Bringing the Bells and Singing for Change
For 28 years, Reuben Reynolds has been the music director of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, standing in front of its hundreds of members as he raises his hands to conduct them in song. “As my mother puts it,” says Reynolds, “I’m a big old professional homosexual.”
The chorus has performed a holiday show in Provincetown since the first Holly Folly in 1997. BGMC will return to Provincetown Town Hall (260 Commercial St.) on Saturday, Dec. 7 at 8 p.m. with a show titled “Bring Your Own Bells.” The idea, says Reynolds, is that “everyone celebrates with bells,” adding that audience members are invited to bring “anything that you can fit in your pants pocket that will be quiet until you pull it out and ring it.”
The program will include, among Christmas classics like “Silent Night” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” a secular piece by composer Jacob Narverud, written at the request of Reynolds. At the end of the four-movement piece, called “Our First Christmas,” the chorus members and participating audience members will ring their bells. “Everyone will be involved in making music,” says Reynolds.
The past few months have been a challenging time for many, Reynolds acknowledges. “We want to find a way to move forward,” he says. “Every Wednesday night, I walk into chorus, and I have 200 guys sitting there waiting to somehow experience something better than what they are while they’re alone. We fight constantly to make the world a better place.”
The second half includes the song “Hard Candy Christmas” from “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” by Carol Hall and arranged by Chad Weirick. Involving four soloists, the song recognizes that life can be hard and sweet at the same time. At the end of the concert, “Everyone will be hooking arms, swaying, and ringing their jingle bells,” says Reynolds, “because we are all in this together.”
Tickets are $55 to $100 at bgmc.org. —Dorothea Samaha
Jerry Thompson’s Lifetime of Art
Born and raised in Branford, Conn., self-taught artist and playwright Jerry Thompson moved to Cape Cod in the early 1970s with his family and in 1976 built a house in Truro, where he still lives. This month, an exhibition of his abstract works is on view at the Truro Public Library.
“As I approach my 88th birthday, it’s time for others to see what I have done,” says Thompson, who began his artmaking career four decades ago with abstract expressionist-inspired work made with ink on rice paper. Over the years, he found that an ability that’s rare among even the most seasoned artists came naturally to him.
“I seemed to know when to stop, to know when the piece was finished,” he says. “It was an inner knowing.” In addition to his visual art, Thompson has written both short and full-length plays that have been produced around the United States.
Thompson’s work is on view in the Ann H. Brock Room at the library (7 Standish Way) through Dec. 28. A reception with the artist will be on Saturday, Dec. 7 from 2 to 4 p.m. See trurolibrary.org for more information. —Hazel Everett
Reading and Remembering Robert Finch
Stephen Russell counts himself among the many admirers of Robert Finch, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated nature writer, radio presenter, musician, and longtime Cape Cod resident who died on Sept. 30. More important, he feels lucky to be among those who considered Finch a friend.
To celebrate Finch’s life and work, Russell is hosting an event at the Wellfleet Public Library (55 West Main St.) on Saturday, Dec. 7 at 3 p.m. He and several other Finch friends and admirers will be reading selected pieces of Finch’s nature writing, which have been anthologized in more than a dozen collections and featured on WCAI’s “Cape Cod Notebook” since 2005.
“At the heart of Bob’s work is a facility with words that is unmatched by a lot of other writers I know,” says Russell. “He has that keen power of observation and curiosity that you want in a nature writer.” He calls Finch a “writer’s writer.”
Among the participating readers are Finch’s widow, Kathy Shorr, novelist Indira Ganesan, playwright Candace Perry, Wellfleet Town Moderator Dan Silverman, Finch’s WCAI producer Dan Tritle, and author (and Independent contributor) Kai Potter. The lineup, Russell says, “is a lot of friends and admirers and people who are already grieving and missing Bob.” Russell says it is particularly appropriate that Potter is taking part: “I think of him as carrying the torch from here forward,” he says.
For his own reading, Russell selected “Winter Solstice,” an essay from Finch’s first collection, Common Ground, in which he muses on the nature of materialism as he watches the sunset on the year’s shortest day. Russell knew Finch for 34 years, he says, but for this event, “I wanted to go back to my introduction to him.”
