Encountering Folk Music With Antje Duvekot
Singer-songwriter Antje Duvekot, who will be kicking off the season at First Encounter Coffee House (220 Samoset Road, Eastham) on Saturday, Sept. 23 at 7:30 p.m., says she has always been drawn to folk music, especially the sound of an acoustic guitar. When she was a teenager, she felt “spoken to” by artists like Woody Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan — and she’s been making a living as a folk singer for the past 20 years.
“My particular take on folk music is very personal,” Duvekot says. “I write almost confessional songs about serious, real things. There’s a lot of vulnerability that happens.” She cites singer-songwriters Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco as inspirations. “They spoke really frankly about things I didn’t know I was allowed to talk about in song,” says Duvekot. “My songs range a little bit into the deep end of things. But then I also try to make my shows fun. I talk between songs. Some people have told me I’m funny.”
Duvekot grew up in Heidelberg, Germany and moved with her mother to the U.S. when she was a teenager. After living in Delaware, she “more or less drifted up to New England,” where she’s been ever since. She often performs on Cape Cod.
This won’t be Duvekot’s first time playing at First Encounter. “It’s truly one of my favorite places to play,” she says. “It’s a small, intimate-feeling venue, a little bit old-school. You kind of feel like you’re stepping out of modernity when you go inside.” She plans to play songs from her fifth album, New Wild West, which was released earlier this month. “It’s about stepping out of your comfort zone,” says Duvekot. “And as things are changing, kind of rolling with it.”
Tickets are $25, and children are welcome to attend with their families (and are admitted free). See firstencounter.org for information. —Eve Samaha
Checking In With John Hill
Singer-songwriter John Hill, whose solo show “Wellness Check” came to Provincetown in July, will be bringing it back to the Post Office Café and Cabaret (303 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Sunday, Sept. 24, at 6 p.m. Hill says the show is a mix of standup, storytelling, and original songs. “It’s a chance for radio listeners to come out and engage in person,” he says.
A Broadway veteran, Hill is also the ex-partner of Bravo TV host and producer Andy Cohen, with whom he cohosts Cohen’s live weekday morning radio program on SiriusXM. As radio cohosts, Hill and Cohen are an alternative to Kelly and Mark, Mika and Joe, and other straight couples who host morning chat shows. Hill and Cohen have maintained their friendship after the dissolution of their romantic partnership.
Hill says that showing their audience that type of relationship was part of the reason they decided to continue to do the show, now entering its ninth year. “We felt ex-boyfriends who are now friends is a type of intimate friendship rarely seen and can be incredibly real and honest,” he says.
Perhaps because their relationship exists mostly in the subtext of the show and not as its central focus, it comes across as a more genuine representation of gay relationships that those presented through Cohen’s empire of reality television: it’s a great example for anyone, gay or straight, on negotiating a working relationship with an ex. (I have a special fondness for Hill’s subtle yet artful shading of Cohen’s relentless thirst for guys on dating apps that Hill feels would make inappropriate partners.)
Originally, Hill planned to perform material from a new show titled “Troye Sivan Is 50.” But he recently announced that Marissa Jaret Winokur, his Tony Award-winning former Hairspray castmate, has come on board as the new show’s director. He now hopes to bring the Winokur-helmed project to Provincetown next year.
Tickets to “Wellness Check” are $35 ($40 for V.I.P. seating) at postofficecafe.net —James Judd
John Waters Gets the Star Treatment
Filmmaker John Waters, a mainstay of the Provincetown Film Festival for many years, received two career tributes on the West Coast this week: the unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the opening of what’s described as the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to his process, themes, and “unmatched style.”
Festival executive director Anne Hubbell, board president Gabby Hanna, director of programming Andrew Peterson, and other Provincetown supporters were in Los Angeles to celebrate Waters, who is a longtime festival host and adviser, as the “Pope of Trash” exhibition opened at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Sept. 15. “The exhibition is mind-blowing and magical,” Hanna says. “A walk through John’s life as a filmmaker, from childhood to today.”
The retrospective at the two-year-old institution, operated by the organization that presents the Oscars, includes more than 400 items including costumes, set decoration, props, handwritten scripts, posters, concept designs, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, and film clips. An “Outside the Mainstream” display connects Waters’s work to American avant-garde film, underground film, and New Queer Cinema, and a related book includes interviews with Waters, curators, film historians, and critics. The show will run through August 2024.
