tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3636026493126530442012-02-01T07:14:11.190-05:00JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.comBlogger1991100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-29296341644224944482012-01-31T16:06:00.001-05:002012-01-31T19:07:18.486-05:00

W.A.S.P. guitarist Doug Blair and his Blade guitar. OK, class: settle down. Hey. I. Said. Settle. Down! Now! … OK, that's better. This week in Port Rules: Our Impact on the History of Rock and Roll, we're going to look at "Babylon's Burning," a video from W.A.S.P.'s 2009 album "Babylon," That, of course, that's the infamous Blackie Lawless center stage, playing bass and singing. Nope, no

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-65320428421209112982012-01-15T21:21:00.001-05:002012-01-25T08:38:51.177-05:00

Port playwright Joshua Faigen, back at the Big Show. Josh Faigen is on the phone. We’re supposed to be talking about his new play, and maybe we are. Who the hell knows? The only sound clearly audible is this horrendous, god-awful squawking, apparently some kind of bird, a parrot maybe. Name's Mary or Barry or something. Harry? Yeah, Harry. Named after his grandfather? "Don't ask," he says.

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-44041738470256161152012-01-15T21:21:00.000-05:002012-01-19T08:36:49.149-05:00

Playwright Leslie Pasternack with Sylvia, um, Simon. Yup, Leslie Pasternack's back at the New Works Festival, but this year it's gonna be a little different. Way different, actually. Instead of running around like a crazy woman backstage or running lines in rehearsal, she's been kicking back at home, without a care in the world, other than dealing with a lingering case of, well, theater's

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-28500176823455342942012-01-10T20:59:00.000-05:002012-01-10T20:59:22.024-05:00

Strictly speaking, there's still nearly three decades left of the so-called American Century, the somewhat jingoistic phrase coined in 1941 by Henry Luce, the American Century's first multimedia mogul, to spur on the good old USA to dominate the world stage in politics, business and culture, not necessarily in that order, just the way God wanted it. But, truth be told, it looks like our century

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-7393194253281237672012-01-06T15:27:00.000-05:002012-01-06T15:54:50.582-05:00

Jeremy Barnard remembers the bad old days of infrared photography, back in the days of film and chemicals. He remembers them well, the bad old days, remembers them as ... well, kind of like golf. Not because the work was mind-numbingly boring, like the so-called sport is for most, if not all, sentient beings, or because you are required to wear silly-looking clothes, but because of the

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-89097537197334751972011-12-09T16:06:00.001-05:002011-12-09T16:11:28.544-05:00

... and speaking of cool holiday music, the kind probably won't be subliminally torturing you in elevators or department stores,the Boston Camerata is about to get all medieval on your holiday. Just back from a tour of northern France and Belgium in November, the early music group will perform “A Medieval Christmas,” a program of song and poetry from France, Provence, England, Spain and

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-37537676112179816552011-12-09T15:53:00.001-05:002011-12-09T16:01:35.733-05:00

.... And speaking of free stuff and Christmas spirit and all the rest of that holiday hockum, here's something to jump on before the season completely overwhelms you: It's a haunting from holidays past, holiday music for those of us who can't stand holiday music, or the holidays, especially, an album guaranteed to put the affect back into your seasonal disorder. Or get rid of it. Or something.

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-46288385393612354302011-12-09T15:43:00.001-05:002011-12-09T15:51:29.515-05:00

It's probably true, the old saw that it's better to give than receive, but, to quote another old saw, it takes two to tango. Which is to say, you cannot give unless there's someone to receive  — and that's where you come in. You've got to help out all the area artists who have created piles of art to give away, and for you to give away to others if you want, as the second decade of the Free

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-77904445982627266592011-12-05T21:03:00.001-05:002011-12-06T16:26:35.522-05:00

There’s always a danger of confusing artist and art or stories and storytellers, especially when dealing with first-person perspective — like on “Girl of Little Faith,” one of the tracks on “Sooner,” the bleak-but-cathartic debut album from Liz Frame and the Kickers, in which a life-hardened narrator who has been kicked around long enough to be drained of hope, faith and even the possibility

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-64708881758476936142011-12-05T20:48:00.001-05:002011-12-06T12:41:35.949-05:00

The road is a way of life for musician-types, a way of life whose rep is nowhere as romantic as its reality, or half as lurid as Frank Zappa's account in "200 Motels." Let's hope, anyhow. But the recent roadtrip of Kristine Malpica, percussionist for Liz Frame and the Kickers and, for those with longer memories, the force behind Imagine Studios in Amesbury, and her musical and actual fellow

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-69513777412133255542011-11-24T08:05:00.001-05:002011-11-24T08:25:05.499-05:00

Kristen Miller and Ken Bonfield perform 'Soulful Strings' Dec. 4. Kristen Miller is a cellist who has been turning the instrument on its head for years, mixing hypnotic African rhythms and Eastern melodies with rock attitude, vocabulary and gear. Ken Bonfield is a Gloucester-based multi-instrumentalist who has developed a style that's difficult to pin down, combining elements of folk, Celtic

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-20392749919114332152011-11-18T10:57:00.001-05:002011-11-19T09:32:38.473-05:00

They say you can't just a book by its cover. Which is bunk. Just ask Joel Brown. Last year, right about this time, the Boston Globe scribbler and Port novelist was in Carriagetown, trying to score some of that fancy, super-nutritious and undoubtedly horribly expensive food for his dog Buffy. All his Port connections had gone dry. That's when he spied Bertram & Oliver, a book store that had just

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-18225877098559698912011-11-17T13:24:00.001-05:002011-11-19T09:15:50.374-05:00

