Tag: 260305

Concord comedy

Three standups bring the funny to Barley House

There are laughs aplenty this weekend at a Concord restaurant/bar, as the Headliners franchise brings three comics to its downstairs function room: Jody Sloane, Dave Decker and Mystaru. Comedy shows are a bimonthly staple these days at The Barley House, across from the Statehouse on North Main Street.

Sloane’s entry into comedy began when she enlisted in the Coast Guard mistakenly believing it had amphibious vehicles. Upon discharge, she got a job as a Duck Tour driver in Boston. Tourists loved her humorous banter, and urged her to try standup. Though her first set was wrecked by a few of her Southie pals who were drunk, it’s been a great run since.

Decker is a 17-year veteran of the New England comedy scene and also performs in New York City clubs. He’s known for bringing “a distinct point of view to the stage in a way that both engages and charms audiences” and is a Headliners regular.

Mystaru is the performing name of Hampton comic Shawn Ruiz. It started as his rap name — he did that for a decade or so starting in the early 1990s. He’s also an actor who’s appeared on the true crime series Fatal Family Feuds a dozen times and is cast for a similar upcoming show on Oxygen TV called Accident, Suicide or Murder?

Comedy is a newer development for Mystaru — though he always wanted to do it.

“I wasn’t going to try to be a rapper in my forties, so I needed a way to get back on stage,” he said by phone recently. “I figured I’d start writing.” So he enrolled in Tony V’s 24-week standup comedy course at Boston’s Laugh University.

The school boasts that it can get a five-minute set from almost anyone, but Tony V kept it real in the classroom.

“You can come here every day for the rest of your life, but I can’t make you funny,” Mystaru recalled him saying. “I can make you write better jokes and teach you what you’re supposed to do on stage, but once you’re up there it’s up to you.”

An initial class of 165 winnowed down to three still doing comedy three years later, among them Mystaru. Since then his success has grown to include a couple of appearances at Jim McCue’s Boston Comedy Festival, where both times he was chosen from more than 700 comic hopefuls.

He admires comics like Brian Regan and Jim Gaffigan. Like both, he works clean, and quite well. There’s a TikTok reel of him entertaining a church audience that’s worth checking out. The skill makes him a good Headliners fit, where shows can happen just about anywhere there’s a stage, in front of widely varied audiences.

That includes campgrounds. Mystaru remembers the first time he performed at one, a year or two ago. His good friend and fellow comic Matt Barry was there to watch.

“He went and got a beer because he’s like, ‘This is gonna be a spectacle,’” he recalled. “He was 100 percent right.”

He performed on a pavilion to 50 mostly empty chairs.

“For about 12 people under 16 whose parents just made them get out of the pool or off the beach,” he said. “The parents all sat along the outside, drinking in their golf carts. So I’m performing to 48 empty seats and a bunch of 12-year-olds that want to go back in the pool.”

The experience was among those that made him stop fearing playing to large audiences.

“You’re thinking that you don’t want to bomb in front of a big crowd, then as you get better you realize it’s really tough to do good in front of a small crowd,” he said. “When I can get 15 or 20 people to laugh in an 80-seat room, that’s the test.”

Comedy With Jody Sloane, Dave Decker and Mystaru
When: Saturday, March 7, at 7 p.m.
Where: The Barley House, 132 N. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Mystaru. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/03/05

• Roots player: Paul Driscoll, an alt folk and country singer/guitarist who’s played out in the region for more than a decade. He mixes originals with covers from artists like Tom Waits, the Steeldrivers and Colter Wall. Check out his spare cover of John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind,” a late ’60s hit for Glen Campbell — it’s a gem, and it’s up on his YouTube page. Thursday, March 5, at 5 p.m., The Local, 15 E. Main St., Warner, nhmusiccollective.com.

• Irish import: Mark the arrival St. Patrick’s Day season with music from Téada, a traditional band from Sligo, Ireland, celebrating 25 years together in 2026. The six-person group has toured the world, performing treasures like “Ríl Liadroma / The Green Cockade / The Mourne Mountains” and “March at Kilmore.” Their take on the timeless “Patriot Game” is a standout. Friday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m., Dana Center, 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester, $29.50 and up, anselm.edu.

