Taking It From the Top at Schoolhouse Gallery
After a long winter filled with anxiety for many over current events, spring feels particularly welcome this year. The hopeful feelings of the season were the impetus for Schoolhouse Gallery owner Mike Carroll as he developed his vision for the gallery’s current show, “Alla Prima.”
The title is Italian for “at first attempt” and refers in art to something that is made quickly. In painting, this usually means completing the work in one sitting or working without allowing time for layers of paint to dry. Not all the works in “Alla Prima” were made using this spontaneous process, but each piece has the feeling of capturing a single elusive moment — a bit of light, a shadow, an impression, something that can’t be touched or held.
The show consists of 14 works by gallery artists and includes paintings and works on paper that were either selected or made specifically for the exhibition. The pieces are hung with plenty of space around them. “I wanted the show to be breathy,” Carroll says. “I wanted a freshness and intention about it.”
On one wall hangs an acrylic painting by Lydia Kinney titled Gum. The color palette is limited, and the composition centers on an amorphous, semi-transparent bubblegum-pink shape. It’s a painting that demands to be seen in person because much of its energy comes from its subtle texture and patterning, which Kinney created by manipulating the paint through scraping and sanding.
Gum is hung adjacent to an oil painting by Maud Bryt titled I Heard. Its color palette complements its neighbor’s, leaning toward green. The composition is built on rectangular forms, but it does not feel static or even particularly geometric. The color shifts are soft, and the rectangles are irregular. It is as though sound has been muffled by this gentle space that seems to fold in on itself.
This pair of paintings represent just one interpretation of the phrase “alla prima.” Other works in the show, like a dense impasto oil painting by Tess Michalik and a pair of small charcoal drawings on linen by Stephanie Frank Sassoon, take other approaches to capturing a moment. The show is a reminder to be present in one’s experience, even if chaos seems to surround everything.
“Alla Prima” is on view at the Schoolhouse Gallery (494 Commercial St., Provincetown) until June 1. See galleryschoolhouse.com for information. —Antonia DaSilva
Hoping for Every Brilliant Thing at Cape Rep
When Julie Allen Hamilton first read Every Brilliant Thing, she was struck by the way its writers had crafted the one-actor script. “There’s a connection to the audience that’s essential to the way the play works,” she says. “It requires immediacy and interaction.”
But that style was also why directing the play at Cape Rep Theatre, where Hamilton leads Bold Company, never panned out. Its indoor theater has rows of seats facing a stage, but the script says the audience should be in a brightly lit space where “everyone can see and hear each other.”
Cape Rep can now offer a theater-in-the-round experience following a $2.2-million renovation of the adjacent Crosby Barn, once a Camp Monomoy gathering area. After eight years of pandemic-delayed fundraising and construction, Every Brilliant Thing will open the 90-plus-seat barn on Thursday, May 8 to launch Cape Rep’s 40th-anniversary season.
Written by British theater artists Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, the play has a son helping his struggling mother fight depression. It’s a coming-of-age journey that Hamilton says speaks to any parent-child relationship. And while it’s moving and challenging, she says it’s also one of the funniest plays she’s ever read. “I know it will leave audiences in such a place of hope — and if we ever needed a play to do that, it would be now.”
The play stars Lewis Wheeler, a Boston-based stage and film actor who has often performed at Cape theaters. “This needs somebody who can play with the audience, who’s excited about some randomness,” Hamilton says. “Lewis is really good with people. Every performance will be based on who’s in the audience, and what they’re up for, and Lewis is jazzed about walking that tightrope.”
Cape Rep still needs funds to finish the barn’s heating and air-conditioning system and other details, but officials hope that using the space in the meantime will encourage donations. More events will be produced there this season.
Every Brilliant Thing runs from Thursday, May 8 to Sunday, June 1 at 3299 Route 6A, Brewster. Tickets are $25 to $40, with a pay-what-you-can performance on May 9, at caperep.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Heather Pilchard Gets Lost in the Woods
Eastham artist Heather Pilchard says that her upcoming show at AMZehnder Gallery (25 Bank St., Wellfleet) is essentially “about trees” and was inspired by her frequent walks through the woods in the fall and winter. “There’s something about that time of year,” she says. “You can really see the sky. There’s beauty in the starkness of it.”
All the paintings in the show were completed in those seasons. Pilchard begins with taking reference photos. The right ones seem to glow as she goes through them, searching for a scene to paint, she says.
