Tag: 250605

Legendary voices

Crowned28 tribute show honors icons

In 2023, when Jordan Quinn did her tribute to generations of great female singers, called “Queens,” it was a one-woman show. She had backing vocalists, but the artists she chose were solo icons: Aretha, Whitney, Cher, Dolly, Gaga and the like. For her latest take on the format, the Manchester performer decided to open up the playing field a bit.

The result is Crowned28, a night of music that includes the aforementioned solo stars but also songs from groups, like the Pointer Sisters, and LaBelle, with its ’70s smash, “Lady Marmalade,” and a version of “I Say a Little Prayer” that, although an Aretha Franklin hit, hints at what Diana Ross & the Supremes might have done with it.

The show is also more theatrical this time around, Quinn explained in a recent phone interview.

“It allows me to blossom and transform into other people, which I really enjoy doing,” she said. “We try to take advantage of that, bring out a side that maybe you wouldn’t see in a typical tribute show with some of these artists.”

The costumes and choreography reflect this, and the milieu also has changed from the last production, which was done for a seated audience at Manchester’s Rex Theatre. This show is cabaret style and will be held in the Angel City Event Space of Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs on Elm Street.

“We are selling more tickets than there are seats, so there will be more standing around,” Quinn said. This will allow the singers to mingle and dance with the crowd, creating a nightclub vibe. Along with Quinn, there are two featured singers, each of whom will have their own spotlight during the show.

Mariah Delage won the Best Voice In Keene competition last year and appeared as a featured dancer in the Actorsingers’ recent production of Legally Blonde. Aysa Carnucci has worked with Palace Youth Theatre, Exeter’s Pine Street Players and the Amato Center’s dance company.

For Quinn, singing together with Delage and Carnucci is Quinn’s is a highlight of Crowned28.

“I really like the ensemble pieces; I love sharing the stage with them,” she said. “‘Lady Marmalade’ is one of my favorites, and the Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’ and then, of course, listening to the other girls sing Cher and Christina Aguilera is just a gift.”

For her solo turns, Quinn enjoys doing Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” and her take on Celine Dion covering “All By Myself” while decked out in an all-white suit was a showstopper in “Queens.” The three singers also do a solid version of Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” and give Heart’s “Barracuda” a terrific three-part harmony that it never had before.

While she continues to perform in the area’s restaurants and bars as a solo artist, Quinn is carving a niche with shows like Crowned28. It’s a pursuit that’s less about enjoying tributes, though watching her convincingly cover Donna Summer or Pat Benatar makes it clear she likes it.

“It’s the fact that it’s mine,” she said. “I grew up in the theater industry, and the whole idea behind creating my own show is because when you go into an audition for a musical theater piece, all you have is 36 bars to sing in front of the director. Then the director and their team decide if you’re right for the part or not. Thirty-six bars is like a minute of singing. In my mind, it’s like I am so much more capable than just 36 bars.”

Shaping a mood and casting an ensemble, which includes a band with drummer Stephen Baberadt, Greg Kieffer on guitar, bass player Jack Lianos and Derek Tanch on keyboards, is more satisfying than just taking part in a show, she continued.

“I feel like I’m able to show all of my capabilities, I think that’s what’s really exciting, because I have found a way to not limit myself,” she said. “There is no one category that everyone belongs in [and] I wanted to create a theatrical piece that everyone can enjoy, but also to showcase that we don’t belong in one category.”

Crowned28 – A Celebration of Iconic Women in Music
When: Thursday, June 5, 8 p.m.
Where: Angel City Event Space/Rock N Roll Meatballs, 179 Elm St., Unit B, Manchester
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. From left to right: Mariah Delage, Jordan Quinn and Aysa Carnucci Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/06/05

Local music news & events

• Jersey night: A Bon Jovi tribute act with a following in the rocker’s home state, 1 Wild Night features look- and sound- alike singer Alex Barbieri backed by a solid three-piece band. The group covers songs like “You Give Love a Bad Name,” “Livin’ On a Prayer” and “Wanted Dead or Alive” with energy and conviction, something they’ve done for over a dozen years in a tough market. Thursday, June 5, 7:15 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $40 at labellewinery.com.

• Local and: A packed bill has two Brooklyn bands. Debbie Dopamine is led by Katie Ortiz and is currently cresting on “Negative Space,” a song about gender dysphoria. Youth Large has whimsical songs that will appeal to boygenius fans. Joining are Manchester emo faves Happy Just to See You, who released the charming Ways To Cope in 2024, and Donaher performing an early set. Friday, June 6, 8 p.m., BAD BRGR, 1015 Elm St, Manchester, $12 at the door, bad-brgr.com.