• Local lights: A four-band show leans into punk, garage rock and power pop with Fun City Fan Club atop the bill. The raucous quartet released a delightful debut LP last year, Yuck, recorded at Rocking Horse Studio with Josh Kimball, who’s also their drummer. They’re joined by Cozy Throne, a Patti Smith-channeling band that would have fit in at CBGB in the mid-’70s, Cape Crush and Donaher. Saturday, March 7, at 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $15 at the door, 21+.

• Bach rock: With her pioneering trio Take3, violinist Lindsay Deutsch was way ahead of Bridgerton turning pop hits like Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” into string quartet renditions. Deutsch is joined by former Take3 piano player Jason Stoll for a show that takes works from “rock stars of yesteryear” like Bach and Beethoven and lines them up with music by modern performers. Saturday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m., Concord City Auditorium, 2 Prince St., Concord, $24, eventbrite.com.

• Piano man: At an intimate afternoon show in BNH Stage’s upstairs lounge, Andrew North will perform selections from Strider, a piano-forward “headphone album.” The lively calypso-flavored opener “Build a Fort” sets a mood removed from North’s jammy band The Rangers. The album, he writes, “occupies a quieter space, closer to a desk lamp than a spotlight,” that’s ideal for focused listening. Sunday, March 8, 4 p.m., The Cantin Room, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $20, ccanh.com.

Family movie night

A look at the Oscar-nominated animated features

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated features are all fairly kid-friendly — though the fact that your family can watch these movies together won’t necessarily mean the whole family will want to.

“This is a great movie,” deadpanned my most sarcastic child about 20-ish minutes into Arco (rent or purchase), a French animated movie that in its English dub features the voices of Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea, America Ferrera and more. Arco is a boy living about 1,000 years in the future and eager to go back in time, as his parents and older sister frequently do, to see dinosaurs. He steals a time-traveling flying suit and zooms off, only to land in the 2070s in a world of robot nannies and suburban homes existing in bubbles meant to protect them from rainstorms and wildfires. Arco is found by Iris, a girl around his age, and the two work on trying to get him back to his time, while dodging a trio of goofballs who have stumbled on the diamond Arco needs to power his suit. While I don’t exactly agree with my kids — the bored one who stayed to complain about the movie, the even more bored one who lasted about five minutes during the most action-packed sequence before deeming it too boring — Arco does have a chilliness and a calm that counteracts the adventure of its premise. It is, however, lovely to look at and there is real emotion behind the relationships, including between Iris and Mikki, her robot nanny.

Their relationship is very similar to one between the main character and her caregiver in Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (rent or purchase). As a baby, Amélie is decreed a “vegetable” by her doctor, but when she’s about 2 years old, an earthquake and a few squares of white chocolate wake her up to the world — specifically, her world in mid-20th-century Japan where her Belgian diplomat father and concert pianist mother are living with Amélie’s two older siblings. When the kind and thoughtful Nishio-san comes to work for the family, Amélie bonds with her, learning how to be in the world and to process experiences of grief and joy. Their relationship is very sweet and the movie is rendered in a kind of picture-book brightness that I enjoyed but could be too gentle for kids looking for, say, demons and sword fights.

KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) on the other hand delivers when it comes to action and was a movie that I think my kids watched on repeat for about a month after its June release. The trio Huntrix is a hugely popular KPop girl band who are also secret demon fighters, the latest in a long line of fighters throughout history whose voices create a protective shield between our world and the demon world and who have the ability to spot and battle any demons that sneak through. With its pop music soundtrack (including original song nominee “Golden”) that to me sounds like the music you hear at a workout class and its stretches of tinny earnestness, this one is very much not for me, though I do appreciate the elements of the movie reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“into every generation,” etc.) and Jem and the Holograms (secret identities and a “totally outrageous” stage presence). And the movie has its moments of goofy fun, particularly as Huntrix is faced with battling demons taking the form of a floppy-haired boy band.

