A Junior-Size Sondheim Musical
After three years of teaching middle- and high-school students in her advanced acting class, Academy Playhouse Artistic Director Judy Hamer knew that her students were ready to take on their own show. Since September, 14 of them have been preparing for this month’s premiere of Into the Woods Jr., a musical that will kick off the theater’s 50th anniversary season.
Hamer calls the students “the heart of the big kids’ crew” at the Orleans theater. Many have participated in previous shows including Annie, The Lion King, and Oliver!
“I’ve done everything with them — scenes, monologues, songs,” says Hamer. “For this play, they’ve really studied their characters, done backstories, studied their walks and movements. And they’re singing well.”
Into the Woods Jr. is adapted from the first act of the 1986 Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical about fairy-tale characters like Cinderella and Little Red of riding hood fame and what their stories say about real life. Hamer says that her students have embraced the complex music, “crazy Sondheim beats,” and tongue-twisting lyrics of the show with help from music director Jennifer Kangas and voice teacher Jennifer Almeida. The show is stage-managed by student Andrew Breda, 14, who also helped design and build the set with Academy designers Mark Roderick and Nicholas Dorr.
The theater is planning to mount the full-length version of Into the Woods in November, so actors in this month’s junior production will have the chance to work with the adult actors cast in the same roles and watch how that larger show develops.
Into the Woods Jr. runs through Feb. 23 at Academy Playhouse, 120 Main St., Orleans. Tickets are $20-$30 at academyplayhouse.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Jim Broussard at Alden Gallery
A limited-run winter exhibition of new work by Provincetown painter Jim Broussard at Alden Gallery (423 Commercial St.) is an opportunity to check in with the artist’s decades-long love affair with the town and its natural environment.
Working in the Impressionist plein air landscape tradition, Broussard’s work is characterized by loose brush strokes, soft edges, and diaphanous swatches of color. While some of his views are instantly recognizable — the slope of a snow-covered Tremont Street in the West End, the long horizontal sweep of the breakwater across Provincetown Harbor — others are marked by more ambiguous perspectives and compositions in which familiar motifs of Provincetown’s built environments function almost as background characters in a stage play.
The steeple of the library looms like a gentle specter over the boats docked on MacMillan Pier in Winter Pier, and the towering silhouette of the Pilgrim Monument becomes a distant supporting player in a view of Beach Point from High Head in North Truro, one of Broussard’s favored plein air spots. Similarly, Provincetown’s dune shacks are more suggested on the horizon than explicitly represented in October Afternoon at Peaked Hills.
The exhibition is on view over Presidents Day weekend from Friday, Feb. 14 through Monday, Feb. 17, from noon to 5 p.m. It is one of several Provincetown Art Gallery Association Winter Weekend offerings, which include other gallery shows and art-related events at venues around town. See aldengallery.com and provincetownartgalleryassociation.org for more information. —John D’Addario
A Winter ‘Artist Jam’ Returns
Several years ago, Tin Pan Alley co-owner Jack Kelly invited local artists to be part of a rotating exhibition in his Commercial Street restaurant and bar during the winter. It was a chance for those who stopped by for a cocktail or early dinner to meet the artists and learn more about their work. Then Covid happened.
“I kind of forgot about it,” Kelly says. “Things got crazy, and then about a month ago it popped back into my mind, and I thought, ‘That was a blast! Let’s bring it back.’ ”
The Tin Pan Alley Artist Jam returned this month and will run through the first week in April. Kelly has selected Provincetown artists to hang their paintings “wherever they want” in the restaurant and bar, turning the space into an ad hoc gallery at a time of year when many galleries are closed or open by appointment only. Every Friday evening from 5:30 to 7 — the hours were chosen to echo summer’s Friday night gallery stroll — each week’s featured artist will be on hand to talk about the work. Kelly is also inviting local musicians to perform during the Jam.
“Six years ago, the interaction of artists and townies and visitors was more than I expected it to be,” says Kelly. “It was always crowded.”
The series opened on Friday, Feb. 7 with work by Gary Kortecki. Gaston Lacombe will be featured during the week of Feb. 14, followed by Ken Pratt on Feb. 21. “It gives an artist great exposure,” Pratt says.
Kelly is still looking for artists to fill out the Artist Jam roster through March and April and is especially keen to include the work of newer artists in Provincetown whose work may be under the radar. Email [email protected] or see @tin.pan on Instagram for information. —Katy Abel
An Outer Cape Nature Writer in the Spotlight
To Texas-born John Dennis Anderson, reading nature writer Henry Beston’s 1928 memoir The Outermost House was a revelation, both as an introduction to the Outer Cape and because of the poetic quality of its language.
Set in an Eastham dune shack, the book “gives you a very vivid sense of being rooted in this place and being attuned to the changing seasons here,” says Anderson, who became more intrigued by Beston’s work after moving to Wellfleet nine years ago and attending a lecture about how Beston inspired the establishment of the Cape Cod National Seashore. An Emerson College professor emeritus who specializes in oral interpretation of literature, Anderson decided to research Beston further and add him to the list of historical figures he’s portrayed on stage, which includes Henry James, William Faulkner, Washington Irving, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Marshall McLuhan.