• Odd milestone: Literate, ethereal singer-songwriter Aimee Mann has been busy of late. The reunion of her band ’Til Tuesday for its first show in 35 years was the highlight of last month’s Cruel World Festival in Southern California, and she’s currently on tour celebrating a quirky anniversary —it’s been 22 and a half years since her fourth solo album, Lost In Space, was released. Saturday, June 7, 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $64 and up, etix.com.

• Surfie sounds: Last year, Jakob Nowell led his late father’s band Sublime at Coachella. Jakob’s Castle, which released a debut album Enter: The Castle recently, headlines with Spray Allen, led by Sublime bass player Eric Wilson, making the Lakes Region show something of a reunion. Also at the afternoon Punky Sunday party are surfer songwriter Jesse James Pariah and Strange Case. Sunday, June 8, 4 p.m., Surfside Burger Bar, 41 Route 25, Meredith; see jakobscastle.com.

• Many talents: The after-work crowd will enjoy a musical treat when Dan Blakeslee performs a midweek solo set at a Seacoast pub and restaurant. The erstwhile troubadour’s blues-infused urban folk music has been a mainstay in the region for decades. Be sure to hit the merch table for some of Blakeslee’s art, including his book, Draw Them In, published last year. Wednesday, June 11, 6 p.m., Riverworks Restaurant and Tavern, 164 Main St., Newmarket; see danblakeslee.com.

Mountainhead (TV-MA)

Four of the absolute worst (and richest) men in America have a poker weekend at a mountaintop rich-dude compound in Mountainhead, a dark satire that maybe doesn’t know where to go with its joke.

Shortly before the weekend begins, Venis (Cory Michael Smith) and his social media company have released AI and associated Deep Fake-ish tools that are now fueling violence across the world. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has crafted software that can maybe help tell the real from the fake and doesn’t particularly want to sell it to the untrustworthy, probably psychopathic Venis. Randall (Steve Carell) is, at least at the start of the weekend, the richest of the four men. He is dealing with a difficult health diagnosis and has become obsessed with post-physical-world eternal consciousness tech. And then there’s Jason Schwartzman’s character, referred to occasionally as Superman and sometimes Super — though we eventually learn the nickname is actually Souper, as in Soup Kitchen because, with his merely hundreds of millions instead of billions, he is the “poorest” of the group. Despite the gang’s “no deals” rules for the weekend, his goal is really just to raise money for his new meditation app.

Even at the Utah mountaintop retreat, the men soaking in the pool can occasionally hear gunfire from below and they watch clips of news feeds where, for example, they learn a mob has burned a group of people to death in a community center or that the mayor of Paris has been assassinated. But Venis is convinced it will all be fine, that the violent mobs are mostly doing it for the LOLs and eventually people will learn to be chill. Or maybe he’s just trying to convince himself of this, as his board breathes down his neck and the U.S. president is calling him. Or maybe, the men start to think, the best course of action would be to “coup out” the U.S. and divvy up control of the world between themselves.

With all their bro-y tech speak, their sky-high levels of self-delusion and obvious inability to, like, do things (three of the men attempt a gruesome task with two chickening out entirely and one half-heartedly participating), the four are easy pickings, comedy-wise. I feel like writer/director Jesse Armstrong (series creator of Succession) relished shredding these rich idiots and their specific brand of algorithm-and-venture-capital-based rich idiocy. I also feel like he didn’t entirely know where to go with these goobers in the limited time frame of a movie versus a TV show. The final third of the movie turns into a farcical thought exercise and then just sort of fizzles out. The writing and performances are sharp enough to basically make it work. B Streaming on Max or HBO Max or whatever we’re calling it today.

Deaf President Now! (TV-MA)

Focused on about two weeks of events in February and March 1988 at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., this documentary tells the story of the students who organized a massive protest after learning that a hearing woman was appointed president by the school’s board over two qualified deaf candidates for this university for deaf students. Fast-paced and well-edited, the movie features the student leaders, now middle-age Gen Xers, fondly looking back on their college selves and what they accomplished. The movie is a rousing tale of a group of people demanding visibility. A Streaming on Apple TV.