My kids enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters and they liked, well enough, Zootopia 2(rent or purchase), a movie whose most “adults friendly” quality is that I, the parent, could let myself snooze through the movie knowing my kids would be reasonably entertained and kept in a Disney safe space. As with its previous outing, Zootopia 2 features a fox (Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman) and bunny (Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) working together to fight injustice. This time both Judy, the cop trying to prove herself, and Nick, a former guy on the make, are police officers. They attempt to overcome big-animal privilege and prove their own abilities in the investigation of some sneaky goings on that may have links to the founding of Zootopia and the longtime mammal/reptile divide. As with the first movie, it is jarring when the movie attempts to map people-world racism and classism onto animals. There are several instances of “wait, what?” with the whole Movie Saying Something vibe here. But it also features lots of quick moments of animal goofiness, usually involving one of the mile-long list of big-name voice actors — Idris Elba again, Andy Samberg, Ke Huy Quan, Patrick Warburton, Quinta Brunson, to barely name a few.

But the winner of this year’s nominees in terms of “won’t hurt the parents, won’t bore the kids” is, in my opinion, Elio (Disney+, rent or purchase). (Winner for me but probably not for Oscar. Gold Derby and my kids agree that, as one kid said “oh, KPop Demon Hunter is going to win, 100 percent.”) Released to absolute “meh” reactions in June, Eliois a Pixar movie, and while not one of Pixar’s best it is a solid tale of a kid trying to find his place in the world. Or really, in the universe, as Elio (voice of Yonas Kibreab), a boy who longs to be abducted by aliens, feels he doesn’t fit in to this world, especially after the death of his parents. He fears his aunt Olga (voice of Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer, resents having to care for him as it means she’s had to give up on entering the astronaut program. However, her position at an Air Force base does mean he’s nearby when they receive what seems to be a message from deep space. Elio manages to send a message back to the aliens, lending them to think he is the leader of Earth. He is whisked to space and finds himself involved in interplanetary politics — and, for the first time in a long time, making a friend. Where the movie really gets me is in its use of sound clips of Carl Sagan, which bring a hopefulness to this sweet tale that still manages to pack in lots of alien capers and physical comedy laughs.

Featured photo: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

(Summit Books, 229 pages)

A dozen years ago Tom Layward learned his wife had an affair. He decided he’d stay with her until his youngest child left home.

Now that milestone has arrived. Tom’s son, Michael, is living in Los Angeles, coming home as rarely as he can get away with; he has become “one of those young people who decides that contact with their family is not a source of happiness, so you have to limit it to unavoidable occasions.” His daughter, Miri, is headed to Carnegie Mellon University and trying to extract herself from a romantic relationship before she goes.

For Tom and his wife, Amy, the past 12 years have been an exercise in marital managed care. Most people who stay married for the long haul, Tom observes, do so because “you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.”

With that, author Ben Markovits signals what the ride of Tom Layward’s life will be like in his 12th novel, The Rest of Our Lives: an excavation of a marriage and its attendant family life, served with droll wit that is a welcome interruption to Tom’s matter-of-fact recitation of events.

It’s a quite manly book, unusual in a fiction market oversaturated with women’s points of view.

Tom, the first-person narrator, is a 55-year-old law professor who departed from literature when he realized he actually would have to write a book. He met his future wife (who “looks like the kind of woman who can ride a horse, which she actually can”) when they were both graduate students in Boston. Amy’s family has a vacation home on the Cape, which is where we first observe the Layward family’s dynamics: the simmering conflict between husband and wife, and between wife and daughter, of which Tom notes, “from the beginning their relationship was one long argument.”

Tom’s relationship with his kids is less fraught; he feels comfortable talking with his son, and he is looking forward to driving his daughter from their home in Scarsdale, New York, to Pittsburgh, as a family. When Amy decides not to go, he doesn’t object and is still planning to drive home after moving his daughter in.

But after spending the night in the spare bedroom of a friend in Pittsburgh, he takes off on an impromptu road trip that will begin with a visit to his brother and end with a visit to his son, first visiting a Walmart to buy clothes, snacks and a basketball for the road. (“If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter,” Tom says.)

He has the bandwidth for a road trip because, unbeknownst to Amy, he’s on leave from his job, having inadvertently become entangled with a scandal through a client. When she reaches him, bewildered, he’s in Akron and vaguely explains that he needs a few days to himself. It’s clear he’s not even really sure what he is doing or what he will do next. Meanwhile, the physical problems he’s been having for months — waking up with a puffy face and draining eyes — are worsening. Everyone has been telling him to get medical help, but Tom is too involved in his existential crises and keeps writing the symptoms off as long Covid.

