Art That Celebrates Mexican Heritage
Nicolas V. Sanchez’s parents emigrated from Guanajuato, Mexico and settled in Lansing, Mich., where he was born and raised. Sanchez combines traditional academic painting practices with subject matter celebrating his Mexican heritage. He lives in New York.
Sanchez’s mother was a seamstress who sewed traditional Mexican folklórico dresses. Several works are informed by this history. Veracruz Dancer depicts a young woman frozen in a moment of display as she activates her skirt with her arms. The spread of fabric is matched by a flourish of painterly techniques: a quick daub, a slow stroke, a smear, and the pull of a palette knife contribute to the delineation of her clothing and adornments. Despite embracing the flatness of the canvas, Sanchez maintains a fealty to reality. The dancer’s arms are discernible through the delicate lace and more solid folds of fabric where light passes through.
Michigan Dusk III depicts a herd of cows in a field. It’s a loosely painted view with a baby blue sky and a limey chartreuse expanse of grass. Here, as in much of Sanchez’s work, the paint and its application are as much the focus of the work as is the actual subject.
Sanctuary depicts Sanchez’s two nieces on a farm in Guanajuato. Their “sanctuary” is a teepee that appears to be made of sheets. The girls and teepee stand out against an abstracted background that denies specificity of place. Without the knowledge of who and where they are, the girls could be anywhere. The small canvas conflates the past and present and connects the artist’s family history with a larger awareness of Indigenous cultures.
Sanchez’s show is on view at Rice Polak Gallery (430 Commercial St., Provincetown) through Aug. 13. There will be an opening reception on Friday, Aug. 1 at 7 p.m. See ricepolakgallery.com. —Chet Domitz
The Life of an Entertainer
Richard Skipper has stories to tell about his own life as an entertainer and about Broadway history. Both are the focus of his back-to-back cabaret performances in Provincetown this week.
On Monday, Aug. 4, Skipper will bring Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Richard Skipper But Were Afraid to Ask to the Art House (214 Commercial St., Provincetown). He describes the show as part memoir and part musical, combining songs with unscripted talk based on audience questions.
In his 46-year career as a performer and Broadway historian, Skipper has also impersonated musical theater legend Carol Channing, and his Hello, Dolly! tribute on Tuesday, Aug. 5 will include music, theatrical history, and “star talk” about the 1964 musical in which Channing originated the role of matchmaker Dolly Levi.
Skipper calls himself “not just an entertainer” but “a legacy keeper” who enjoys talking about Broadway’s past. He says he designs his shows to connect with people in a time of digital distancing, a way to “bring people together in a shared space — to laugh, to listen, and to celebrate something meaningful together.” Besides performing around the country, both in and out of drag as Channing, he has hosted the podcast Richard Skipper Celebrates in which he spotlights “artists and their worth.”
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Richard Skipper plays on Aug. 4 at 8:30 p.m., followed by Richard Skipper Celebrates Hello, Dolly! on Tuesday, Aug. 5 at the same time. Both shows feature musical director Dan Pardo and opening act Chrissy Pardo. Tickets are $35-$45 plus fees at rainboweg.com. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Rose Vineshank’s Weird World
Stand-up comedian Rose Vineshank recently moved from Baltimore to New York City, where she lives in a cupboard in a gay man’s Manhattan loft. What kind of cupboard? “The kind with my bed in it,” she says. There’s no need to get into it further.
The title of Vineshank’s new show, “She’s Being Weird Again,” comes from a phrase she says she’s heard since childhood. “Every person I meet walks away saying, ‘Wow, that’s the strangest person I have ever met,’ ” she says, adding that her “high energy” might be one reason for the reaction. Also, she doesn’t care for small talk: “If people aren’t trying to make each other laugh or talk about the mysteries of the universe, then I don’t see the point of interacting.”
So, what makes Vineshank laugh? “ ‘Road Runner’ physics,” she says, explaining that she was raised on “a steady diet of old cartoons.” As an adult, she still likes to imagine things like people walking off cliffs and not realizing what they’ve done until they look down, or little birdies flying around someone’s head after they bump it on something. That cartoonish sense of humor translates into her stage presence. “I’m really animated on stage,” she says. “I like to move my body in ways that surprise people.”
