Jozef Nadj: Hitting all the right notes

Jazz violinist Jozef Nadj’s got his funk on. He’s moving, grooving, despite the fact that he’s still getting used to real time after a trip back home, his first home, to Central Europe. So he rolls out of bed at the ungoldly hour of 5 in the morning, still hobbling around the house, nursing a foot injury from a pick-up soccer game, which delayed his return stateside by almost a week, leaving him barely enough time to prepare for the first day of classes at The Musical Suite, where the Lynn resident has taught for three years. He puts on some Maceo Parker and shakes off the cobwebs. Not that the violinist, who brings his band, the Jozef Nadj Fusion System, to the Firehouse next week, is especially heavy into the funk thing. Fact is, Nadj, whose name rhymes with "lodge," could, and would, play pretty much anything, as long as he finds something intriguing at its core, some challenge, something interesting to latch onto, to explore, an attitude perfectly illustrated by the classically trained musician’s two current, competing projects: the first, a rock album of original music somewhere in the vicinity, musically, of his favorite bands from back in the day: Guns N’ Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica — itself a significant departure from JNFS’s 2009 debut, "Digital World," which finds him in the neighborhood of Jean Luc Ponty (natch) and Miles Davis (the fusion years). And then there’s the other project, an album of tunes by Charlie Parker. By a band that does not have a tenor player — any saxophone, in fact. Yeah, Bird, the guy who all but invented the instrument. A god in jazz circles. Untouchable, unapproachable. An album with violin as its main weapon, its ax of choice. Granted, a hopped-up violin. Electric, with all the gear, pedals. Which adds another layer of controversy for purists.

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Mara Flynn back in the local spotlight

Singer-songwriter Mara Flynn performs with Tiger Saw
March 24 at the Firehouse.

It's not like Mara Flynn fell off the face of the earth. She's been around, over there, at the Tannery, running Acting Out Productions for the past decade. And it's not like she made a conscious decision to walk away from music, from the stage. Not at first, anyhow, although it almost ended up that way, but not because she had grown tired of it. Life just took over. Her focus turned to family, the day-to-day and, after a while, she just didn’t feel the need to pick up the guitar. Maybe once a year, when she would have to play camp songs at summer theater workshops for kids, but that’s it. And the stage? That would have been way too much of a commitment, with rehearsals and performances and all. All things considered, life was good and, just when things started getting comfortable, real life came tumbling down on her, big time — a health crisis, an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her. Which got her attention. And, after dealing with the physical realities, left her holding the existential bag. She had to figure out what all of this meant, which, for Flynn, meant creatively. She started writing, not for anybody in particular, just writing to process, writing from “a place of deep grief and solitude,” she says.

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Barnard Firehouse photo exhibit shines infrared-hot

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 way the game, and the style of photography, just takes it out of you — challenging you, taunting you, all but daring you to throw your clubs — or your camera — into the lake. Where they belong. Like most golfers, if you were working the infrared part of the light spectrum before the dawn of the digital age, you "stunk most of the time," says Barnard. Not for lack of talent or for an inability to keep your eye on the ball, but because the technology itself was, back then, unpredictable — and flawed.  "It drives you out of your mind, but then, just as you're about to quit, after all that frustration and disappointment, you get something that's decent and, masochist that you are, you think, 'OK, I'll suffer with this a little longer.'"  He eventually drifted away from infrared, but got back into the game when technology caught up with the format, with digital photography eliminating most of the headaches. When it came time to upgrade his equipment about three years ago, he replaced the low-pass filter in his digital SLR with a permanent infrared filter. Why? “Because something about infrared that speaks to me,” he says. The approach has an eerie effect in black-and-white photography, giving viewers blistering, eye-popping detail, sometimes on a surreal canvas, with leaves transformed plume-like on silvered branches and tree trunks. Or, as Barnard puts it, the images are like "an X-ray peering into the innermost life of Mother Nature ... allowing us to see more than we would with our naked eye." All of which you can see in "Beyond Our Vision," Barnard's new exhibit of infrared photography at the Firehouse. 

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Project comes home for the Holadays

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 morning. But, romantic ideas about the lives of rockers aside, he really is a very busy boring rock star. The bassist, probably best known for his long-running gig with The Fools, is back in town after a recording date with Fran Cosmo, the "other" singer from the band Boston, sharing session credits with keyboardist Steve Baler, Holaday's bandmate from Beatlejuice, the Fab Four tribute band that had been fronted by original Boston vocalist Brad Delp until his death four years ago, and that has soldiered on in the wake of his suicide — and in Velvet Elvis, another tribute band, this one giving props to pre-Vegas Elvis and other golden age of rock pioneers: two bands that, to make things even more complicated, include, among other people, Mike Girard and Rich Bartlett from The Fools. And, come to think of it, Holaday's sons, Jared and PJ. They have been known to take the stage with Beatlejuice, which is one of the reasons that a couple of their "goofy uncles," which is how Holaday Senior describes the relationship between his sons and the boys in the band(s), perform  in the Holaday Project, the family band that makes its formal debut at the Firehouse this week. And, yeah, we're talking about the mayor's hubby and kiddos.