Throughout the trip Tom ruminates on his marriage, which he concludes “was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than B overall on the rest of your life.” Along the way we learn more about Tom’s childhood and other aspects of his life.

He doesn’t have an especially compelling voice, which can make it difficult to want to stick with him when he’s talking about minutiae, such as what he and others are eating. There are no made-for-Hollywood plot twists here, just the quiet unspooling of a life, with two questions that beckon the reader to the end: What’s wrong with Tom physically, and will he leave his wife?

The Rest of Our Lives, first published in the U.K.,was on the short list for 2025’s Booker Prize, which may baffle some readers who find the novel’s plodding pace tough sledding. But it doesn’t so much intend to dazzle as to evoke, and its heart and intelligence won me over, as did its understated ending. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

Album Reviews 26/03/05

IT’sALIE, Wild Games (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

I know it’s lazy of me to write about arena-metal bands, given that I was in one for about 14 years and know the genre and all its predictable, hare-brained tropes like the back of my hand, but I think it’s been a long enough while since I last wrote up an LP from the Frontiers record label, which I always affectionately refer to as “Frontiers Mercy Hospital,” given that they remain committed to releasing records from bands whose musical growth stopped at either Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. The band’s name isn’t a misprint, they’re not “It’s A Lie,” but they’re Italian, so what do they care (it makes me think of all the Americans out there who’ve gotten tattoos with “genuine Chinese characters” that actually read something like “If tent parakeet for” or whatnot). These guys say they like Lynch Mob, Dio–era Sabbath, and Southern Rock,” how adorable, let’s go. OK, it’s a girl singer whom they tout as having Janis Joplin chops, which she doesn’t, more like if your aunt sang for a Skid Row cover band, which is what the first song (“Waiting For The Rain”) sounds like. The next soggy tune sounds like Buckcherry, zzz I am getting shleeeepy, nothing to see here but yay for these guys, sure. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Onelight, Autobody (self-released)

Finally something I can sink all four of my canines into, from a French R&B-experimental hybrid-electronic DJ/producer who’s gotten love from DJ Mag, Complex, and Rinse FM, I’m all over this. Dude looks like a cross between Borat and the U.S. Olympics goalie, and I simply can’t be arsed to try Googling up his real name, but he’s got more soul in him than a dozen Jamie Liddells or (lord help us all) Steve Aokis. He kicks things off with a glitchy dubstep-adjacent curveball (“Starter”) that had me expecting a showoff-y, unreadable noise filibuster, but it settles into a wickedly relatable groove that’ll be the envy of a lot of EDM guys. A lot of stuff goes on here, folks, from Mariah Carey diva-twee (“Let It Be,” featuring the helium-inflated vocals of Nikki Ariel) to bong-bubbling reggaeton (the title track) to Martian bloop-tech (the Tristan Price-guested “Keep Your Heart Alive”). I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this record, it’s truly a beauty. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh great, here comes another Friday, specifically the one on March 6, which spells new albums for your ears! We’ll start this week with very old U.K. New Wave band Squeeze, who tortured human ears in the 1980s with jangle-pop nugget “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)” and the even more awful
proctologist-waiting-room standard “Tempted,” which had xylophone in it, before xylophones became cool again in the Aughts for whatever reason! The band’s revolving door membership once included singer Paul Carrack, who was in Mike And The Mechanics for a while, but either way, during their early ’70s breakout era, Allmusic hailed the band’s songwriting core of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as “the heirs to Lennon and McCartney’s throne,” that is to say, they were the next Beatles, a compliment critics have doled out over the years to, let’s see, The Bee Gees, The Monkees, Oasis, and the Bay City Rollers just to name a few (in the Reagan era, Tears For Fears skipped the middleman and just came right out and said they were the new Beatles, that’s telling ’em!). Whatever, Squeeze has a whole new incarnation these days, built around Difford and Tillbrook, including Dirty Vegas singer Steve Smith. This all brings us to the band’s new album Trixies, their 15th. The project features songs written by the duo in 1974 when they were teenagers (19 and 16, respectively), long before their first official record, which is as things should be, given that the chill-pop single, “You Get The Feeling” sounds like it was written by two teenagers who had just discovered the guitar arpeggio, how useless!