Anderson first portrayed Beston at a 2018 living-history event in Ohio, in which he delivered a monologue and answered questions in character. His new play, which premieres at a Truro Playwright Collective staged reading this weekend, adds Beston’s family to the cast. The 50-minute script juxtaposes writings by Beston (played by Anderson), his wife Elizabeth Coatsworth, a poet and children’s book writer (played by Karen McPherson), and their daughter Kate Beston Barnes (played by Laura Scribner), who was Maine’s first poet laureate.
“This script is a collage of various kinds of literature — poetry, nonfiction, interviews — so there’s little original writing,” says Anderson. But the family’s writing careers aren’t the only focus.
“It’s also a nuanced portrait of a complicated marriage,” says Anderson. “Beston had a very dark side, and his wife and daughter were witnesses to that. I admire Beston a lot, but I think some diehard fans will be surprised at what his wife and daughter say about him.”
The free staged reading will take place at Truro Public Library, 7 Standish Way, on Saturday, Feb. 15 at 2 p.m. at. See trurolibrary.org and truroplaywrightcollective.org for information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Celebrating All Kinds of Love at the Crown & Anchor
Last December, Jonathan Hawkins presented his cabaret series “To All the Men I’ve F*cked Before” at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown. A new version, “To All the (Wo)Men I’ve L*ved Before,” will premiere this weekend on Friday, Feb. 14.
The show features tales of love, sex, break-ups, and reunions, with songs ranging from “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys to “My Funny Valentine” by Frank Sinatra and “All I Ask of You” from the musical Phantom of the Opera. “Love songs are such an integral part of pop culture and our lives,” says Hawkins. “They’re embedded in every one of our relationships.”
In his previous show, “most of the stories had some bitterness attached to them,” he says. In the new one, Hawkins says there’s less of that. “I love Valentine’s Day,” he says. “I love love.”
The cabaret will feature performances by Marissa Miller, Bob Keary, Todd Alsup, Kory Desoto, Peter Donnelly, Emily Olcott, and Mike Sullivan. “I wanted to make sure this show included women, both on the stage and being loved,” says Hawkins.
Miller adds that all the stories in “To All the (Wo)Men I’ve L*ved Before” are gay ones, full of romance. “There will still be comedy, but we’re doing a more sincere take on it.” She hopes the audience will feel the show creates a safe space to have fun. “I want people to be able to laugh at past breakups and leave with a little bit of hope that love still does exist,” she says, “especially for queer people.”
As part of that inclusive focus, the Crown & Anchor will also host “Sapphic Sunday,” a day of lesbian and queer programming for women that includes Miller and Olcott’s show “Pillow Princesses: A Queer Slumber Party” on Sunday, Feb. 16.
Tickets for “To All the (Wo)Men I’ve L*ved Before” are $25 ($35 for V.I.P. seating), plus fees, and tickets for “Pillow Princesses” are $20 ($30 for V.I.P. seating, including a complimentary “Lavender Haze” cocktail), plus fees. See onlyatthecrown.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Art, Family, and Community at Wellfleet Public Library
The 8th annual Wellfleet Art Exhibition at Wellfleet Public Library features work from community members including a shop owner, a boat maker, a surfer and garden designer, and an arts editor. The 70 entries vary in style and medium, with representational painting being the most prevalent. While some works refer to faraway locales, Wellfleet and the Outer Cape dominate in theme and subject matter.
A few artists who are related to each other stand out. Grisaille charcoal drawings by Robert La Pointe and his daughter Sasha exude an otherworldly veracity appropriate to their subject matter: a seal skull and a sculpture of the Roman god Neptune. Winter Sea, by Robert’s wife and Sasha’s mother Lorrie La Pointe, expresses a different kind of realism: her painting technique evokes the spindrift and sea smoke of rough weather. Joan Hopkins Coughlin’s My Grandmother’s Rose is both illusionistic and abstract, while an ink drawing by her husband, Jack Coughlin, is a more detailed depiction of a fishing vessel at a pier.
There are also unusual mediums and creative uses of materials. David duBusc’s Five Cod by Three was made by the labor-intensive platinum palladium printing process. Kai Potter’s caricature-like Sebastian, affixed to a slate roof tile identified as coming “from Pres Hall,” combines expressive lines with coffee splatters. Julia Salinger’s Oy, Not Again mixes found materials with drawings, painted elements, and words. The piece is shrink-wrapped so that its shiny surface reflects movement and light in the room.
The legacy of late artists is also very much present. A block print by Winifred Milius Lubell (1914-2012) depicts two shamanistic figures, while an icon-like figure on a gold leaf background by Selina Trieff (1934-2015), whose husband, Robert Henry, is also represented in the exhibition, is an apt inclusion for a show that emphasizes community and the endurance of the arts on the Outer Cape.
Other highlights from the exhibition include Frank Morgan’s Snow on Marsh and Abraham Storer’s New Studio (Holy Spirit). Morgan’s work evokes early American Impressionism, while Storer’s represents contemporary realism and emphasizes the flatness of abstraction.
There will be an opening reception on Friday, Feb. 14 from 5 to 7 p.m., and the show is on view through Feb. 27. See wellfleetlibrary.org for more information. —Chet Domitz
