A Musical Pirate Adventure
In Melina Long’s 2003 children’s book How I Became a Pirate, young Jeremy Jacob is playing on a beach when he is enlisted by Capt. Braid Beard and his pirate crew to find the best spot to bury treasure. The book and its musical adaptation tell an adventure story that carries a lesson: “At the end, it’s about how wonderful it is to have a home, and your parents, and how you can have the greatest adventures right in your back yard,” says director Trish LaRose. The musical opens on Saturday, Feb. 8 at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre (105 Division St., West Harwich).
LaRose is making her directing debut at the theater where, as a child, she saw her first play. Her career has included stints at Cape Rep Theatre, Provincetown Theater, and Great Music on Sundays @5 performances in Provincetown.
The musical, written by Janet Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman, features costumes by Cat Perry and sets by Guy Trudeau (including a pirate ship) that are designed to reflect the beauty of David Shannon’s original book illustrations.
LaRose will reprise her 2023 autobiographical musical Trish LaRose: Come On-A My House in Cotuit the week after Pirate opens. “It’ll be an interesting crossover,” she says.
How I Became a Pirate runs through March 2. Performances are Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., with matinees from Feb. 18 to 20. There will be a special “pay what you can” performance on Sunday, Feb. 9 and a sensory-friendly performance on Saturday, Feb. 22. General admission tickets for all shows are $21-$32 at capecodtheatrecompany.org —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
MiYoung Sohn’s Daily Innovations
MiYoung Sohn creates art from everyday materials like aluminum foil, push pins, and cut paper. “My core practice is transforming the material function to create a new interpretation,” she says.
Sohn’s solo exhibition “Daily Innovations” at Higgins Art Gallery at Cape Cod Community College (2240 Iyannough Road, West Barnstable) will display samples of her work that focus on a single material, created over a 20-year period. “It feels like a survey show,” says Sohn. The exhibition opens on Monday, Feb. 10 at 1 p.m. with an interactive workshop followed by a reception from 2 to 4.
Previously, Sohn led interactive projects at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, one of which culminated in a piece titled Collective Line Drawing that will be on display in her new show. In it, participants used colored push pins to create images on a bulletin board — a communal and large-scale iteration of Sohn’s own work using a similar technique to create representational and abstract imagery. The direct, colorful images recall the pixelated quality of early computer graphics. In more recent work, Sohn uses straight pins to create more airy and delicate compositions.
The earliest works in the exhibit are from Sohn’s time as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, where she began to experiment with aluminum foil left over from a potluck dinner. Starting with a soup can, she continued working with the foil to create to-scale representations of common objects like a spoon and Hershey’s Kisses. During the Covid lockdown, she turned to foil again, rolling and pounding 1.6 miles of it to create a dense metallic ball.
Later, floral imagery made its way into some of Sohn’s straight-pin drawings. Her experience of frequently moving around without a stable studio resulted in work that references minimal, abstract painting, but made with the simpler medium of cut paper. Each image in the resulting collage series was constructed in one sitting.
Like the foil sculptures she made during lockdown, these images were a way for Sohn to navigate isolation in a disciplined practice that allowed for invention and play with simple materials. The exhibition will include selections from this series as well as a video presenting 115 of the images created over 115 days.
The show will be on view until March 14. See capecod.edu for information. —Abraham Storer
Making Musical Connections With Opal Canyon
For Brewster songwriter Debra DeMuth, music is a means of emotional connection. “My goal is to write songs that are like arms wrapped around you,” she says. “Songs that have a message of hope, comfort, safety, and serenity.”
That goal is reflected in the name of her band, Opal Canyon. It’s an imaginary place that you won’t find on a map. “We wanted the music to create a sense of place,” DeMuth says. “Somewhere beautiful where you could sit and let your troubles wash away.”