• New Jersey-born R&B/pop singing man Charlie Puth shoots for his fourth straight Top 10 album this week with Whatever’s Clever! He is really going for it this time: Instead of settling on feats from nobodies like Meghan Trainor, Boyz II Men, Blackbear or Jungkook again, he’s corralled a Who’s Who of super-famous 1980s names to turn in guest appearances, for instance Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Jeff Goldblum, wait what, why is Jeff Goldblum on an album, what is even going on here, pop culture! There have already been two singles from this album; the latest one, “Cry,” features pop saxophonist Kenny G, who once tried to make jazz safe for normies with no taste, but we won’t get into that. The tune has a yacht rock vibe stolen from Toto’s “Africa”; it is very nice and pretty, perfect for the overhead speakers at Bed Bath & Whatever, I don’t really mind it.

• Before I landed at your illustrious Hippo Press, I was on a team of snarkmeisters at a seacoast-area newspaper that has basically been banished to online-only publication these days. Now, my editor there was a big fan of Morrissey, who used to be in The Smiths, whom she also liked very much, and she’d get all over my case if I made fun of either band in my column, because I couldn’t stand them. Much good-natured ribbing ensued, which usually ended with my messaging something cleverly mean, but either way, I’m sure she’ll be buying Morrissey’s new album, Make-up Is A Lie, just to upset me. But an open mind is important, so I will listen to the title track single, just to upset myself. Yes, it is a tuneless mishmash of French café vibe, 1960s fashion statements and hotdog water, get this nonsense away from me this instant.

• And lastly it’s Kentucky freak-folk fixture Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, with his latest album-load of Bonnaroo bait, We Are Together Again. The single “They Keep Trying To Find You” is like James Taylor if James Taylor couldn’t sing all that well. — Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

Running the Numbers

  • A 2-inch chunk of cucumber – I like using the long, skinny English cucumbers; they seem to have a little more flavor. Go ahead and wash it, but don’t bother peeling it. The peel will add color and flavor to the finished drink.
  • 2 ounces chili-lime rum – I’ve been using Captain Morgan’s for this. I do not regret it.
  • 1 6-ounce can of pineapple juice

Muddle the cucumber thoroughly in the bottom of your cocktail shaker. This means smooshing it up with a stick. If you don’t have a muddler you can use a wooden spoon, or a beer bottle if it fits, or if you’re up for a project you can actually go outside and find a stick (wash it before using it). I’ve heard of a guy who cut off the handle of a child’s baseball bat, presumably not while his child was using it. The point is that you want to crush this chunk of cucumber, body and spirit, until it is the consistency of applesauce.

Add the rum, and shake your rum & cuke for 20 seconds or so. This is what is called a “dry shake,” meaning without ice. When you muddle herbs or fruits or vegetables, you do it for three reasons:

1. By smashing your cucumber up, you’ve given it a lot more surface area to interact with the alcohol.

2. You’ve broken up the cell walls inside the cucumber and released some of the flavor compounds from their tiny prisons. (If you are really committed to breaking up the cells of the cucumber, you can freeze it first. Ice crystals will poke holes in the cell walls before you even get to it with the muddler.)

3. So now you have all these flavor compounds floating around unattached. Some of them like water just fine and will dissolve into it without complaint. Others are pickier and are waiting around for some alcohol to bond with. By dry shaking your rum & cuke before diluting it with melting ice, you’re swooshing the flavor and color chemicals around in an alcohol solution. On a molecular level you’ve kick-started a party. As you shake it up you’ll hear a “slosh-slosh” sound, but the botanical molecules will hear Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train.”

At this point go ahead and add a handful of ice to the shaker, as well as the contents of the miniature can of pineapple juice.

Shake the mixture for another 30 seconds or so, then strain it over fresh ice in a Collins glass. It will have a gratifyingly foamy head on it. This drink is best suited to drinking with a straw.

This is a mildly refreshing drink. The cucumber flavor team has spread throughout the pineapple juice, keeping it from being too sweet. There is a subtle citrussy spiciness from the flavored rum.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

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