Cold Chocolate at Wellfleet Preservation Hall
Boston-based Americana band Cold Chocolate comes to Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Friday, May 3. The band is currently on tour for its latest album, Now That’s What I Call Cold Chocolate, released last fall. It is the band’s fifth full-length album.
The musicians, Ethan Robbins on guitar and mandolin and Ariel Bernstein on banjo and percussion, fuse folk, funk, and bluegrass. The theme of the new album is nostalgia. “We conceptualized it over Covid,” says Robbins. “We couldn’t get together, so we were searching for songs that brought us back to happy memories from growing up.”
Robbins gives another reason for their decision to record an album of songs written by other artists. “Sometimes when you didn’t write the song, you can have more fun with it because it’s not as personal,” he says.
A violinist since age four, Robbins says he fell in love with guitar when he turned 14. He began performing bluegrass as a student at Oberlin College and moved to Boston after graduation. Cold Chocolate formed 10 years ago after Robbins and Bernstein met at a friend’s show. Bernstein was the drummer of a mutual friend’s band.
In recent years, their sound has evolved from bluegrass toward Americana and funk. “During the pandemic, Ariel learned how to play banjo,” says Robbins. “I’ve always played mandolin. We realized with that combination we were able to tap into a more bluegrass style. We stopped playing our original songs until this year when we broke out the banjo-mandolin section of the show.” Their song lineup now includes a mix of original music and covers like the ones on their new album.
As for the band’s name, it comes from a memory of Robbins’s childhood visits to Wilkes-Barre, Pa. to visit his grandfather. He and his brothers would spend the six-hour drive thinking about the frozen Milky Ways awaiting them in their grandfather’s freezer. “We would just shoot right past him when he came out of the house and head straight to his freezer for the frozen Milky Ways,” he says. The name honors his grandfather’s memory. “It reminds me of home,” he says.
Tickets are $20 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Pat Kearns
Provincetown Art at the Sandwich Museum
Works by several influential Outer Cape artists of the 20th century are a focus of a season-long exhibit at the Heritage Museums & Gardens (67 Grove St., Sandwich): 15 of the 61 pieces in “Impressionist New England: Four Seasons of Color and Light” are by artists who lived or regularly worked in Provincetown, and several more have other Outer Cape connections.
Making a connection to the other end of Cape Cod was one reason why curator Amanda Wastrom says she decided to include so many paintings from Provincetown in the exhibition. Its status as one of the country’s oldest art colonies also made it central to the show’s premise. “New England plays significantly in the Impressionism story, and Provincetown is one of those important places,” she says. “You can’t tell this story without Charles Hawthorne, his school, and all the artists who were influenced by him.” In addition to Hawthorne, the show includes work by other artists affiliated with the Cape School of Art, including Henry Hensche and his wife, Ada Rayner.
Other Provincetown figures featured in the exhibition include Mary Oliver, whose poem “Spring” is displayed on one of the gallery walls. Wastrom says she wanted to add a range of voices and types of art inspired by the region. Christine McCarthy, executive director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, is featured in a video about Provincetown’s art colony. PAAM loaned eight paintings from its permanent collection for the exhibition.
The show is on view until Oct. 20. See heritagemuseumsandgardens.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on May 2, misspelled the last name of Ada Rayner as “Raynor.”
Louise Mosrie Coombe at First Encounter
To listen to folk singer-songwriter Louise Mosrie Coombe is to journey through the stories and landscapes of the South. The Tennessee native will perform at the First Encounter Coffeehouse (220 Samoset Road, Eastham) on Saturday, May 4 at 7:30 p.m.
After several years collaborating with country, bluegrass, and folk musicians in Nashville, Mosrie Coombe carved out a distinct niche in the mid-2010s with her ability to blend personal experiences with broader historical narratives. Her acclaimed 2010 album Home showcased her adeptness at melding folk with country influences, and her 2014 album Lay It Down stripped back the layers to emphasize her vocals and guitar work and showcase the raw emotion in her lyrics.
Mosrie Coombe’s music provides a reflective look at Southern history and its implications. The song “Battle of Blair Mountain” conveys the struggles and resilience of 1921 West Virginia coal miners who challenged oppressive labor practices and inequitable working conditions. Another song, “When Cotton Was King,” is a reckoning with the South’s legacy of slavery.
At the same time, Mosrie Coombe reflects on personal growth, love, and loss in her own life, fusing the historical with the contemporary. In “Land of the Living,” she sings out in hope and the spirit of perseverance: “I know it’s all part of some grander plan, and I can’t stop the hourglass draining sand.”
Tickets for the May 4 performance are $25 and available at the door or online at firstencounter.org. —Aden Choate
Denise Page Follows the Path to Our Town
Making big life changes has allowed Denise Page to return to the acting and singing she’s loved since she was a student at Provincetown High School. Now the Wellfleet resident has a central role at Brewster’s Cape Rep Theatre that hits close to home.
Page plays wife and mother Mrs. Gibbs in director Maura Hanlon’s “fresh take” on Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about life and death in turn-of-the-20th-century New Hampshire. Page remembers relating to its teen characters’ worries when she was in high school. But the play holds deeper meanings now that she’s the mother and stepmother of three teenagers and experienced her own mother’s death six years ago. The story is a “marvel,” she says, in how it resonates at different life stages and shows how “so much changes but also how nothing changes.”
A similar outlook inspired Hanlon’s choice of the play, which she considers “remarkably contemporary” rather than a quaint period piece. “The message felt really powerful to me,” she says. “Life goes by so quickly. We get so caught up in our routines that we don’t hold onto what a gift it is.”
Page’s path to the stage included several career changes. Her father was a longtime Provincetown police officer, and she followed him into emergency services, working as a police dispatcher, EMT, and paramedic in Truro and Provincetown. As an actor, she performed at the Provincetown Theater and with Provincetown’s Counter Productions.
She gave up acting for eight years until she took a more flexible office job at Land’s End Marine Supply in Provincetown, where her husband is general manager. She found a creative home at the Academy of Performing Arts in Orleans, where she acted in eight shows in two years — including the musical Annie, in which she starred as the villainous Miss Hannigan. She also taught theater classes aimed at instilling confidence in elementary school students.
Page says that taking a chance to audition at Cape Rep was part of a decision to live more fully since her mother died. “I’m trying to not stay jammed in a box,” she says. “If something calls me, I’ll try something new. Life is short. Do whatever it is you need to do, and make sure you do it with purpose.”
Our Town is at Cape Rep (3299 Route 6A, Brewster) through June 2. Call 508-896-1888 for ticket information or visit caperep.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