Opal Canyon will play at Truro Public Library at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 8 as part of the library’s winter music series. DeMuth performs with her husband, Dave Houghton. She comes from a ’70s singer-songwriter musical background, while Houghton is influenced by indie rock.
“We have an interesting dynamic of two styles coming together in a unique way,” says DeMuth. Houghton plays guitar and harmonica, and both sing. While the band usually includes a bass player, drummer, lead guitarist, and steel guitarist, only DeMuth and Houghton will be performing at the library.
DeMuth says the setlist will include original songs as well as “eclectic covers” of less familiar indie rock, country, and folk songs — all of which she hopes the audience will connect with. “Music has the ability to transport people to a memory,” she says. “It can bring ease, some hope or some joy.”
The performance is free. See trurolibrary.org for information. —Eve Samaha
From Radio Play to Live Show
A haunting 19th-century tale that has fascinated theatrical sound designer J Hagenbuckle since he was 12 has become the first of his radio plays to be turned into a live performance.
Since September 2020, Hagenbuckle has created 30 half-hour episodes of Cape Noir Radio Theater that have been broadcast on WOMR. (They are also available to stream at womr.org.) On Tuesday, Feb. 11 at Snow Library (67 Main St., Orleans), his 2024 adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge will be performed live with the two actors from the original radio production and an original soundtrack.
The event is an experiment to “break the episode open,” says Hagenbuckle, and to offer an intimate experience that’s “still all about sound.”
“This is a hybrid kind of performance art,” he says. “It lives in a space between a staged reading and a full production. The actors have scripts, but this is not a work in progress. We rehearse in great detail, with the inclusion of the sound score, as would happen in any sophisticated theater production.”
Bierce’s story is about a Civil War soldier captured in the act of sabotage and sentenced to hanging. The creepy tale inspired a famously dialogue-free episode of The Twilight Zone that caught Hagenbuckle’s young imagination. His own script tells the story from the points of view of the soldier and his wife. The stage production features several area actors including Wellfleet’s Casey Clark and Tamara Harper, who is also Wellfleet Preservation Hall’s director of programming.
The performance is free and will be followed by a talkback to help Hagenbuckle gauge audience response for future productions. See snowlibrary.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
What Makes a Musical Legend?
The mission of Red Door Chamber Music, says co-founder and co-director Craig Combs, has always been to bring chamber music to Provincetown and the Outer Cape. More than that, it has sought to combine the standard classical repertoire with music by composers who have historically been marginalized — especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ composers, many of whom have not received the recognition they deserve. Where classical music is concerned, says Combs, in recent years “the whole concept of ‘legend’ is being rethought in light of the discovery of music we didn’t know existed.”
In the ensemble’s upcoming concert, “What Makes a Legend Most?” on Sunday, Feb. 9 at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House in Provincetown (236 Commercial St.), five musicians will play pieces by six composers. Two — George Friedrich Fuchs and Robert Schumann — are widely recognized. The other four, says Combs, have been comparatively ignored: Reynaldo Hahn, a French composer who was openly gay; English composer Ethel Smyth; Hans Gal, an Austrian Jew who emigrated to the U.K. to escape persecution in the 1930s; and Nadia Boulanger, a French composer, conductor, and music teacher. All four were established artists who led complicated and full lives. But they are not as well known as their more privileged contemporaries. The program will include one piece from each composer — a carefully designed “sound palette,” says Combs.
After the concert, the audience will rank their selections on ballots, with number one being the “most legendary” and six being the least. Combs will publish the results online.
“Each person evaluates music differently,” he says. With a master’s degree and doctorate in piano performance and literature, Combs has a certain perspective. But he recognizes that his opinions aren’t definitive.
“People who have been gentle listeners over the years will hear something different from me,” he says. As the audience listens to the music, “I’m suspecting that we will find that what touches us is what is legendary.”
Suggested donation for the concert is $20 (free for age 17 and under), although no one will be turned away for lack of funds. See reddoorchambermusic.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
