Bob Mackie, Still Sparkling
If you close your eyes and picture some of the most memorable celebrity fashion looks of the past half century — particularly the more revealing ones and anything involving an overdose of sequins — there’s a good chance they were designed by Bob Mackie.
On Wednesday, Aug. 21, Mackie will appear at a special screening of the new documentary Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion at Waters Edge Cinema, where he will participate in a pre-screening champagne toast and a discussion after the film about his long and sparkling career.
The film, which premiered in May in Los Angeles, traces Mackie’s life and work from his earliest days to the present. Born in California in 1939, Mackie began his Hollywood career in the early 1960s at Paramount Studios, where he was discovered by legendary costume designer Edith Head. An early professional highlight came in 1962 when he made the drawings that would become the infamous “nude illusion” dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. Over the next six decades, Mackie went on to create memorable ensembles for dozens of stage, screen, and music performers from Carol Burnett, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, and Tina Turner to Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, and Beyoncé.
But it was his ongoing collaborations with Cher that perhaps most cemented Mackie’s status as a pop culture icon. He designed the sensational outfits that became the singer’s signature look on her television variety show in the mid-1970s as well as the notorious feathered headdress ensemble she wore to the 1986 Oscar ceremony. He would later win his first Tony Award for his costume design for the Broadway review The Cher Show in 2019. (Mackie has also been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won nine Primetime Emmy Awards for his work in television, including the first-ever Emmy awarded for costume design in 1967.)
In an interview with People magazine earlier this year, Mackie credited his sense of humor as the reason for his popularity with his celebrity clientele. “You have to have that little thing in your brain, that little sense of humor, that you’re wearing it because it’s fun to wear, not because it makes you look so fabulous, you know?,” he said. “It’s partly the wit.”
Tickets for the screening event are $75 ($65 for Provincetown Film Society members). See provincetownfilm.org for information. —John D’Addario
Boston Art Review Pops Up in Provincetown
Jameson Johnson started the Boston Art Review in 2017 to fill a gap left by the closure of publications that covered art in Boston, including the Boston Phoenix, DigBoston, and Big Red and Shiny. It has since grown into a twice-yearly publication that leads conversations about culture through on-the-ground coverage of the local art scene. “We seek to facilitate discourse and make connections between artists and audiences,” says Johnson.
The nonprofit magazine recently completed its first strategic plan, and Johnson kept hearing that people wanted to see Boston Art Review expand its presence throughout New England. Its upcoming pop-up in Provincetown is one of the first steps in expanding that reach, although the review has long had readers around the country.
From Aug. 16 to 21, Boston Art Review will be in residence at Zone 7a Gallery and Books (437 Commercial St., Provincetown) where it will exhibit work by 16 artists who have been featured in the magazine. Participating artists include Clint Baclawksi, who has shown at Room 68 in Provincetown; Cicely Carew, a 2023 recipient of the ICA’s Foster Prize; and Silvia López Chavez, who currently has a mural of a right whale installed on Provincetown’s MacMillan Wharf. Proceeds from sales of the artworks will support the magazine’s writer fund.
“Artists need a few different kinds of spaces to be successful,” says Johnson, who sees Boston Art Review as one part of a healthy arts ecosystem. “What happens when small collectives and individuals take up the task and try to make something happen?”
Johnson will discuss this question further at the opening event: a panel discussion about the spaces needed for the arts to flourish in communities like Provincetown. She will be joined on the panel by Fine Arts Work Center Executive Director Sharon Polli and visual artist and co-director of Zone7a Gallery and Books Cole Barash. Artist James Everett Stanley will moderate the discussion, which will be held at the Fine Arts Work Center (24 Pearl St., Provincetown) on Friday, Aug. 16 at 4 p.m. An opening celebration will follow at Zone 7a from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. See bostonartreview.com and zone7agalleryandbooks.xhbtr.com for information. —Abraham Storer
Cole Barash Expands the Limits of Photography
In his upcoming exhibition “Multiplex Realities” at Farm Projects in Wellfleet, Cole Barash looks to the intersection of wilderness and family to push the boundaries of photography, combining documentary images with sculptural elements to create mixed-media works.
The exhibition includes traditional silver gelatin prints from the book A Walk on Cape Cod, which Barash made with poet Eileen Myles in 2022. To make these photographs, Barash backpacked from Nauset Light up to Provincetown, sleeping in the dunes along the way. “I didn’t see anyone for four days,” he says. “I was in my own vortex— that’s how I wanted to experience making my work.”
In Primitive View of the Moon, the full Moon hangs low in the distance over the tip of a pyramid-shaped dune. In the foreground, a lush mess of beach grass shines in the moonlight.
Alone in the dunes, Barash thought about his father, who died in 2020. He considered the materials one would use to survive in the wild — tents, ropes, and fiberglass cloth, which was used for sail repairs out at sea — and made art out of these materials.
The other room in the exhibition includes mixed-media photo-based sculptures. In these works, images are often printed on unconventional material such as tents, burlap, and fiberglass. For these, Barash says he considered the question, “What am I able to print on and how is the material related to the overall idea of the work?” The resulting works came from a place where Barash felt photography was two-dimensional and restrictive.
For Flowing Water, The Mind Wanders Across, Barash used woven fiberglass cloth, UV ink, and wood. The looped ridges of the woven fiberglass cloth give pattern and depth to the piece. Hands squeeze an abstract yellow pouch of water. Deep violet contrasts with light against a black background.