Ian Thal playing the Sprite in a recent production of 'Pico.' Photo courtesy Daniel Bourque. Complicated world we live in. Most people aren't really happy until they get the whole story, but, in this sad era of diminished expectations, we're happy enough, or we'll settle for, a piece of the action. Because something's better than nothing, right? Because you can't always go whole hog. Which is

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-78022413807978476492011-11-03T10:48:00.000-04:002011-11-03T10:51:17.069-04:00

Joe Holaday may well be, and, for the record, these are his own words, "a boring rock star." He's a house-husband and dad who eats (and likes) oatmeal, plays basketball three days a week in an old folks lunchtime league at Latitudes  (“My jump shot hasn't left me,” says the 54-year-old Port musician) and actually shows up on time, sometimes a little bit early, for interviews — even in the

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-27212702681401797772011-10-24T08:57:00.000-04:002011-10-24T09:17:50.545-04:00

In downtown Libertyport the other day. You know, that achingly familiar, desperately quaint and picturesque and oh-so-hip New England seaside community? Ran into Joel Brown, the Boston Globe scribbler sidelining, these days, as a crime novelist. He was hanging in Foley’s, the iconic newsstand/coffee shop with the red and green neon sign and the old-time soda fountain, the funky rival the

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-63169318107155910732011-10-07T17:03:00.000-04:002011-10-07T17:03:02.862-04:00

Wow, they've been sitting on this for months now, not saying a word, despite endless badgering from reporter-types, and unauthorized posters offering more than they could deliver, but they promised it would be the most ambitious project they've ever been involved in, but something they just couldn't talk about, even though you could tell they were dying to spill it — and it turns out that they

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-30642722046760377252011-10-04T10:28:00.000-04:002011-10-04T10:28:03.121-04:00

You can call him AJ, you can call him Andrew ... Call him AJ. Not a lot of people do these days, at least not in our little city where he a local celebrity — famous, you could say — where everybody knows him by his given name. The nickname goes back, way back, to the days  when he was a young punk and promising juvenile delinquent growing up on the wrong side of the river, back to his father,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-80108039080832340542011-09-22T16:06:00.000-04:002011-09-22T16:06:07.864-04:00

Garret Savluk It's hard to imagine the Boston Horns playing a sit-down concert. The seven-piece band has been burning up stages with high-energy, hard-grooving funk and soul for more than a decade and has developed a reputation for, well, burning down the house, for getting folks off their seats and onto the dance floor or into the aisles. And that's exactly what they're planning on doing

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-78309023621187436082011-09-22T16:05:00.001-04:002011-09-22T16:20:44.435-04:00

Things aren't the way they should be and they're not what they seem in "The Way Life Should Be," the "new" Leslie Powell play that has been kicking around stages, on the east coast, in the southwest, in one form or another for about seven years and, recently opened the fourth season of North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative, a Port play development series, in a dramatically stripped down form

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-89571457555251554922011-09-20T10:09:00.001-04:002011-09-22T08:05:55.234-04:00

Aisha Chodat plays Jenny in the new Greg Moss play. Photo by Lydia See. It's not like anyone hoodwinked him, he was not dragged, kicking and screaming, into the project. He went along willingly, however cautiously, saying he would kick the idea around a little, to keep an open mind, just see what happens, but with a boatload of doubt, because Gregory S. Moss, a homegrown, but lately a

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-15933119421058453572011-09-13T08:18:00.000-04:002011-09-13T08:20:36.198-04:00

The Rhythm Chicks, aka Lynne Taylor and Kristine Malpica, are sitting at a window table at Cafe di Siena, kicking back before putting on happy faces for a photo shoot for the debut album from Liz Frame and the Kickers, scheduled for a late-October release. They're also trying to remember, without much luck, it turns out, the last time RC2 (Taylor, since she came into the Liz Frame fold later,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-13098745527078199232011-09-11T15:27:00.000-04:002011-09-11T15:27:40.152-04:00

Funny name, Tabasco Fiasco. Maybe not the best he's come up with, and, believe me, there have been many over the years. Personal favorites? Well, Felonious Monks for the jazz reference, and Magnificent Bastards,  just for the sheer gall. But we're also fond of the Maldens, especially knowing that the musicians were from Everett. And Alan Laddd and the Abashed, for the inside joke: Alan Ladd was

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-7830837215832004712011-08-16T14:20:00.002-04:002011-08-16T15:19:05.024-04:00

Still no action on the band's web, but it's still early. Maudsley's mad musical adventure, or "grand European tour," as the duo puts it in its tongue-in-cheek video biography, has just begun. Barely. Ashley Plante and Joe Berardi are on the ground in Belgium, the beginning of a two-week, seat-of-the-pants Old World buskers tour of Europe that will take them from Amsterdam to Brussels to Paris to

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-9585424512412832922011-08-12T16:03:00.000-04:002011-08-12T16:03:48.067-04:00

Theater in the Open has been messing with myth for three decades. It's  what they do, they do it well, they always have. But when someone finally gets around to writing a proper history of the troupe, the company's current production, a dizzying, kaleidoscopic retelling of Jean-Paul Sartre's epic play "The Flies," will be one of the shows they will linger over. It's a startlingly original take on

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-69042854918141226252011-08-03T10:07:00.002-04:002011-08-12T15:52:33.274-04:00

Not saying it's all he does, but Kile Smith, the composer-in-residence at this year's Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, is "a choral guy," so he probably can't help getting all caught up in the literary side, in the words, in the history, before getting down to the music. Just part of the job description. But sometimes the Philadelphia-based composer takes the word thing almost to the point of

