Category: Featured Content

A tough year is remembered for great art

The New Hampshire arts world wasn’t greeted by upheaval as 2025 dawned, but it came soon enough. After DOGE took a sledgehammer to the federal budget, canceling grants already budgeted, the New Hampshire House voted away the state’s Council on the Arts in the spring, though one employee managed to remain.

All this chaos didn’t keep New Hampshire’s arts community from producing moving works, from theater to visual art and classical music. On the latter front, however, the search for a successor to outgoing Symphony NH Music Director Roger Kalia was interrupted, as funding issues roiled the organization. Five finalists announced at the end of March and were due to perform for the public during the 2025-2026 season. However, two of the performances have been postponed to the 2026-2027 season. Along with that, Executive Director Deanna Hoying took a personal pay cut, and some staff were moved to reduced hours, according to a patron letter on Dec. 18.

“We are scaling back certain production elements [and] launching a bold plan to strengthen our internal capacity and build sustainable revenue for the future,” the letter continued.

“I hate the word pivot, but we have to pivot again,” Hoying said in a Dec. 23 phone chat. “It’s not like COVID, but we need to meet where our revenue is. Our Christmas Pops concert had lower ticket sales. Charitable gaming is down, giving is down, so we have to re-scale ourselves to see what our community needs. What gets our audience excited? The patrons that have stuck with us are extraordinarily important, I need to say that, but we don’t have the margins some larger organizations have.”

In Portsmouth, the multidisciplinary 3S Artspace marked its 10th year with a special installation, Christina Watka’s “Noticing Light.” Watka leveraged the big gallery space’s wall of windows and plentiful light. “I decided to place this large installation exactly where the band of light curves around the room and then shoots through the entire thing,” she said.

Theatre Kapow’s season-long “community conversation” continued with a production of Every Brilliant Thing in Concord and Meredith. Director Emma Cahoon said of the challenging, interactive play that “throughout, the audience is relied on quite heavily to make the story actually happen.”

Cahoon also directed Romeo & Juliet for Saint Anselm College’s Shakespeare on the Green series, a collaboration with Manchester dance troupe Ballet Misha, led by Amy Fortier, that’s become a summer highlight. The pairing, Cahoon said, provided “a third, middle ground” to unify Shakespeare’s dance and drama.

Other solid productions in 2025 included Clint Eastwood’s movie The Bridges of Madison County redone as a musical in April by Manchester Community Theatre Players, October’s immersive whodunit Southern Fried Murder, part of Majestic Theatre’s 35th season, and Bedford Off Broadway’s regional premiere of the delightful comedy Icehouse in November.

In early December the semifinalists for the New Hampshire Theatre Awards were announced; the awards ceremony takes place Jan. 31 at Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts. Actorsingers, Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative, The Village Players, Nashua Theatre Guild and Milford Area Players all received multiple nominations.

The Currier Museum of Art exhibited five large figures from Ann Agee’s “Madonna of the Girl Child” series in March. The works were a feminist attempt to reclaim the Madonna figure, Agee said, as a symbol of not just motherhood but equality, showing that women and girls deserve the same hopes, dreams and opportunities as their male counterparts.

In the cinema world, the Jewish Film Festival in March offered a rich and varied slate of 15 movies at locations across the state. They included Debra Messing’s documentary October H8te, the Tribeca Audience Award winning comedy Bad Shabbos, and Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, about the singer/songwriter who penned “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen.”

Granite Orpheus, a movie that took a decade to complete after most of it was shot in 2015, showcased Concord against the backdrop of the classic Greek myth amidst that year’s Market Days celebration. Inspired by the ’60s film Black Orpheus, it featured many local musicians, and offered a look back at a city then in transition. Granite Orpheus will be screened at BNH Stage in Concord on Saturday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m.

The gallery scene remained lively throughout the year. Glimpse Gallery in Concord hosted regular events featuring local artists. In Nashua, ArtHub returned in a new downtown location, after the pandemic torpedoed its original plans to open. The city also hosted its annual sculpture symposium, with artists working for three weeks as the public watched.

Manchester’s Mosaic Art Collective hosted the Halloween-centric” Exquisite Corpse.” It explored the idea that “art happens at the point of juxtaposition” and included a wide range of fun activities to go with what Gallery owner Liz Pieroni termed the many works of “creepy, weird art.”

It all added up to an arts community that remained resilient in a challenging year.

Upcoming arts happenings in 2026

Theater
Actorsingers Company’s production of the Stephen Sondheim/Andrew Furth musical comedy Company runs Jan. 9-11 at Nashua’s Center for the Arts.
Theatre Kapow’s What The Constitution Means to Me, written by a teenager who won a national debate competition on the topic, runs for two weekends beginning Feb. 6 at Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith and Concord’s BNH Stage.

