Joan Osborne Puts Her Own Spin on Bob Dylan
Joan Osborne has been listening to Bob Dylan since his music was being released on cassette tapes and covering his songs for just as long. Her renditions range from jazzy and sensual to country-inflected and soulful, and some of them are set against a totally different beat from the original version. Two of her albums, 2017’s Songs of Bob Dylan and Dylanology (Live) from earlier this year, spotlight lesser-known songs from Dylan’s vast oeuvre, from ’60s protest songs like “Masters of War” to tracks from his evangelical Christian era and beyond.
On Saturday, Aug. 9, Osborne will perform Dylan’s songs at Payomet Performing Arts Center (29 Old Dewline Road, North Truro). It’s interesting to hear Dylan’s often hypermasculine lyrics sung with a woman’s voice. The twist draws attention to how gender functions in his lyrics and the different ways singers wield sex appeal. It’s odd, for example — and a little uncomfortable — to hear Osborne sing “Tangled Up in Blue”: “She was married when we first met/ Soon to be divorced. Helped her out of a jam, I guess/ But I used a little too much force.”
Sometimes, her renditions give the originals new meaning; often, they lack Dylan’s silly, self-mocking sense of humor. But as Osborne said in a recent interview, “You’re not going to sing a Bob Dylan song exactly like Bob Dylan sings it. You want to find that place where your voice and the song intersect in a way that allows the song to blossom in a way that it hasn’t before.”
Tickets are $32-$65 at payomet.org. —Lauren Hakimi
Music as a Melting Pot
Kotoko Brass is a melting pot. Its eight members come from four different countries: Ghana, Antigua and Barbuda, the United States, and Japan. “The core of the band is a traditional West African drum and dance sound,” says drum-set player Ben Paulding, who grew up in Yarmouth Port with his brother Brian, the band’s trombonist.
The band — which Paulding says shows up at performances “with a small army of percussion instruments” — will play at Payomet Performing Arts Center (29 Old Dewline Road, North Truro) on Thursday, Aug. 14 at 7 p.m.
Paulding spent two years in Ghana studying traditional Asante music with one of the band’s percussionists, Attah Poku. “Outside of the band’s traditional Ghanaian rhythms, we bring in more contemporary genres,” says Paulding. “You’ll hear a little Ghanaian high life and a little brass band sound. We’ve got some Caribbean, reggae, soca (a variation of calypso), and New Orleans influences. We mash it all up in our own way.”
The Years of the Quiet Sun, the band’s debut album, was released in 2023. It includes covers of Ghanaian folk tunes, songs from the standard reggae repertoire, and originals compositions like “Down From the South” and “Monarch.”
Composing “Down From the South” was a collaborative effort, says Paulding, beginning with a saxophone melody composed by Andy Bergman. The dense instrumentation isn’t opaque: one can clearly hear the round beats of the kwadum drums, the bark of the trombone, and the whine of the sax layered on top of each other. Guitarist Dillon Zahner brings a “desert rock vibe” to the verses, Paulding says, and a “Congolese soukous sound” to the chorus.
“Monarch,” a collaboration between the Paulding brothers, is another fusion of musical culture. It begins with what Paulding calls “a mellow Latin vibe” and ends with a double time, chaotic section inspired by Haitian rara music. With its versatile group of musicians, Kotoko Brass does it all with one goal in mind, says Paulding: “We aim to get people dancing.”
Tickets are $18 to $38 at payomet.org. —Eve Samaha
Art That Explores a Family’s History
Lisa Cohen’s exhibition “Beneath the Layers” at Wellfleet Preservation Hall (335 Main St.) is a multimedia meditation on her family’s story of migration and survival.
Cohen worked as a freelance photographer in Boston until a few years ago when she retired and devoted herself to art. This show reveals an understanding of photographs as carriers of memory and meaning.
Most of the photographs are from a family collection that she inherited when she was in her 30s. “My family thought I would take care of them and keep them safe,” says Cohen. “I sat on them for years not knowing what to do with them.”
Cohen eventually found a way to use the photographs to multiple ends. While they tell her family’s story, they also become springboards for creative exploration and opportunities to comment on the greater story of displacement, immigration, and xenophobia throughout the world.
Photographs become malleable objects in Cohen’s art. She manipulates them with encaustic paint, print overlays, sculptural embellishments, and innovative printing techniques. Many of the photographs feature her grandmother Käthe Oppenheimer, who escaped with her children (including Cohen’s mother) from Europe during World War II.
Alongside one large-scale image of Oppenheimer on her wedding day, Cohen installed flowing white tulle. In another photograph titled On the Move, Cohen captures movement with an overlaid image of quick, gestural marks on fabric. Cohen often prints photographs on multiple pieces of fabric stitched together. In doing so, she evokes a feeling of fragility, echoing her family’s vulnerability. The effect is also ephemeral, like memory and history. “We don’t know the reality of exactly what happened,” says Cohen. “It’s based on my feelings and my emotions and piecing together stories.”