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-50132851665199584052011-08-03T08:10:00.000-04:002011-08-03T08:10:12.529-04:00

Google "The Dangling Conversation" and, naturally, you’re swamped with references to the Simon & Garfunkel song from the monster "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" album, but it’s also the name of an ongoing improvisational performance project by Port actor Brendan Pelsue and Natasha Haverty — a piece that is informed and inspired by the Simon song. Well, not really, but sort of. It’s not like

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-6857369827614219072011-07-18T19:18:00.000-04:002011-07-18T19:18:06.585-04:00

Saturday afternoon, downtown Newburyport, a sweltering summer day. The air thick, oppressive. It’s a zoo. The streets lousy with tourists and vendors, the air thick with the greasy stink of fried dough. The day-long Riverfront Music Festival will begin in about an hour. Chris Plante, the keyboard player for the Brew, is hustling through Market Square, a tight, focused but weary expression on his

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-3265149566044382322011-07-15T11:41:00.000-04:002011-07-15T11:41:58.270-04:00

Had to go to the dictionary to figure this out. First you’ve got anhedonic, which you can almost suss out from its roots. It’s an inability to experience pleasure from activities that used to give you a charge. Then you’ve got dysthymic, which comes from the word/condition dysthymia, a mood disorder characterized by chronic depression, but not quite as nasty as hardcore depression. So, now that

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-53650202978048456652011-06-27T13:53:00.000-04:002011-06-27T13:53:48.024-04:00

Oh, say can you see ... Sunchunck? Singing, well, not the "Star Spangled Banner," as this piece seems to indicate, but "God Bless America," the tune that should be the National Anthem. At Fenway Park? Yeah, you can. On July 10. When the hometown team dispenses with the bottom-dwelling Baltimore Orioles. It's a thrill, of course, playing at Fenway, something  Sunchunck bassist Mike Bertolami

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-40695773602577651492011-06-27T11:00:00.000-04:002011-06-27T11:00:56.472-04:00

Okay, Memorial Day has come and gone, and so has the solstice, meaning, at least for  crusty, fatalistic New Englanders, that summer, which officially arrived a couple of days ago, although you certainly can't tell by the weather, is almost over and we can move on to other things, like that big 10th anniversary season for the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, and, on the horizon, the impending

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-12446925596093466052011-06-26T10:56:00.000-04:002011-06-26T10:56:47.723-04:00

Usually the MO for actors is to get to the bright lights/big city, get noticed, get work, and get bigger and bigger roles until you're a part of something gargantuan, and, important lesson here, not to get all bummed out if you're not making a big splash right away. It's a tough business — competitive and fairly cutthroat. But that's not the way Hal Fickett is playing it. Not exactly, anyhow. The

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-20145568448566851742011-06-11T15:57:00.000-04:002011-06-11T15:57:25.515-04:00

Nah, you probably don't know their names. Which is fine, says Craig Martin, who founded the band Classic Albums Live eight years ago. They aren't important anyhow. The names, that is. "We're a faceless bunch," he says. Expanding upon the theme, they're a faceless bunch of top-notch musicians from the Great White North, all of whom have been in tribute bands in the past. Which, in itself, isn't

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-47318221749613709392011-06-09T12:35:00.000-04:002011-06-09T12:35:42.455-04:00

OK, so here’s the dirty little secret: Nobody ever taught Robin Lane, the woman who will be teaching the songwriting class at Whole Music, how to write a song. She hung out with people who were doing the songwriting thing during the laid-back flower-power days on the left coast and Lane just assimilated it. At least that’s how she remembers it. She had always wanted to write songs, and one day

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-40281872085984828852011-06-07T08:48:00.000-04:002011-06-07T08:48:59.223-04:00

Who's that, emerging on the New York theater scene? Nikole Beckwith, probably best known locally for her work with the edgy (and much-missed) Independent Submarine, Gregory S. Moss's production company. She moved to the Big Apple almost a decade ago and has been writing writing writing, her work being read at Ensemble Studio Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-31314767856008527102011-06-06T07:20:00.000-04:002011-06-06T07:20:44.662-04:00

For reasons I've never fully understood, they always involve a bit of a dance, these advance pieces, a struggle between enticing a potential audience and giving away the game, often ending up with vague or, worse, clever descriptions, whose sole charm is that they are short enough to fit on a program, but don't really tell readers anything useful about a show they, at least in theory, might like

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-2856346426011209032011-06-04T14:00:00.000-04:002011-06-04T14:00:51.786-04:00

It's a tough production to talk about, and pretty intimidating — intellectually, emotionally, to sit through, let alone to talk about. Go ahead, call your Mom or, even better yet, drop in for a visit (you really should visit your mother, regardless) and try explaining it to her: Well, Mom, it's about a successful guy, an architect, a family man who loves his family and who, um, falls in love with

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-87426040889314945032011-05-23T10:58:00.001-04:002011-05-23T19:27:53.128-04:00

My first thought? That the title of Sunchunck's new album had to be an inside joke. You know, "Finally Here" as a follow-up to "L8," the Port power trio's long-promised and  famously slow to arrive second album, which finally dropped in 2007, several months after its official record release party. Same deal with "Finally Here," which had been scheduled for a Spring release, and that would be of

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-42796052108554716472011-05-18T07:39:00.004-04:002011-05-18T07:41:10.270-04:00

Last time we saw Leslie Powell, she was being slaughtered and devoured by some seriously evil entities in “God of the Vampires,” the gory, gross-out flick by former Amesbury resident Rob Fitz that recently aired on the former WNDS-TV. Well, that’s not exactly true. Honestly, we just couldn’t take it. The film made us nostalgic for the sweetness and light and, in comparison, innocence of “Kill