The reading is free. See wellfleetlibrary.org for information. —William von Herff
Roxy Pops Is Coming to Town
In her first ever solo show, Santa, Bring Me a Man, drag queen Roxy Pops stars as the fictional Editor in Chief of Throb Magazine. Between her live songs, Pops will take the audience through her “Ultimate Holiday Guide for Dating,” which includes a slew of wise and risqué tips she’s accumulated from a decade of living in Provincetown.
The show was written by drag queen Delta Miles: “I wrote a really tawdry script,” she says. “Roxy looks like Christmas at the beginning of the show but by the end she’s scantily clad.” Pops will perform for one night only at the Gifford House’s Wilde Playhouse (9 Carver St.) on Saturday, Dec. 7, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Pops grew up in Somerville and then Cranston, R.I. After attending Pittsburgh’s Point Park University, she moved to Boston and began performing in regional theater and as a drag queen in nightclubs. Pops says her style is influenced by Broadway musicals and Y2K-generation pop stars who she watched on MTV growing up, like Britney, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston.
And especially Lady Gaga: “She was the main reason I started doing drag,” Pops says, “because she was the first person I saw who was theatrical and pulled from popular culture. Her early aesthetic was very D.I.Y. So it was easy to replicate.”
Roxy Pops has been performing in Provincetown for 10 years. “I feel like the girl who came with nothing and no connections and clawed my way up, working hard, creating something for myself,” she says. “I wanted to go to Broadway as a kid, and in Provincetown I’ve been able to make a career as an entertainer.”
Santa, Bring Me a Man is about dating, but it’s also about laughing through the pain of the holiday season, which often includes keeping the peace with your family while answering questions about your career, weight fluctuations, or why you aren’t married. Pops will guide listeners through everything from finding the perfect first date spot to surviving family interrogations as a single woman on a mission for love.
The Fudge Factory, one of the show’s sponsors, will provide a surprise to each guest in the audience. Tickets are $35 at giffordsprovincetown.com. —Pat Kearns
Two Holiday Favorites Take the Stage
Seeking some holiday spirit? So are the central figures in two family-friendly theatrical productions now playing on Cape Cod stages. Both shows explore what’s truly important in the season — and in life — from the perspectives of two very different characters: a sour miser in Victorian England and a naive but hopeful elf at the North Pole.
Elf, the Musical, based on the 2003 movie about Buddy, a human raised at Santa’s workshop seeking his birth family and Christmas cheer in New York City, runs Dec. 5 to 22 at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans. A bit farther up Cape, A Christmas Carol, Eric Hill’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1843 tale about a miser’s selfish life transformed by four ghosts, runs Dec. 5 to 29 at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre in West Harwich.
The directors of each show say they hope the stories’ uplifting messages of family, love, and spreading happiness resonate with all ages. “I’ve always believed theater can be a powerful tool to help teach and reinforce what we learned as a child about being kind, generous, and not making it all about yourself,” says Jane Staab, who directs A Christmas Carol. “This story is about what it means to discover the goodness in yourself and that there are ways to change who you are.”
Beyond entertaining audiences, Jennifer Almeida, who co-directs Elf with Terrence Brady, wants the story and its jazzy songs to offer a break from reality during the holiday season. “It’s a time when you can just enjoy and not think about everything going on in the world or what people may be dealing with personally,” she says.
One of Elf’s themes is family, both on stage and in real life. Not only is the elf Buddy (played by Mark Roderick, who also co-designed the sets for the production) finding his own family, but multiple family members will be sharing the stage as well, including mother-and-son leads Katie Beatty and Toby Goers and Almeida’s son Lucas.
Both shows feature large casts with children, who Staab says have been on her mind lately. “Many of us are despairing that children may be getting the message that it’s OK to be mean and cruel and to lie,” she says. “This play is about redemption, and I think that goes deeper into our souls when we see real people on the stage struggling.”
Tickets for Elf, the Musical at Academy Playhouse (120 Main St., Orleans) are $25-$40 at academyplayhouse.org. Tickets for A Christmas Carol at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre (105 Division St., West Harwich) are $18-$28 at capecodtheatrecompany.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