Vineshank sometimes performs with a guitar (“because I’m loud and annoying”) and sings song parodies like “Wonder U-Haul,” about the phenomenon of lesbians moving in together soon after starting a relationship. “Through the generations, that’s never changed,” Vineshank says. “Except we’re all polyamorous now. So, I guess it’s more of a ‘We-Haul.’ ” As a lesbian herself, Vineshank says she’s trying to “tell an intergenerational lesbian story.”
When she’s onstage, Vineshank says, it’s her chance to let the audience look at life through her lens. “You’re going to put on your cartoon goggles and see the world like I do for a minute.” It will probably not come as a surprise to learn that the world she sees is very weird indeed.
“She’s Being Weird Again” opens at Red Room (258 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Saturday, Aug. 2 at 5:30 p.m. and will run nightly except Tuesday and Wednesday through Saturday, Aug. 9. Tickets are $41.50-$51.50 at redroom.club. —Eve Samaha
A Teenage Wasteland of ‘Unfortunate’ Adolescent Memories
David Dean Bottrell began telling stories about his life years ago on a California stage, starting with his 10-year relationship with a partner with alcohol issues. “It was a very funny story until it wasn’t,” he says. “The audience was laughing and laughing and then was sniffling at the end.”
The veteran character actor, with television credits ranging from True Blood and Frasier to Mad Men and Modern Family, says that he found enough success and audience connection with those autobiographical stories that he decided to continue. His first show, David Dean Bottrell Makes Love, was turned into an audiobook in 2020, and two subsequent shows that mixed comedy with introspection included tales about mortality and forgiveness.
He describes his current show, Teenage Wasteland: Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, which debuted in January in New York City, as a series of reflections on his “unfortunate” early adolescence: memories of “heartbreak, hard-ons, and hair” that connect to a time in life he believes is difficult and transformative for many people.
“I was struck by how much gets decided at that age, the number of things happening to you, and how it shapes who you are,” he says, describing memories that include realizing he wouldn’t stay in his hometown, wouldn’t follow his parents’ strict religious beliefs, and that he’s gay. While Bottrell says his stories are aimed at “an adult NPR crowd,” he jokes that people who had happy teen years probably wouldn’t understand them.
Writing his current show revealed something to Bottrell, too. “I never thought of myself as a brave kid,” he says. “But in hindsight, I was actually pretty brave. I have a new respect for that teenage self.”
Bottrell will perform Teenage Wasteland at Wellfleet Preservation Hall (335 Main St.) on Saturday, Aug. 2 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 plus fees at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
A Gender-Bending Recital on Love, Lust, and Vengeance
Donatella Fermata’s name comes from two worlds: the world of fashion, where the glamorous Donatella Versace reigns, and the world of classical music, where the term fermata indicates that a musician should hold a note longer than it’s written, suspending a cadence.
“For me,” says bass Michael Galvin, who created Fermata as his drag alter ego, “it’s that moment of holding your breath as I walk in the door.” (Galvin is a tall person; Fermata, in heels, is taller.)
At the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House (260 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Sunday, Aug. 3, Galvin, as Fermata, will perform with countertenor Cody Bowers in a concert titled “Two Fairy Queens.” The two will be accompanied by Frederick Jodry on keyboards and Thomas Barth on cello. The program, which is part of the Great Music on Sundays @5 series, is described as “a wild, gender-bending journey of passionate worlds of love, lust, and vengeance through the Renaissance and Baroque.”
Galvin and Bowers, both classically trained singers, met when they performed together in a production of Handel’s Orlando at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2019. Both singers love Baroque music for its simplicity, the elegance of its melodies, and the joy of its ornaments. The concert is a chance to “play and have fun,” says Galvin, “and inject our own queerness into an art form that doesn’t always have opportunities for that.”
The program includes music from the Italian Renaissance, early English Baroque, and Italian Baroque periods. Bowers will sing Purcell’s “Sweeter Than Roses,” and Galvin will sing the same composer’s “Man is for the Woman Made.”
Their performance on Sunday will resemble a classical recital in some ways, says Bowers. But in others, it won’t: “We’re going to be serving old wine in a new bottle,” he says. “It’s not going to sound how you’d expect it to, based on how we look.”
Classical audiences often have certain expectations of how music they’re familiar with should be performed, adds Bowers. When listeners put those aside, he says, “it allows us to meet somewhere new and fresh, where we’re able to receive things in a more authentic and sincere way.” Galvin agrees. When the audience is “disarmed,” he says, “all you’re left with is space to create.”
General admission tickets are $30. See ptownmusic.com for information. —Dorothea Samaha