Fear Street: Prom Queen (R)

The R.L. Stine-inspired teen horror continues with this Shadyside-set 1980s slasher movie homage. Prom Queen feels more like a faithful recreation of a B-movie horror from the time of big hair than a satire. And other than “Sarah Fier lives!” bathroom graffiti and a mention of the 1978 Camp Nightwing massacre, this movie is more adjacent to the 2021 Netflix trilogy of Fear Street movies than a sequel. Here, we have an old-school red-raincoat- and mask-wearing murderer walking toward one prom queen candidate after another and axing them to death. After the first victim, a popular stoner girl, goes missing, the remaining potentials are part of a gang of popular mean girls led by Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), who is sort of Heathering them into accepting her win as inevitable, and Lori Granger (India Fowler), an outcast because her mother was suspected of murdering her father around the time of their prom and who is looking to change her rep. Lori is supported by her buddy Megan (Suzanna Son), a horror-loving proto-goth girl who is fine with her fringe status. Though general creepiness sets in when the first prom queen candidate disappears, it isn’t until prom night that the disappearances really pick up.

And become more gory! Like, so, hilariously, severed-limbily gory in a nearly comic corn-syrup-fountain way. But the movie is so straightforward that even a boy with two hand-less wrists squirting stage blood as he tries to turn a door knob doesn’t register as particularly comic or horror-y. The movie doesn’t do satire or have a take so we’re just watching a straight-down-the-middle slasher where even the red herring potential killers aren’t given much attention. This is particularly strange as one of the side characters, the school’s stern vice principal, is Lili Taylor, which feels like it should be the movie doing a thing, Taylor being of the Yellowjackets-ish Gen-X indie girl all-grown-up variety. But Prom Queen, while perfectly adequate as a slasher, just isn’t doing enough to do anything more. C+ Streaming on Netflix.

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/06/05

Kurt Deimer, And So It Begins (Bald Man Records)

From the fringes of arena-metal stardom comes this Cincinnati, Ohio-based actor (a die-on role in the 2018 soft reboot of Halloween), rocker (this album, his first) and filmmaker (the upcoming slasher flick Hellbilly Hollow), who specializes in a highly accessible sort of Buckcherry meets power-metal vibe with a southern-fried side of Widespread Panic. He’s made a few influential friends as a frontman, including Queensryche’s Geoff Tate, who guest-sings here on “Burn Together,” and, in strange bedfellow news, Bon Jovi lead guitarist Phil X, who co-wrote four of these songs, including the focus track “Hero,” which nicks Marilyn Manson’s early sound pretty heavily. As you go along with the record there’s nothing really wrong aside from a little scalar verisimilitude between the songs, which could have been solved with (all together now) some interesting samples, but nevertheless it’s got a lot of crunchy riffing if that’s your thing. He’ll open for Tesla at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom this Friday (June 6) and Saturday (June 7). A-

Avicii, Avicii Forever (Pinguettes/Universal Records)

The world lost Swedish EDM/electro genius Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, in 2018, but his tracks are permanently seared into the memory banks of club-goers worldwide, for instance the bouncing, trance-adjacent “Levels,” with its NHL hockey-rink-rinsing ambiance, and the infectiously urgent “Wake Me Up,” a country-tinged dance joint that you’d definitely recognize from having heard it somewhere (he made several successful attempts to fuse country and techno, this being his most successful, peaking at No. 4 on the U.S. dance chart). What we have here is a career compilation of sorts; all the aforementioned songs are found on this set, as well as the buzzing shock-treatment electro hit “Sunshine,” a collaboration with David Guetta that was his debut into elite DJ society. This guy was gone way too soon; luckily for most fans this one is one-stop shopping. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• We’re into the new June music releases now, guys, the albums of Friday, June 6, to be precise, and there’s a metric ton of new ones coming out, all scrambling around like feral puppies, doing little clown dances as they compete for your hard-earned dollars if you have any (and haven’t figured out how to use YouTubeToMP3 yet)! I’m pretty sick of all the mixtapes I burned for my car, but since I left the daily-grind workforce, my entire weekly commuting time is down to about 20 minutes, just back and forth from the Elm Street Market Basket when Petunia and I run out of waffles and assorted other health foods, so it’s all good, but maybe there’ll be something in this week’s list that won’t instantly put me in a sour mood, let’s go have a look and hope for the best. Ugh, not an enticing start for me, a new album titled I Forgive You from Cynthia Erivo, who won the role of Elphaba in Wicked for having ridiculously long and dangerous fingernails and having the most piercings in human history won tons of Grammys and Tonys and whatnot, which is fine, because at least the part of the Good Witch didn’t go to Amanda Seyfried, who left the TV show Big Love to make seriously bad movies, which is one thing she definitely excelled at in her post-teen years! This is Erivo’s second album, said to be a “reintroduction” to her world-class style, and I found that everything on it (at least what I heard, anyway) has an epic romantic-tearjerking quality to it, in which she makes Adele look like a complete amateur, there’s really no contest. She’ll be on a very limited tour in August; the closest venue to New England will be in Syracuse, N.Y.