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-13665709952405811102011-05-17T07:57:00.032-04:002011-05-17T08:29:10.440-04:00

All together now: Duck! Because All Together Now, the long-running Beatles tribute band, is gonna throw everything they’ve got at you, all at once, when they turn up at the Firehouse this month. The band, which has been doing the Fab Four thing longer than those lovable, adorable Mop Tops did, will play its usual set of 40 tunes, each one paired with an original ATN video playing on the 12-by-18-

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-25636887045258601242011-05-03T09:03:00.000-04:002011-05-03T09:03:23.462-04:00

The kids from "Peanuts" have been taking it on the chin a lot lately, particularly at the hands of "The Family Guy," mostly notably when everybody's favorite blockhead shows up at a Peanuts reunion with a skanky crackwhore. He's got tats, multiple piercings and, more significantly, a major habit. Which is the reason that Snoopy isn't there with him. Old Chuck apparently supplied the drugs that

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-15174168422600940542011-04-24T11:27:00.000-04:002011-04-24T11:27:19.642-04:00

The curtain is about to open on a new reality for Theater in the Open: The company, which has been performing at Maudslay State Park for most of its three-decade-plus existence, will be launching its first-ever free season, when the temperatures get up just a little higher. The season will include a little something for everybody: one of those pantos, a free-form, improvisational production with

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-45667244017593665562011-04-22T18:48:00.010-04:002011-04-24T11:47:12.386-04:00

Oh, bloody hell, there they are again. Not in the lobby or in the shadows of a darkened theater, where you usually find them, but on the small screen, in a gory, gross-out horror flick. At least they will be next week. Granted, you don’t want to close your eyes during the feature presentation, even though you desperately want to close your bloody eyes, because, if you do, you could very well miss

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-20126172508655596072011-04-21T17:11:00.007-04:002011-04-21T17:15:44.326-04:00

Once upon a time — and, relatively speaking, it wasn't  that long ago, just 50, maybe 60 years ago — the lower-case gods walked among us. Jazz gods, a pantheon of now-legendary players  like Armstrong, Parker, Gillespie, then just working stiffs. Not only walking among us, but also playing across the street from each other. Not just a street, of course, but The Street: 52nd, between 5th and 6th,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-1785690779370001812011-04-18T22:36:00.011-04:002011-04-18T23:00:08.804-04:00

The big Japan benefit concert went off without a hitch yesterday. Unless you count that two — count 'em, two — times  The Fools blew out the power at Ipswich Town Hall, where the hometown heroes first played back in 1946, as the opening act for Teddy and the Pandas. At least that's the story Fools' frontman Mike Girard remembers it. Maybe the story's in  “Psycho Chicken & Other Foolish

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-31048594160808928632011-04-06T10:34:00.000-04:002011-04-06T10:34:50.065-04:00

Used to be that his family got shortchanged. Vardan Ovsepian lived and worked in Newburyport, and got out to see the folks and his sister in Cali-Cali once, maybe twice a year. These days, he lives on the left coast, in Los Angeles, with the family, and gets here once, maybe twice a year and, like everyone on the wrong side of the short end of the stick, you've got to be ready to drop everything

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-16675854480256112132011-04-05T14:27:00.000-04:002011-04-05T14:27:23.917-04:00

The final schedule for Help Japan: A Benefit Concert for Japan Disaster Relief is locked in place and the organizers could not be happier for three reasons: 1) They're sick and tired of revising the poster 2) There's no longer any danger that the font sizes of the band names will shrink any further, meaning readability will be maintained and 3) They can move on other other technical issues, like

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-2881641544429654092011-04-03T13:10:00.000-04:002011-04-03T13:10:05.590-04:00

You’d think that with all the stuff going on in his life over the past year — first rebranding, then undertaking a huge expansion of Whole Music, bringing the former Pine Island Music Resource to the historic Carriage Mill Building in downtown Amesbury, and launching an ambitious artist development series, partnering with former WBOS program director Dana Marshall.... You'd think that E.J.

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-32775243444264204812011-03-27T12:50:00.001-04:002011-03-28T08:23:32.465-04:00

Shmoozing in the hallway outside the Actors Studio after a performance of Leslie Pasternack’s “Clean Room,” we saw a poster for a performance of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland Jr.” at Byfield Community Arts Center. Not exactly our cup of tea. Not by a longshot. Not with all that singing and dancing. But the director’s name caught my eye: Jack Neary. Hmmm, could it be the same guy? He’s one of

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-1042500176524171732011-03-22T07:59:00.014-04:002011-03-22T10:22:09.341-04:00

It all started last year when Penny Lazarus saw the old piano off to the side of the aisle of the Screening Room, sparking an image of the old days of silent films, when every theater had a pianist who would give context to the films they would accompany. She didn’t know that the piano was more of a showpiece than a working instrument or that the last major workout the instrument had seen was

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-25265246069817722942011-03-19T19:09:00.000-04:002011-03-19T19:09:11.784-04:00

Yeah, yeah, he’s heard it before: Always knew you were smart. The work proves that. Always knew you were a smart ass. The work, a quarter century of mouthing off in public and getting paid for it, proves that too. But now Boston comedian Jimmy Tingle has the sheepskin to prove the former, and we have the video of his Harvard commencement address last summer to prove the latter. Yup, no joke,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-46751629359162234562011-03-14T09:19:00.000-04:002011-03-14T09:19:14.868-04:00