Barash says another consideration was the changing nature of documentary photography. “You can’t make certain work anymore unless you have the right to,” he says. “You have to have a real connection to the place and community. During Covid it was so intense in the documentary space that I felt I needed a place to expand the lanes, experiment, and mess around. I didn’t want to feel the weight. I wanted the documentary work to feel slower and not spend all my time in that space.”
“Multiplex Realities” is on view from Aug. 16 to 26, with an opening reception on Saturday, Aug. 17. Barash will present an artist talk at Farm Projects on Monday, Aug. 19 and will participate in the panel discussion “Creating the Space We Need” at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown on Friday Aug. 16. See farmprojectspace.org and colebarash.com for information. —Pat Kearns
Of Magic and Marconi
Set in Wellfleet in 1903, Tom Stephens’s debut play Three Dots tells the story of how Italian telegraph pioneer Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first-ever wireless communication from America to Europe. The play will be presented in a staged reading at Harbor Stage Company (15 Kendrick Ave., Wellfleet) on Monday, Aug. 19 and Tuesday, Aug. 20.
Stephens based his story on real circumstances and people, including Sarah Atwood, America’s first female lighthouse keeper. “I never wanted this play to be a lesson, though,” he says. “It’s much more about the personalities of people in the area. And it has a lot of sort of magical elements to it: at what point does science become the supernatural or the supernatural become science?”
Stephens knows something about magic. Since 2018, he’s understudied five roles in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. He’s the first actor to cover all three leads of wizards Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Draco Malfoy — sometimes with just an hour’s notice.
When not needed on stage, however, Stephens has plenty of downtime. He says he wrote Three Dots “in my dressing room in between shooting flames out of my wand on stage.” He acknowledges how his experience with Harry Potter’s many sound elements influenced his own play’s emphasis on sound, particularly the sense of being surrounded by water and the forces of nature.
A native of England, Stephens discovered the Outer Cape (and Marconi) while performing at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, starting with 2008’s The Pillowman. He now vacations here with his family and has remained friends with the actors he first performed with, who later founded the Harbor Stage Company. Stephens particularly credits Brenda Withers and Jonathan Fielding with helping to shape the play and to obtain the science and tech-oriented playwriting grant to develop it.
Tickets for the reading are $12 at harborstage.org. —Kathi Strizzi Driscoll
A Music Festival With Something for Everyone
Two years ago, David White says, he began thinking about “all this local musical talent on Cape Cod,” including well-known artists like the multi-Grammy nominated Groovalottos and musicians like Eastham native Natalia Bonfini, who was a top 50 finalist on the 20th season of American Idol. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” White remembers thinking, “if we had a festival that showcased all this talent?”
The first Outer Cape Music Festival took place last summer. This year’s festival will be on Saturday, Aug. 17 and Sunday, Aug. 18 at the Elks Lodge in Eastham (10 McKoy Road). White, who owns D J White Welding and Construction, runs the festival with his wife, Rachel White, and Adam Rouillard. All are volunteers: “We don’t take a paycheck,” says White. All profits for the nonprofit festival benefit Outer Cape charities, including the Elks Veteran Fund, the Council on Aging, Lower Cape Outreach Council, and the recently established Outer Cape Children’s Music Scholarship Fund.
The scholarship fund was created to address a problem faced by many working families. “All too often, the first thing that is taken off the table when you’re a struggling parent is your children’s extracurricular music classes,” says White. “When you have to choose between that and putting food on the table, I think the decision is pretty clear.”
This year’s festival will feature performances by local bands and visiting artists from around the country, including 40 Thieves, who, White says, used to play at Nauset High School in the 1980s. Other artists include Bonfini, Sarah Burrell, Hand of the Tribe, and Sidewalk Driver. “Every hour, there’s a band switch,” says White. The festival will also include food trucks, a raw bar, and prizes.
White expects a wide range of festival attendees from all walks of life. “The nice thing about Cape Cod is that you never know who you’re sitting next to at a restaurant or at a bar or at a show,” he says. Everybody will be there for the same thing: to enjoy local music.
“Every single one of these bands could be a headliner,” he says. “Making the lineup was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
One-day general admission tickets for the festival are $35. Two-day tickets are available for $60. See outercapemusicfest.com for a complete festival lineup. —Dorothea Samaha
Yvie Oddly Follows Her Oddities
“Follow your oddities and fly your freak flag,” drag queen Yvie Oddly declared after winning Season 11 of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2019. As they sashayed down the runway, bedazzled scepter in hand, Oddly’s five-pointed, mirrored headpiece reflected the drag queen’s impeccable contours, the light of the other dazzling queens sharing the stage, and the faces of the cheering audience.
In the five years since, Oddly has continued distorting perception and working the angles across mediums, completing a residency in Las Vegas and a debut rap album, Drag Trap, in addition to competing on the seventh season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars.
Oddly will make their Provincetown debut to celebrate a new milestone: the recent release of All About Yvie: Into the Oddity, a memoir co-written with Michael Bach. The Provincetown Bookshop (229 Commercial St.) will host Oddly and Bach for a book signing on Sunday, Aug. 18 at 2 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.
After the reading, the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St.) will host a conversation with Oddly and Bach along with a live performance and meet-and-greet with Oddly. Tickets are $45 and include a signed copy of the book. See onlyatthecrown.com and allaboutyvie.com for information. —Aden Choate