Pilchard grew up as the child of two artists in North Carolina and went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Before she was anything else, she says, she was an abstract painter. The easy honesty of abstraction remains in her current paintings.
In Snail Road Trees, the sky exists in translucent, pale brushstrokes. The edges of the strokes define the trunks of trees — their bark, notched and mottled, looks almost shockingly real. Cranberry Bog Trees is another story: the dark trunks appear to wrest themselves from their surroundings, all yellow and pink and fiery with light.
In fact, says Pilchard, the paintings “seem to want to be really abstract and loose, almost like a gesture drawing.” The more she strives for detail and definition, she says, the muddier a painting gets. “I think that’s how I feel when I’m in the woods,” she says. “You’re not really focusing on one thing.
“When you’re looking at the ocean,” says Pilchard, “it feels like you’re looking out at infinity.” But in the winter woods, she says, “you’re surrounded by vastness. It’s like an embrace. It seems so large. It makes me feel small.”
There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 10 at 4 p.m. and an artist talk on Saturday, May 17 at 3 p.m. The show is on view through May 21. See amzehnder.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
The Elegant, Naughty Cole Porter
In 1935, composer and lyricist Cole Porter was riding on Long Island when his horse fell and rolled over his legs. As he awaited rescue from the accident that would cripple him, Porter began writing a song, “At Long Last Love,” which would become part of his 1938 musical You Never Know.
That tune — and the story behind it — will be part of John Murelle’s Night and Day: A Cole Porter Celebration on Saturday, May 10 at Wellfleet Public Library (55 West Main St.). The show will complete a trilogy of tributes to “great American innovators of musical theater” that the East Sandwich baritone, historian, and voice teacher has presented at the library with pianist Chris Morris. (Previous programs celebrated the music of George Gershwin and Irving Berlin.)
“My programs are music and dialogue,” says Murelle. “I love all this stuff when I study it and try to give audiences more than they expect.” In between well known Porter hits — like “Begin the Beguine” and “Let’s Do It” — and more obscure songs, he’ll talk about the composer’s “life, personality, why he was writing this, and what happened to him.”
Murelle says that his own training, recital work, and degrees in opera and classical music have influenced his interest in composers whose popular music resembles poetry. The “sophisticated, elegant, charming, and naughty” Porter began life as the scion of a rich Indiana family, Murelle says, and later traveled the world with his wealthy wife (while remaining a “practicing homosexual”) and hobnobbed with royalty.
Murelle has chosen about 20 songs for the program, including selections from the musicals Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate. “There’s so much music that I’d like people to hear that they probably don’t know,” he says. The show will intersperse ballads with up-tempo numbers and highlight Porter’s intricate lyrics. Medleys will include songs related to the night — like “Night and Day,” and “All Through the Night” — and Paris — including “Paris Loves Lovers” and “I Love Paris.”
The show is free. See wellfleetlibrary.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Two Songbirds Take the Stage
Michael Martinez and Max Embers met 10 years ago at Berklee College of Music, but it wasn’t until 2021, when Embers stayed with Martinez in San Francisco, that the two realized their “synergy” as musical partners. “We both love this planet, we both love nature, and we love the same music,” says Martinez. They became the Lonely Parrots, a folk-pop duo with Martinez on piano and Embers on guitar. Both sing, their voices blending in perfect harmony.
The Lonely Parrots will perform as part of the 12th season of Twenty Summers at the Hawthorne Barn (29 Miller Hill Road, Provincetown) on Friday, May 16. While the duo hasn’t released any original music yet — its first album is set to come out next year, Martinez says — they’ve released two covers, one of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” and one of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” Both songs have been reimagined as “love songs to Earth,” says Embers.
In their hands, “Ain’t Nobody,” originally a “sexy R&B” song, becomes a lush, acoustic reverie. “We’re letting it be an ode to nature,” says Embers. “Big Yellow Taxi,” originally quirky and upbeat, becomes a mellow, nostalgic lullaby.
Nature is a part of all their projects. The two recently started MORF (Music on Regenerative Farms), a “live music initiative with the intention of bringing concerts to sustainable, nature-based projects,” according to the program’s website. When the Lonely Parrots write songs, says Martinez, “we take Max’s guitar to the beach or the forest, wherever we can feel most immersed in nature.” From there, the pair’s “song seed” — a lyric, word, or melody — will bloom.
Tickets for the concert are $45 at 20summers.org. —Eve Samaha