Whoever composed that old schoolboy lament about the toxic inevitabilities of the language of Caesar was speaking out of school. That is to say, this guy, whoever this guy happened to be, besides a poor student, was dead wrong. Because, dig it, non latine lingua mortua est ubique, right? At least it seems like it, it seems like there’s been a whole lotta Latin going on lately — fun, fake (at

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-51694879669230208832011-03-12T15:18:00.001-05:002011-03-12T15:48:01.525-05:00

Personally I’d go with another nickname. "Spotty" sounds, well, a bit sketchy. But nobody asked, so ...  it’s nice to see Port people in the mix for this year’s Spottys — a Spotty being a Spotlight Award, the Seacoast equivalent of Grammy. This year, the Spotty's 16th anniversary, there are four contenders in three categories for the regional competition, with two of them, Tiger Saw and Dan

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-60084020658696680932011-03-11T16:13:00.001-05:002011-03-11T16:15:20.241-05:00

It’s been more than a year since we last saw Brighina, the cheerful but obviously disoriented woman hanging out in the waiting room of a locked ward, trying to suss out the reason she’s there, on the ward, in Leslie Pasternack’s one-woman show “Clean Room,” and a lot has changed since the show ran at the Actors Studio in 2009.  The playwright and actress has gotten lots of feedback about her

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-12370555943827978382011-03-06T13:22:00.002-05:002011-05-23T19:27:23.823-04:00

The best advice for viewing Ron Pullins’ new play is don’t over-think it, just sit back and let it wash over you without getting caught up in the drama about what it’s all “about,” because there’s a lot going on in “Bicycle. Woman,” which gets its first spin around the literary block next week at the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative. The full-length piece has three competing story lines,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-80884981161191725672011-03-02T09:36:00.001-05:002011-03-03T07:52:56.680-05:00

Theater in the Open has always been a cheap date: The first show of a production is free, the rest of the run costs only only eight bucks. Even a seriously thrifty Yankee  — is there any other kind? — can’t complain about that. Well, not too much, anyhow. But this year it gets even better: All of TITO’s “in the open” shows will be free. That’s right, free. The company, which lives and performs at

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-65200434019916348772011-02-28T09:23:00.007-05:002011-03-20T17:33:51.683-04:00

The sun is setting, the red-tailed hawks that hang out in the back yard are likely around somewhere, hidden in the dusk. The rehearsal is supposed to be starting now — about 45 minutes ago, actually, and the bass player is nowhere in sight. Will he show? No one knows. He’s got phone, car and work issues, apparently. A triple threat. Nobody seems too worried about it, they’re all pretty laid back

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-52586688656765089342011-02-26T14:53:00.001-05:002011-02-26T14:55:58.273-05:00

Kristen Miller’s new obsession started quietly — appropriate, considering the media — seven years ago, even though nothing really came of it until last year. She had been hanging out in Gloucester with Brian King, from the band What Time Is It, Mr. Fox?, a band rooted in folk and blues, but filtered through cabaret and alt-rock, and a frequent Miller collaborator, working on a project — a

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-56543796397701027272011-02-17T14:13:00.011-05:002011-02-17T17:31:03.203-05:00

The name’s kind of a joke. Not the first part, of course. That’s straight from old wooden teeth, Georgie Washington. Supposedly, back in 1780, he was hanging on the Salisbury side of the river, waiting for a ferry to get him across to the proper side, and made a comment on what a “pleasant valley” it was. No, it’s the second part of the name — the social club business, that is, well, if not

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-87876544119888506892011-02-11T13:43:00.000-05:002011-02-11T13:43:59.696-05:00

In case you hadn’t heard, it’s official: Pianist Natalie Zhu’s Newburyport Chamber Music Festival debut, a victim of our unrelenting winter season, has been rescheduled for 4 p.m. April 24. Yes, that’s Easter Sunday. Making it “a perfect way to celebrate the return (well-established by this time) of sun and light to our world,” according to  NCMF Executive Director Jane Niebling. Yeah? Maybe. We’

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-74910823054643433072011-02-11T12:04:00.000-05:002011-02-11T12:04:46.644-05:00

Paint & Play isn’t going to play out like “The Chamber Group,” the Alan Bull painting pictured above, seeing how we’re in the middle of a new Ice Age and everything. But the piece, which is hopeful and all but screams “warm summer breeze, warm summer breeze,” certainly conveys what the thing is all about — music and painting. The event, let’s call it a paint-slam,  will be the first local show

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-42263599826299845412011-02-04T11:59:00.000-05:002011-02-04T11:59:27.087-05:00

There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you (re)turn to Old Faithful and, after you dust it off, put a shine on it and kick its metaphorical tires, and (re)discover that it still rocks and gets the job done even after all these years — or, as Anna Smulowitz, the Queen of the Scene, puts it, “that we’ve still got it.” And that is what’s happening with “Terezin: Children of the Holocaust,”

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-28112886558621898262011-02-04T11:45:00.000-05:002011-02-04T11:45:05.740-05:00

Usually we’re fans of irony, but this is just too much: A show designed to take a bite out of the psychological turmoil of this cold, heartless winter — the hottest ticket in town, by the way — has been canceled because of ... well, because of the cold, heartless winter: Natalie Zhu, a  pianist who is known for hot, emotional pyrotechnics, was supposed to play “The Romantic Piano,” a program that

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-54056937083663437022011-01-30T11:37:00.001-05:002011-01-30T19:49:31.274-05:00

Interesting band, Lux. Crazy instrumentation: Drums. Two saxes, an alto and tenor. Guitar, but no bass. The bass isn’t needed because the guitar is no ordinary guitar. It’s a Novax: Eight strings, three bass, five standard, everything but the low E, an instrument that allows the guitarist to double. And the guitarist? Studied with Stacey Pedrick, founding member of The Fools. Still considers