Visual Art
“Third Space,” at 3S Artspace through Jan. 25, transforms their Main Gallery “into a sanctuary of creativity, connection, and comfort during the holiday and winter season,” and includes works by papercutting polymath Dylan Metrano.
“Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth & William Roth” is at the Currier through March 15.

Classical Music
Symphony NH Music Director finalists perform with Adam Kerry Boyles’ Bernstein’s Legacy March 7 and Tianhui Ng’s New Hampshire Passions April 18. The Symphony is also planning a chamber concert led by its musicians on March 28 at Keefe Auditorium.

Featured photo: Granite Orpheus. Courtesy photo.

Nashville’s Celts bring Christmas show to New Hampshire

Unlike many purveyors of his genre, Ric Blair, who leads The Celts, wasn’t born in Ireland, though he has family roots there and in Scotland. Rather, the music found him, while he was studying jazz and classical at Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, and it took hold.

A friend persuaded Blair to take a day off from the rigors of studying and check out a traditional Irish band playing a show downtown.

“We walked in the door, and people were literally dancing on the tables,” he recalled by phone recently. “And immediately every cell in my body was like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.’”

Celtic music would weave its way into the Christian music albums Blair released starting in the mid-1990s. Around 20 years ago he launched an early iteration of Christmas With The Celts in churches around the country. The shows were a unique blend of ancient carols, traditional holiday songs, and modern tunes given an Irish twist.

In 2011 PBS broadcast a Celts performance filmed at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and their holiday show became a national phenomenon. Since then the group’s name has changed a few times. First it was the Ric Blair Band, then The Celts, then the Nashville Celts. A few years ago they finally switched back to The Celts.

“We don’t know who we are; we like to keep the customers on their toes,” Blair said with a laugh. “Upon the advice of our booking agency, we made it official. They were like, ‘People are easily confused — is it country or is it Irish music with the Nashville Celts?’ We said, ‘Well, it’s a little bit of both. Just tell them the Celts.’”

These days the show offers a bit of everything, like traditional Irish dancers, some of whom are recruited locally. An area youth choir is usually at every tour stop, and there are plenty of jokes. “The quick Irish wit is a big thing in Irish culture,” Blair said, along with “the ability to laugh and not be so overly sensitive that we can’t laugh at ourselves.”

The music, of course, remains front and center, and it’s the most eclectic element of a Celts performance. For the holiday show there are songs not normally associated with the traditional Irish canon, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” done with a reel.

“I’ve always been a Beatles fan, like millions and billions around the world, and it just seemed to me to be a good song to kind of unify everybody,” he said. “The people that were around when The Beatles first started, and the children that don’t know who they are.”

Every year, Blair and his band strive to add new touches and fresh numbers to a show that for many fans is now a holiday tradition. He hinted at a new addition that doesn’t come from anyone’s Christmas carol book but seemed to him to be ripe for the Irish touch and a seasonal role. It’s a well-known hit from an English rocker popularized in a late 1980s movie and an accompanying music video.

“There was just a moment that hit me, where I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is a perfect Christmas song,’” Blair said. “Just because of the lyrics, as far as getting to the message of Christ’s birth. It’s so fun to perform.”

Some of the best moments come when The Celts perform carols that are hundreds of years old. Even those are done in a decidedly untraditional manner.

“We have a song called ‘Wexford Carol’ that goes back to the 1600s, or 1500, even earlier than that. We’ve composed almost an EDM version of that.”

The band coming to New Hampshire for two shows, the first Dec. 19 at Derry’s Stockbridge Theatre and the second Dec. 23 at the Colonial in Laconia, consists of Blair, bassist Jimmy Sullivan, David Rollins on drums, and two fiddlers, each doing double duty. Grace Broadhead also sings, and Kira Doppel is a dancer.

Finally, multi-instrumentalist Patrick D’Arcy was a founding member of Flogging Molly and is a longtime collaborator of Blair’s, who called him “one of the best pipers in the world.” D’Arcy was lurking during the interview, and Blair deferred to the native Dubliner when asked why Irish music is so popular with American audiences.

“Because it’s so brilliant,” D’Arcy exclaimed, and continued. “They love it, and it’s not anything to do with their culture or family history. It’s way more an international thing now [even if] it will always be from Ireland. And it represents a return to simpler things as well. I think people like that at Christmas.”

Christmas With The Celts
When: Friday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m.
Where: Stockbridge Theatre, 5 Pinkerton St., Derry
Tickets: $33 and up at pinkertonacademy.org
Also appearing Tuesday, Dec. 23, at 7:30 p.m., Colonial Theatre, 609 Main St., Laconia, $43 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Celts Christmas. Courtesy photo.