• After a four-month rollout that’s driven his fans insane, famous hip-hop man Lil Wayne resurfaces this Friday with Tha Carter VI. He is known for being one of the greatest rappers of all time, the inspiration for such luminaries as Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar and such, but there’s no consensus at the moment in online sewing circles like the HipHopHeads subreddit as to whether or not he’ll make any sense onstage, in interviews or anyplace else as he promotes this new one, owing to years of opiate abuse. His last one, Funeral, came out in 2020 and was met with “mixed to positive” reviews; there’s an advance sample of this one in which he sounds, as always, like a nasty version of Skee-Lo, not to influence the buying decision you’ve already made.

• Since this musical decade has no idea what it’s doing or what it even is, the latest knuckleball in the works is the new album from Cypress Hill & London Symphony Orchestra, titled Black Sunday Live At The Royal Albert Hall, because why not. What’s that? No, I’m serious, you can go to YouTube right now and hear this album’s version of “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” before it drops on Friday. Spoiler, the 31-year-old song gets the symphonic treatment, and the band couldn’t sound more bored, but do with that information what you will.

• If you’re a boomer, you’ll recall the Doobie Brothers being one of your favorite pop-rock bands, but then they decided to let Michael McDonald take over the singing for “What a Fool Believes” and most people couldn’t believe how lame it was compared to their earlier hits. Be that as it may, the band’s new LP, Walk This Road, is on the way, and original singer Tom Johnston is back with them, but the (spoiler) blues-based title track features McDonald singing in his Airedale terrier voice, oh well, whatever.

• And finally it’s Pittsburgh’s own psychedelic-indie band Black Moth Super Rainbow with a new album, Soft New Magic Dream, featuring the single “Open the F—ing Fantasy,” an annoyingly catchy down-tempo thingamajig, its unintelligible vocals piped through a 1970s voice modulator for no reason whatsoever.

Featured Image: Kurt Deimer, And So It Begins (Bald Man Records) and Avicii, Avicii Forever (Pinguettes/Universal Records)

A Boy and His Blender

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

I really wanted a serious blender.

Not one of the relatively inexpensive ones from a big-box store. Not a cool, chromey, vintage one that would be at home in a diner. A serious blender, the type you can watch chew up hockey pucks and Barbie dolls on the internet.

My wife tried to deflate this ambition with logic — namely, why would I want to do any of these things, particularly grinding up hockey pucks? “We are not spending $500 on a blender,” she informed me in a tone that would not allow for any argument.

An hour later, after some internet research, I informed her that we could buy a reconditioned professional blender for a relative bargain of just over $200. I took the jar on my dresser that I had been dropping change into for the past year to change-counting machine at the bank. It made short work of my jar of change and returned two British pounds, $1.40 in Canadian change, two buttons and almost $300 in Blender Money.

Upon returning home, I informed my wife that we would have to pick up a change-of-address form at the post office.

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“Because we’re moving to Blender Town, Baby!” I replied, waving a wad of cash in the air.

I subsequently bought a red Vitamix blender and named him Steve.

This was Steve’s project this past weekend:

Fluffy Lemonade

  • 1½ cups of ice cubes
  • Zest of one lemon
  • ¼ cup (2 ounces) fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • ¼ cup (2 ounces) heavy cream
  • ¼ cup (2 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
  • ¼ cup (2 ounces) London dry gin

Combine all ingredients in your blender (Steve).

Blend on low speed, until the ice stops rattling around, then really put the spurs to the blender, and whip the mixture up for 30 seconds or so, until it is light and fluffy in texture.

Pour into a Collins glass and drink with a straw, while your digital assistant plays “Mr. Blue Sky” by the Electric Light Orchestra. Hold up your glass, as in a toast, and gently clink it against the rim of your blender jar. Your blender will smile to itself contentedly.

Given that some of the ingredients — I’m looking at you, condensed milk — are pretty heavy, this is a beautifully light and delightful blender drink. It’s super lemony, but not too sour. The gin hides in the background. The overall drink is lightly sweet, and super refreshing.

Featured photo: Amanda’s Savory Cheesecake. Photo by John Fladd.

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