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-67013610874811364692011-01-27T14:05:00.001-05:002011-01-29T09:14:58.103-05:00

Chances are you’re rock-solid when it comes to the 800-pound gorillas of the era, the rockstars of the Renaissance, the bigwigs of the arts and sciences of the period. Which is to say, chances are good that you’re down with da Vinci and Michelangelo and that old sourpuss Galileo — maybe even Raphael. But if the Jeopardy category was music of the Renaissance instead of superstars, you’d probably

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-46803441693001800682011-01-24T13:39:00.002-05:002011-02-04T10:24:07.395-05:00

Yeah, I know, I know: You hoped that you would be able to swoop in at the last minute and snatch up a couple of tickets for Natalie Zhu’s  “The Romantic Piano” concert, which, one hopes, perhaps vainly, will take the winter’s chill out of our bones. Fat chance of that, or getting a ticket to this show, for that matter. The pianist, of course, is a monster, a Philadelphia-based musician who has

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-11048869284511046792011-01-21T20:50:00.001-05:002011-01-22T10:11:55.924-05:00

Funny thing is “Entree Gold,” the John Minigan play that won top honors at this year’s New Works Festival — a piece that will likely raise more than a few eyebrows when it finally hits the stage next week, seeing how it looks at fallout from the complete emotional collapse of a cross-dressing Catholic pedagogue (a word conjuring up another — pedophile — because of the context, which also figures

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-48883838303673077372011-01-15T10:21:00.002-05:002011-01-21T20:53:02.546-05:00

So, the toe bone's connected to the foot bone  and the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone, right? But the dinosaur bone? Well, the dinosaur bone’s connected ... to an ugly, fascinating and, ultimately, from a purely psychological point of view, sadly illuminating scientific-commercial  battle royal between paleontologists — and you know what they can be like when you ruffle their feath ....

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-67810232014433902622011-01-13T22:12:00.000-05:002011-01-13T22:12:19.238-05:00

My favorite moment in a Charles Card film comes near the end of “The Good Samaritan,” when the vampire (Jack Rushton) bares his fangs, ready to feed, for better or worse, on the life blood of that vapid party girl (Nicole Foti) who had disgusted him a few minutes earlier when they met at a cafe that looks just  like Stella’s, the former Middle Street Foods, and little Miss Pretty (vacant) looks

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-92017935602132932042011-01-09T08:50:00.000-05:002011-01-09T08:50:17.699-05:00

It’s feast or famine out there in theater land, right? Sometimes — and that, of course, means usually — you can’t even give your stuff away, and sometimes ... well, sometimes things really start to groove. Just ask Ann Marie Shea, the Worcester-based playwright who is starting the new year in a big way, with three productions  — one full-length play and a couple of 10-minute shorts. On the same

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-90995933599336557512011-01-08T18:07:00.004-05:002011-01-09T09:01:54.581-05:00

A lot of new faces at this year's New Works Festival, the two-weekend play series focusing on new works by local and regional playwrights, but also a  lot of familiar faces, too. Like James McLindon, the Northampton-based scribbler who has taken home top honors in three of the last four years. This year, however, he’s playing a supporting role instead of his more familiar position as the festival

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-49130568061821568992011-01-08T08:42:00.014-05:002011-01-09T08:54:38.145-05:00

Surprise, you’re in the New Works Festival! Um, thanks … huh? That’s how it happened, more or less, at least for Bruce Menin. The school committee member, you see, is an inveterate, although not especially detail-oriented scribbler. Last summer, he looked at the calendar and noticed it was like five minutes to deadline for the New Works Festival, so, he rifled through the old desk drawer and

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-51332800383564176952010-12-29T12:36:00.000-05:002010-12-29T12:36:35.590-05:00

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to attend art openings besides the one taught to every cub reporter on the first day of J-school — that it’s a good place to score a free meal, or at least something to take the edge off, and, if you’re a lucky little ink-soaked wretch, maybe some sort of bracing libations. Mmmmmm, libations. You also get, if you’re pushy enough, some face time with the

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-51670673621589333922010-12-19T12:40:00.001-05:002010-12-19T18:45:04.878-05:00

Sorry, you won't get the full-throttle kick in the teeth you'd expect when Ruin/Renewal blows through Kittery, Maine, next week for the Burst & Bloom festival. The band will play a short acoustic set — not because of artistic considerations or commercial and crossover possibilities, but because the festival location will be in a gallery that's just one thin wall from a nice little restaurant, and

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-21806960008312950122010-12-16T09:19:00.000-05:002010-12-16T09:19:14.098-05:00

Congrats to Gregory S. Moss. That's him on the left. No, no. Not the short guy who dressed up for the photo shoot, the well-rested one. The other guy. The Pavement Group's production of the Port playwright's "punkplay,” a piece that has its roots in the city, in Inn Street youth culture during the second-wave punk, has just been named one of the Top 10 plays of the year by TimeOut Chicago. Number

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-1001270478383109342010-12-15T09:24:00.000-05:002010-12-15T09:24:49.377-05:00

Finding Alan Bull in a gallery isn't all that unusual. On the walls, anyhow. The Port painter always has something going on somewhere. But finding him behind the counter, that's something else. And finding him behind the counter of his own gallery, well, that's just .... whaaaa? Yeah, that's right. Bull, perhaps best known for his emotionally charged series on old trucks, has his own gallery

