Jazz for All at the Provincetown Festival
When Bart Weisman moved to Cape Cod after growing up in Washington, D.C., he didn’t see much in the way of jazz on the cultural calendar — and he decided that he’d change the tune. Why did he eventually decide to create the Provincetown Jazz Festival? “Why not?” he says with a chuckle.
Since the first festival in 2005, Weisman has served as its executive producer. The format of the festival has changed over the years. “In the first few years, we played around with the formula and tried to do workshops,” says Weisman. “But the most successful format has been a series of nighttime concerts.”
While the festival has mostly highlighted local performers, it has also seen its share of jazz legends and guest stars, like clarinetist Joe Muranyi, who performed with Louis Armstrong and appeared at the festival in 2016, and actor Molly Ringwald, who Weisman performed with in 2017.
“I heard that Molly Ringwald had been singing jazz,” says Weisman. “Her father had been a jazz musician. So, I contacted her and got her here. We had a great time performing together.”
This year’s program began on Monday, Aug. 5 with a performance by Cassandre McKinley & the Cape Cod Jazz Quartet at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth. On Monday, Aug. 12, Tish Adams will perform with Mike Flanagan at the Cotuit Center for the Arts (4404 Falmouth Road), followed by a performance by Atla and Matt DeChamplain on Tuesday, Aug. 13 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (460 Commercial St.).
Proceeds from the nonprofit festival support local causes including the Jazz in the Schools program, which Weisman founded in 2014. For many students, the program is their first opportunity to hear live music and participate in improvisational music-making. The program, which includes students from pre-K through high school, has taken place at public schools across Cape Cod.
“Getting students to actively participate while learning about the history of the genre makes the program special,” says Weisman. “We play a contemporary jazz song while the students are arriving. I love watching the kids’ faces when they say to themselves, ‘This is jazz?,’ and seeing them groove to the music.”
Tickets for each event are $35. See provincetownjazzfestival.org for more information. —Hazel Everett
Staging the Life of a ‘Charismatic and Explosive’ Artist
Carl Kline’s play Part of the Noise offers a glimpse into the life of his uncle, the painter Franz Kline, and his abstract expressionist cohort, including William de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Jack Kerouac, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. On Sunday, Aug. 11, actors from the Helltown Players will stage a reading of the play at the Provincetown Theater (238 Bradford St.) in a production directed by Lynda Sturner and presented as part of the summer-long Forum 24 by the Provincetown Art Gallery Association.
The play centers on Franz Kline’s turn to using color in his work after the success of his gestural black-and-white abstract paintings. It begins in 1959 in his studio with a visit by gallerist Sidney Janis, who gets into an argument with the artist about his new direction. Janis tells Kline that if he puts the colorful paintings in his upcoming show, it will be his last one at the gallery.
“Sidney wants to make money, but Franz wants his artistic freedom,” says Carl Kline.
The story also includes flashbacks to Kline’s early career as a struggling artist (“When he was poor, he’d paint bar signs and murals and character sketches for 50 cents apiece,” says Carl) and the time when his wife, Elizabeth, was institutionalized with schizophrenia.
Franz Kline, who worked in Provincetown during the summer for several years beginning in the mid-1950s, died of heart disease in 1962 at the height of his career. Carl, who received his M.F.A. in theater from Michigan State University in 1999, says he didn’t know much about his uncle growing up aside from the fact that his dad talked on the phone with him a lot. “But I knew he was a famous painter,” he says. “He was charismatic, but could be explosive.”
Tickets for the reading are $40 or $80 including a reception at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown following the reading. See helltownplayers.org for information. —Pat Kearns
‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (and Cape Cod)’ at Readymade Gallery
Nearly a century and several hundred miles separate Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from contemporary Cape Cod. But however improbably, Smith’s semi-autobiographical story of growing up in a working-class urban neighborhood in the early decades of the 20th century has inspired a current group show at Readymade Gallery in Orleans.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (and Cape Cod)” features work by nine of the gallery’s artists in residence and invited guest artists, all of whom use the natural world as a point of departure. According to a gallery statement, the show shares a central theme with the book that inspired it: “Just as in Smith’s novel where a tree growing outside a tenement building comes to symbolize resilience and hope, the paintings on view here reflect the tenacity of the natural world as much as the indomitable will of the human spirit.”
The nine artists in the show approach the landscape genre in different ways, most of which tilt toward abstraction. Some of the highlights include Walter Brown’s Disruption, Chaos, Uncertainty, which resembles both a colorful topographic map and a microscopic view of a cluster of cells or microorganisms, perhaps reflecting the artist’s prior career as a medical doctor.
With its expressive, loose brushstrokes suggesting hilltops, clouds, and the furrowed lines of a valley, Jai Hart’s Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall takes a somewhat more figurative but no less evocative approach to depicting a natural environment.
The cluster of colorful biometric forms hovering over a loose latticework suggesting rivulets or perhaps a system of fencing in Becky Yazdan’s It Sheds Its Failure split the difference between representation and abstraction, while the soft washes of color juxtaposed with harder-edged fields of paint and a spangle of stars against a dark sky in Jen Shepard’s Low Tide has both the vagueness and specificity of a half-remembered dream.
Readymade Gallery is at 11 Cove Road in Orleans. The show is on view until Aug. 25. See readymadegallery.com for information. —John D’Addario
John Hill Is ‘Willing to Do Anything’
There tend to be two ways people know John Hill, and they bring very different audiences to his live performances. There’s the radio show with ex-boyfriend Andy Cohen that — although he doesn’t know why — he says lures a conservative crowd that “look like people who would have taught fifth grade.” Then there’s his thirst-trap-filled Instagram, where he rarely if ever posts a pic with his shirt on.