Although this is a personal show, Cohen intends the images to be read in the context of the present. One photograph of a man walking on a street is overlaid with the text of a historical document, a list of “alien passengers for the United States.” Despite the difficult subjects in this exhibition, it conveys a message of hope. The images express enduring family bonds and the perseverance of the human spirit.
The show runs through Aug. 31. Cohen will talk about her work on Monday, Aug. 11 at 6 p.m. See wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Abraham Storer
Challenging the Comfort of the Familiar
None of Shaboom!’s three members can remember how they landed on the group’s name, though they do recall an early performance where they sang the 1954 doo-wop classic “Sh-Boom” through helium balloons. The word is meaningless — perfect for a comedic troupe whose work revels in incomprehensibility, uncertainty, and idiocy. Shaboom! likes to describe what they do as “nude vaudeville for elderly children.” “We put in a lot of cultural references that get really perverted and deranged, and it comes out like Liza Minnelli on bath salts,” says member Silky Shoemaker.
Formed in 2016, Shaboom! is three artists with distinct backgrounds. Shoemaker is a painter and sculptor. Paul Soileau is best known for his drag persona Christeene, an electro-punk scream queen who regularly performs in Provincetown. Lex Vaughan’s performances and novelty items cultivate queer spaces and preserve lesbian history. Together, the three merge their talents in improv, slapstick, sculpture, and drag as they try to crack each other up.
They have bombed on stage. But that’s part of the process. They’re not pursuing perfection; they’re trying to surprise themselves. While their shows are structured around a prerecorded audio track, their facial expressions and gestures are made up in the moment. They do some basic blocking to get a sense of how their bodies work together on stage but leave room for chaos. “We press play, and it’s a runaway train,” Shoemaker says.
This week, Shaboom! kicks off a two-week residency at the Wilde, the performance space at Gifford House (9 Carver St., Provincetown). If Provincetown’s entertainment ecosystem is dominated by drag queen mainstays and pop karaoke crowd-pleasers, Shaboom! offers something else entirely, a left-field alternative to the comfort of the familiar.
Shaboom! performs at the Gifford House beginning Tuesday, Aug. 12 at 7:30 p.m., and shows run through Aug. 24. Tickets start at $35. See gifford.house. —Brian Droitcour
A Fresh Perspective on a Revered Musical
For years, Stanislav Przedlacki would choose the song “Finishing the Hat” from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical Sunday in the Park With George to perform in musical theater classes. It eventually became a signature of sorts for Przedlacki, a 2024 graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
After a friend recommended him to Cape Rep Theatre, Przedlacki auditioned for and was cast in the lead role for its current production of the musical. In his first time on stage on Cape Cod, Przedlacki plays two characters, both named George. In the first act of the play, George is a fictionalized version of the pointillist painter George Seurat in the mid-1880s creating his famous painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the second act, George is Seurat’s fictional great-grandson who wrestles with Seurat’s legacy and his own art career a century later.
The musical is a meditation on making art, personal sacrifices and losses, and seeing the world through an artist’s eye. That’s one reason Przedlacki was drawn to the song “Finishing the Hat” as he sought balance in pursuing his own creativity. “It’s the story of the relationship between the intense focus you have in your work, your art, and then on the outside world, with your relationships with your family and people you love,” he says.
As much as he was drawn to the role, Przedlacki hadn’t thought he’d get a chance to play Sunday’s George in a professional theater because it was most often cast with older actors. But Przedlacki notes that Seurat was also in his mid-20s when he started his painting. Przedlacki sees that younger perspective as an advantage as he tries to move away from familiar recordings and renditions of the musical — “literally putting it together, piece by piece,” in the words of the song, for a fresh interpretation.
As a photographer, musician, painter, and filmmaker, Przedlacki is able to draw on his own experience as an artist to inhabit the role. “I’m making George my own,” he says. “This is a story I’m able to tell.”
Sunday in the Park With George plays at Cape Rep’s Indoor Theater (3299 Main St., Brewster) through Aug. 24. Tickets are $25-$50 at caperep.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Double Threats Come to Provincetown
Actors Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery — best known for their respective television roles as Sue Sylvester in Glee and Meredith Palmer in The Office — are teaming up for a new cabaret show, “The Trouble With Angels,” on Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 7 p.m. at Provincetown Town Hall (260 Commercial St.) as part of the Payomet Road Show series.
In a recent Instagram video, Lynch described the title of the show as a nod to the 1966 film of the same name about the heartfelt misadventures of two girls in an all-girls Catholic school. But audiences should come to town hall expecting to hear songs from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s instead. “Your toe will be tapping,” said Lynch.
Lynch describes herself and Flannery as “double threats,” which means they only sing and act (with professional, hilarious gusto). But don’t expect any dancing — that would make them triple threats instead.
The two will be backed on stage by the Tony Guerrero Quartet. Tickets are $45-$85 at payomet.org. —Dorothea Samaha