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-2187249961002456022010-12-07T10:29:00.000-05:002010-12-07T10:29:28.689-05:00

Tiger Saw's latest, the aptly named "Nightingales," has been billed as a flight back to the nest, of sorts, a return to the Newburyport-born, Portland-based band's slowcore roots, and it's difficult to argue with that assessment, especially after the stylistic detour that was "Tigers on Fire," the controversial 2007 album that reinvented Saw as a kind-of white-kid basement soul dance band, horn

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-2568245835150786012010-12-04T10:20:00.000-05:002010-12-04T10:20:44.730-05:00

Trident Studios is housed in a nondescript building in Te Aro, an inner-city section of Wellington, New Zealand. Most people pass it without ever knowing that the Martin Square building was once home to the Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS -- MI6 in the popular jargon -- an organization perhaps not quite so well known as its international brothers-in-acronym, but newly repositioned and

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-64200145903585116992010-09-26T17:04:00.001-04:002010-09-26T18:35:31.364-04:00

Had a feeling there might be trouble with this show: Uz jsme doma headlining a bill with Providence, R.I., heavies Bellows, Normal Love and Whore Paint at the mysterious, if blandly, named Building 16 — a venue with no phone number and no web presence, which kinda made us wonder if it actually existed. Trolling the web, we managed to find an email address. Fired off an email with a couple

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-19983391116612765802010-09-25T13:24:00.002-04:002010-09-26T18:47:45.301-04:00

Just back from the second stop on Uz jsme doma's US tour, their first since 2007, and I've gotta say, man, aren't the Wesleyan University kids just the coolest? And I'm not just saying that because I'm afraid the little bastards will give me another shiner. No, I wear those colors under my right eye as a badge of honor. It's the first time I've gotten a black eye from a college student since,

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-73652343999572596052010-09-22T10:13:00.007-04:002010-09-22T21:34:24.526-04:00

Fans have been bugging Liz Frame for product for the past two years, ever since the Newburyport musician jump-started the career she had all but abandoned for marriage and motherhood and put together the Kickers — a tight, country-tinged acoustic act known for solid playing, tight harmonies and just plain looking good on stage. Not a bad problem to have, if you think about it, but

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-23681606244361073182010-09-20T10:20:00.001-04:002010-09-20T10:22:40.405-04:00

The suds will be flowing next weekend in Carriagetown. Hundreds of brews, dozens of styles will be featured at the Amesbury Brew Fest on Sept. 25.  Which is a good thing. Because when you get hundreds of beer freaks together, the only thing you can count on is disagreements about what to order, about what's the best brew and, of course, what naturally flows from this, is why the other guy, even

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-60896621161222438682010-09-16T09:43:00.001-04:002010-09-16T09:45:02.100-04:00

We all know that, for better or worse, pictures convey more information, more quickly than words ever will, but the Lydia See photo you see here, as powerful and creepy as it is, just barely scratches the surface of what will be happening at Maudslay State Park this weekend. It shows a line of cloaked specters. Only one face is visible. It’s blank, emotionless and appears to be covered with

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-70649672603102746962010-09-15T09:46:00.003-04:002010-09-16T09:46:58.231-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. In a moment, relatively speaking, we will begin our featured performance,  the world premiere of "Orange Hat and Grace," the new play by Newburyport playwright Greg Moss that kicks off the new season at Soho Rep. In this case, in a moment means roughly 12 hours — just enough time to get to the city and find a parking space. We understand it may

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-29216587544991583102010-09-05T14:13:00.001-04:002010-09-05T14:14:57.799-04:00

Busy guy, Charles Van Eman. He's flying up Route 95, trying to make a rehearsal for the Firehouse production of Mark Twain's “The Diaries of Adam and Eve" at the Firehouse. It's not quite clear whether it was a last-minute thing or whether it just got lost in the shuffle of his schedule. Doesn't really matter. He got the call, he made the rehearsal and, en route, was able to check off a

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-15196199381567707292010-09-04T11:10:00.003-04:002010-09-05T12:29:56.301-04:00

If you check it twice, you'll find out that Port playwright Ron Pullins' "The List" has re-emerged, strangely naughty and nice, making the leap from an award-winning short play to a creepy-but-compelling two-minute video. It was one of five pieces selected for Project Y's "Confessionals," a fundraiser for the New York-based theater company. It's a monologue by a compulsive list-maker who has

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-75589569636414621522010-09-03T10:46:00.001-04:002010-09-03T13:23:45.955-04:00

C'mon kids. We all knew it would come to this eventually. Long-distance relationships just don't last. So, when Jeff Morris blew town for Chicago last year, we knew what it meant — even if we never said it out loud. Morris came back from time to time over the past year, dusting off Death & Taxes, the ex-Bruiser's no-nonsense, straight-ahead rock trio, for another mad joyride. But, seriously, how

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-69812591355736716432010-08-26T09:52:00.002-04:002010-08-26T19:35:45.600-04:00

Caught up with Joel Brown at Fowle's. He's a regular, stops in every day after an solo sunrise bike ride on Plum Island, and, closer to home, a bit of exercise with his dog, Buffy. Yes, named after the vampire slayer. He confesses to being “a little uncomfortable on this side of the pad.” You know, answering the questions instead of asking them. He's an old-school ink-soaked wretch. Moved to town

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-40333754460004642172010-08-23T16:33:00.009-04:002010-08-23T21:58:43.234-04:00

Dreary afternoon. Desperately needed rain, equally desperate need to get out of the house and do something amazing — or at least amusing. So, from the list of fun things to do and other strategies for avoiding boredom-inspired bickering: An afternoon of crazy beer at The Ale House. And, man, they've got some kinda crazy brewskis at the Carriagetown restaurant, located at the former site of Pow