“Whatever’s going on with Instagram’s algorithm is shocking,” he says in his defense. “I posted once with me in a turtleneck for a show in Seattle and five people saw it. Then I posted one with my shirt off and 5,000 saw it! You’re not getting in people’s feed unless your shirt’s off.”
Somehow, he promises that his upcoming solo show at the Post Office Cabaret will appeal to both sides — even if the sexy poster for the show is clearly aimed at the social media fans. It is Provincetown, after all, he says, and “I know where my people are.”
Unlike last year’s “Wellness Check,” Hill’s new show, “Gooning,” is mostly improvised. He riffs on the audience and “anything that’s happened to me that day,” with some songs for those who know him from Broadway (he was in the original cast of Hairspray). Hill says the unplanned nature makes it a more ambitious performance but one that’s perfect for the Provincetown vibe.
“I think a lot of times my humor goes very well there,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s drag humor, camp humor, edgy gay humor, and they always get the jokes. In general, I don’t do a lot of politics. It’s normally personal observation, like hosting this radio show with my ex-boyfriend and some of the embarrassing stories from my life.”
But will the shirt come off? “I’m willing to do anything,” he says.
Tickets are $35 ($40 for V.I.P. seating), plus fees, at postofficecafe.net. —David Marsland
Jeffrey Solomon’s Journey of Love
Playwright, performer, and director Jeffrey Solomon first brought his award-winning “two-character, one-person show” Mother/SON to Provincetown in 1999. It will return for a one-night-only performance at the Provincetown Commons (46 Bradford St.) on Thursday, Aug. 15 at 5:30 p.m. The production is a fundraiser for two local nonprofit organizations, Gay Sons & Mothers and the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod.
Mother/SON is inspired by Solomon’s relationship with his own mother, who died of heart disease in 1995. When she was alive, says Solomon, his mother would talk to him “in a great miniseries of repeat phone calls.” After her death, he says, “What I noticed most of all was how silent my life suddenly was.”
The play became a way to hear her still — “not in a ghostly sense,” says Solomon, “but in the way that her voice, humor, love, fear, anger, it was all there.” In writing the play, he found a way to recreate their communication. In performing it, he could “touch base with her from time to time.”
Some elements of the play are invented, says Solomon, “but all the emotions are true.” Two characters, one loosely based on Solomon and one on his mother, go on a journey toward understanding and friendship. It’s a coming out story, says Solomon, but “really it’s much more about acceptance and love.”
Solomon’s decision to play both characters in the play came easily to him. For one thing, he wanted to be able to tell the story anywhere, so there was a practicality to going solo, he says. (“One time I performed on top of a table.”) Then there was the specificity of the story. His mother was “right there,” he says, “in my heart, in my voice, in my breath, in the way I carry myself” — so who could be better suited than him to play a version of her?
Solomon has performed Mother/SON all over the U.S. and worldwide, including productions in England, Australia, the Philippines, India, and Sri Lanka. Solomon, who founded the New York City-based nonprofit theater company Houses on the Moon, says that the play, like most of his work, exists both as entertainment and as a tool to “create conversations, offer support, educate, and illuminate.”
There is a $25 suggested donation for tickets, which are available in advance on eventbrite.com and at the door the evening of the performance. See housesonthemoon.org and provincetowncommons.org for more information. —Dorothea Samaha
A Concert to Honor Queer Voices
Tenor Andrew Bearden Brown notes that the baroque composer George Frederic Handel never married or had children. “He was a lifelong bachelor,” says Brown, who has included Handel’s aria “Where’er You Walk” in the program for a concert titled “Queer Voices Through the Centuries” on Sunday, Aug. 11 at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House (236 Commercial St., Provincetown). The concert is part of the weekly “Great Music on Sundays @5” series.
In four sections — “Queer Beginnings,” “Queer Life,” “Queer Remembrances,” and “Queer Love” — the program includes music by historical and modern composers. Brown will sing accompanied by pianist Frederick Jodry and flutist Eric Maul.
In Handel’s aria, the god Jupiter sings to Semele, the female object of his attraction, offering her beautiful compliments to win her favor. While it’s an objectively heterosexual scene, Brown says “that same pastoral context was where a lot of passionate desire was expressed, including same-sex desire.
“That one is probably the piece you’d have to read into the most,” says Brown. It’s on the program partly for its queer connotations and partly because, “I just really like it,” he says.
In “Queer Life,” Jodry and Maul will play a flute sonata by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), who was gay — a piece Brown describes as “lively and joyful.” The section also includes a song cycle, “Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc,” by contemporary American composer Jake Heggie.
Brown says that the next section, “Queer Remembrances,” “focuses on loss and grief and the way that queer people show up for each other in moments as traumatic as the AIDS crisis to the sort of quiet, person-to-person ways we’ve decided to honor one another.” It opens with Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the 18th-century song “Tom Bowling.”
“It’s a beautiful depiction of same-sex love,” says Brown, “erotic or not.” The section will conclude with the aria “In Need of Breath,” from Craig Hella Johnson’s 2016 oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard, which honors the memory of Shepard, who was murdered near Laramie, Wyo. in 1998. The text of the aria is a translation of a poem by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez. In the context of the oratorio, the aria is sung from Shepard’s perspective. “Musically,” says Brown, “it’s incredibly open and vulnerable and clear.”
The last section will include songs by American composer Cole Porter (1891-1964). “He’s delightful in his word play, the way that he can be tongue-in-cheek in one moment and completely genuine in the next,” says Brown, who adds that ending the program with Porter’s lighthearted music was a deliberate choice.
“It’s important when you’re programming a concert, especially if you’re going to take people to some place really challenging, that you give people the space to be able to sit with it and also the room to let it go,” he says.
Tickets are $30 at the door ($50 priority seating; free for ages 17 and under). See ptownmusic.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
