You see amazing works and think, ‘I can aspire to that,’ and you also see someone who’s only been quilting six months. They’ve put their heart and soul into something, and it’s encouraging. Because you think, ‘I can do that.’”

Parker came to quilting in a roundabout way. Growing up in a rural town, she kept busy making clothes. In her teens she decided to make a quilt with collected fabric scraps.

“I had no idea there were rules or guidelines,” she said. “Traditional quilts are made from cotton, but my first one has everything from polyester and double knit to velvet.”

The hand-stitching of her childhood has given way to high-tech equipment like a long-arm quilting machine, a computer-guided, large-format device that’s transformed quilt-making in recent years. It was used to make this year’s raffle prize, a quilt that began as paper pieced blocks that individual Guild members worked on prior to assembly.

Speaking of high-end, a big-ticket prize at this year’s show is a $1,800 Bernina 335 sewing machine from Pintuck & Purl in North Hampton, a donation that wowed Parker.

“When they offered us that machine to raffle off, my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “If somebody wins it … they’ve hit the jackpot.”

Proceeds from the show benefit the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Mass. However, the raffle for the “Tastefully Tula” collaborative quilt raises funds in support of Kidneys for Kindness. The nonprofit organization advocates for organ donation, supports donors and raises awareness about kidney health.

Other Guild charitable efforts include Cases of Caring, with members making and donating pillowcases to local groups to bring to children, veterans and shut-ins. Every other year, the Guild hosts a workshop to mass produce them, and kits can be picked up at monthly meetings and returned.

There’s also the Quilted Gift program. Members receive pre-batted and backed kits for quilting and bouncing, along with other completed tops and quilts that members have finished and wish to donate. The Committee then distributes them to people in need. More than 850 quilts have been donated to various programs and charities in the past five years.

This cohesiveness is a big part of what draws Parker to the organization, and it has less to do with fabric than with people.

“One of my favorite parts of quilting, besides the creativity, is the community,” she said. “Having the chance to meet people, to develop friendships — that’s really what drives me.”

Amoskeag Quilters Guild Show
When: Saturday, May 16, and Sunday, May 17), 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Where: Manchester Memorial High School, 1 Crusader Way, Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door, free for ages 12 and under
More: amoskeagqg.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.