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-9508322957358468752010-08-18T09:43:00.000-04:002010-08-18T09:43:08.988-04:00

It’s not like John Tavano really needs anything else to fill out his dance card. The guy's stretched pretty thin as it is. Performing with Rhina Espaillatt and Alfred Nichol in Melo Poea, the continuing music-meets-poetry series, and with soprano Ann Tucker, most recently in "The Ballad of San Isidro," a program also based on one of Espaillat's poems. He's also gearing up for a fall show with

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-35804047916923385222010-08-14T10:52:00.001-04:002010-08-15T21:37:10.204-04:00

Let's be clear about this: Andrew Sidford does not know whether he's getting thrown off the island or not. Not Plum Island, where the Port architect does a lot of his work, like Sea View House, a unique, striking home on the dunes that we've written about before, but in a "reality" TV sense, after lots of old-fashioned intrigue and dramatic backstabbing. But there'll be none of that on HGTV's "

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-86052053629879808382010-08-12T18:26:00.003-04:002010-08-12T18:34:21.926-04:00

OK, we’re not naming names, but Jon Deak has seen a lot of the clips of people performing his “B.B. Wolf” and, frankly, some of them make him ... well, cringe. Because the piece for double bass and narrator, which he will perform at this year’s Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, is cool and funny and seems easy enough to handle and “open” to interpretation, especially once you finesse the

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-66010933566496893682010-08-09T12:32:00.000-04:002010-08-09T12:32:51.960-04:00

This is the story of two Andys. The first one came up with the insight — prescient, now a cliche — that in the future everyone would be famous for oh, just about a quarter of an hour. And he became very famous indeed, Andy, almost as famous as the amazing Lindsay Lohan is today. The other Andy has a peculiar relationship with celebrity. Unlike Andy I, a genuinely revolutionary artist who became

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-50964398972620517202010-08-07T12:57:00.013-04:002010-08-12T07:29:04.378-04:00

A fabulous start to Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, a stunning performance by the Naumburg competition-winning Trio Cavatina at the Carriage House that was a treat for eyes and ears.  The trio — pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute, violinist Harumi Rhodes and cellist Priscilla Lee — pounced on the program, bringing a real physicality, a fiery, visual intensity not often found this side of tell

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-30643727650215056942010-08-05T17:41:00.001-04:002010-08-05T17:41:48.978-04:00

Yeah, sure. He admits that he’s “probably pushing it” a little — fessing up that, unlike previous years, there’s no immediately obvious overriding theme unifying the music of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival this year. But David Yang, the guy behind the programming at the festival since its inception nine years ago, isn’t quite ready to give up the musical ghost: He’s starting to warm up

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-43012902097630332852010-08-04T22:20:00.000-04:002010-08-04T22:20:07.929-04:00

Here's a little zig to the normal zag of performance: The always-intriguing Exit Dance Theatre will be collaborating with father-and-son duo Doc Zig and Benny Z, otherwise known as Jim and Benny Zanfagna, who will be joined by local aces Roger Ebacher and Mike Gruen — yes, the same lineup as "Father & Son Playing for Small Change,” Zig and Z's debut EP —  in an evening of dance and music to

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-25591231143241551822010-08-02T09:41:00.002-04:002010-08-02T09:42:58.508-04:00

Dylan Metrano has been escaping to Monhegan Island for the past four years. Every summer, like clockwork, he just vanishes into the mists of Maine. So does his band, Tiger Saw. It's a time for everyone to kick back and recharge. You've got to chill on Monhegan — a close-by island with a far-away feel, just a dozen miles off the Maine coast, accessible only by boat, no cars or paved roads. He

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-56250792672058893462010-07-30T20:31:00.001-04:002010-08-01T17:01:41.871-04:00

Dude’s a monster, a triple threat — drummer, writer, producer. Yeah, on the left wearing the Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. Old friend Tom  Hambridge, one of the original members of Parker Wheeler’s Blues Party back ... nah, forget it. It couldn’t possibly be almost two decades since he first started working the weekly sessions at the Grog, right? And why Skynyrd, you might ask? Old school nostalgia?

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-70899947396680468262010-07-30T20:16:00.001-04:002010-08-01T16:59:02.739-04:00

Everything seems just hunky-dory, but, almost from the beginning of "The Bald Soprano," you know something is off, and if you say "off what" you are on track, in the zone, whatever that means, in this completely over-the-top absurd Ionesco classic being staged by Theater in the Open. We find the Smiths, a proper English family, which is to say circumspect and bloodless and deceptively

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-69916991398977589232010-06-25T10:00:00.001-04:002010-06-25T10:03:15.164-04:00

The whole thing had a feeling of inevitability about it: Gary Shane, the man of a thousand musical identities but probably best known for his hit-making power pop band, The Detour, runs into Wade Dyce, the Jamaica-born reggae singer now living in Salem, who made his name with the band Cultural Roots right about the same time as Shane was scoring on the charts. They didn’t know each other —

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363602649312653044.post-41776300305425053722010-06-23T09:38:00.001-04:002010-08-01T17:03:06.905-04:00

When Jeff Morris (yeah, that's the guy, second from the left) pulled up stakes last year, he left behind a two-decade deep, stylistically diverse musical legacy only hinted at in "Mutes in the Steeple," the Joshua Pritchard documentary focusing on the Newburyport indie music scene in the late '80s and '90s — from NPD, one of the city's first punk bands, and the Bruisers, who bashed their way out

JC Lockwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16181971510907159869noreply@blogger.com1