Waters, 77, is a visual artist, author of 10 books, and director of 16 boundary-pushing, irreverent, and satiric films that offer what the museum calls “a daring dismissal of social norms and the status quo.” Two of his films — Pink Flamingos (1972) and Hairspray (1988) – have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
Waters’s Hollywood star ceremony on Sept. 18 was to be emceed by Variety editor Mark Malkin and feature actresses Ricki Lake and Mink Stole and photographer Greg Gorman as guest speakers. The star at 6644 Hollywood Boulevard is in front of Larry Edmunds Bookshop at fan Edmunds’s request, says Walk of Fame producer Ana Martinez, who called Waters “a huge part of pop culture for many years.”
On the exhibition website, fans can use camera filters to take selfies “wearing” hairdos, makeup, and accessories associated with Waters and his characters. See academymuseum.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Kevin Adams Returns to Gallery 444
“He’s always looking for new light — light is one of his fascinations,” says Jay Brown, the partner of artist Kevin Adams. In the context of a career that has spanned decades, Brown’s statement reads as a credo for Adams’s art.
Adams is a veteran of Provincetown landscape art, in the sense that he has prolifically painted scenes and landmarks like Race Point Beach and Cabral’s Wharf and also in that he shows his work in town nearly every year (and usually twice a year). His work — often impressionistic and controlled, yet exuberantly colorful — brings out the depth of its subjects by depicting the same locale at different times, days, seasons, and weather conditions. Adams has also established a reputation, on the Cape and beyond, as a teacher, mentor, and steward of painting as a career and way of life.
Adams and Brown have savored being able to spend so much time in a place they love that also happens to be so artistically fruitful. Earlier this year, Adams was diagnosed with a serious illness that makes it difficult for him to travel far from his medical caregivers in Virginia. For his new show at Gallery 444 (444 Commercial St., Provincetown), artists he has mentored and supported — including Paula Amt, David Costello, Jeff Krehely, and his brother Keith Adams — are all pitching in. They’ll be transporting, hanging, and even working as gallery attendants throughout the show’s two-week run.
Despite the uncertainty of this arrangement, Brown affirms that, for Adams, change is the only constant, in life and in art. “His goal is to capture those moments of change, some of which are very fleeting, and to preserve them for people to enjoy,” says Brown. For Adams, there’s never been anywhere better to witness and admire change in all its manifestations than here in Provincetown.
The exhibition is on view from Sept. 21 to Oct. 2. See gallery444ptown.com for information. —Derek McCormack
Lorrie La Pointe’s Paintings of Dark and Light
Artist Lorrie La Pointe loves the off-season in Wellfleet, where she lives. On a stormy day in January, or a rainy one in April, she’ll walk for miles down the coast.
“You can go for hours and not run into anyone,” she says. “It’s my meditation. You get some spectacular days, and sometimes the sand is pelting your face, or the wind is whipping.”
The shore acts as La Pointe’s workshop — a place to think without distraction, and often the source of intensely personal reflection. “There’s no better church than taking a walk down the coast in the winter,” she says.
La Pointe’s new exhibition at AMZehnder Gallery (25 Bank St., Wellfleet) is her response, she says, to the charged energy she feels before a winter storm, or during a day of particularly heavy fog. Many of the pieces are seascapes: curiously abstract visions of frothing waves, churning skies, and sometimes glassy waters under engulfing mist. “They’re intense, dramatic, kind of foreboding,” says La Pointe. Some feel serene. La Pointe doesn’t get caught up in the details of each site. Instead, she tries to capture an atmosphere.
The paintings feel organic and alive. Dark shadow meets icy blue in the belly of a wave, and color drips down the canvas like water down the lens of a video camera. La Pointe uses driftwood sticks and broken shells to scratch into the paint. She doesn’t overthink her process, she says. By trusting her intuition, she avoids a “static painting.”
“It can be funny how people respond to my paintings,” says La Pointe. “Some people will be like, ‘I feel like I’m drowning.’ ” But she urges those apprehensive viewers to look a little closer. In all her paintings, there is “a light on the horizon,” she says; maybe some suggestion of sunlight, or the approaching dawn, or a lifting of the storm.
The show is on view until Oct. 17. See amzehnder.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