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Boston Horns blow into town for concert

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 next week, when the band pulls into the Port for their first local gig in years.  "You'd better tie the roof down," says Horns frontman Garret Savluk. "We're going to mix it up, we're going to do our thing, we're going to blow this place up." But, as hard as it is to imagine people sitting in their seats, politely clapping like it's the US Open, while the Horns tear it up onstage, it's even more difficult to imagine Savluk up there doing it without saxophonist Henley Douglas at his side. They've been playing together for better than two decades, from the early days with The Blues Meanies, which had them backing the Del Fuegos, among others, to the years as the conceptually outrageous Heavy Metal Horns, which put them on the road with then-chart-toppers Extreme, to their work over the past ten years as the Boston Horns, opening for monster funk acts like the Tower of Power and bringing the band, and its powerhouse sound, to a headlining tour in Japan. But that's where the Horns are these days. They're still together, but the Douglas-Savluk partnership is done. 

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What's new with the Brew? Lots, but ...

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 face, obviously dragging ass. No, the Brew, the homegrown band Plante has been performing with for nearly a decade, a quartet that will be opening for rock legend Gregg Allman next month in Lowell, will not be playing the Port festival. Lucky for them. The boys were just hours past their last gig at the Spot Underground in Providence at 2 a.m. By the time their trusty tour bus, a Dodge Sprinter that sometimes doubles as wiffle ball field, as fans of Brew video blogs know, pulled into their driveway in Newburyuport, the sun was coming out, giving the band a couple of hours to decompress and grab a little shut-eye before dealing with the brutal, life-and-death struggle for a parking spot and a table at Joe's in this madness and, of course, dancing around questions from the local press about the band's next album. His brother, Brew bassist Joe Plante, who just stepped over the low fence into the dining area, is ready to help out. Bottom line? Yeah, it's been three years since "Back to the Woods" dropped and, yeah, they say, the band is about due for a new album and something is happening, something really big, in fact, "the most important thing we've ever done," says Chris Plante, but ... well, they can't talk about it right now. There will be an announcement by the end of the summer. Brother Joe backs him up. "It's the biggest thing to happen to us," he says. But, but ... "We just can’t talk about it." There's a tired grin on brother Chris' face. Tease! He admits it. "Yup." But says he doesn't enjoy it. "Seriously," he says. "We just can't say anything about it right now."

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Roasting Newburyport: A 'Forbidden' treat

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 to see. Understandable, perhaps. You don't want to spoil it, but, hey, there aren't any big secrets in Shakespeare any more, but people still go out to see the Bard. So, gotta say it was nice to find out that Suzanne Hitchcock Bryan was willing to spill the beans about "Forbidden Newburyport," a satirical musical that takes colorful local personalities and hot-button political issues and serves them up Broadway style, as splashy production numbers, celebrating the city and all its quirks, and, as local folks know, there are many, and ... fair enough, maybe we should dial the premise back a bit. 

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All together now: Imagine the Beatles

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-foot screen in back of them. The quartet will also come at you with a five-camera shoot to document the show for a possible concert DVD in the future, as well as provide band and crowd shots for the big screen during the performance and, of course, the raw digital material for future videos. They’ll also be promoting “Hang in There,” a new album of original music that is soaked in the sound and sensibility of that fabled period, the Beatlemania era, although they won’t play anything from the album. That’s because people come out for the real thing or, yeah yeah yeah, in this case a close-your-mind-and-imagine recreation of the real thing, although you probably won’t want to look away because of the multimedia aspects of the show, like the vids and old-school commercials — Nancy Sinatra getting her boots walking for RC Cola, The Munsters shilling for Bit-O-Honey. Even, more on point, older Ringo and the Fab Four lite. That would be the Monkees doing a Pizza Hut ad. Besides, the album won’t be ready for the May 21 show. The full order is in transit and should be ready soon after the Port performance. But, for hardcore fans, they’ll have a special limited-edition, autographed version of the album, about 100 in all. Can anyone say collectible? The Firehouse show will also include a special guest appearance of Melissa Moore, wife of Tommy Moore. No, no. Not Tommy Moore, the 1960s Silver Beetles drummer (and if you know that little bit of trivia, then you’re too wrapped up in the whole Beatles business for your own good), but the bass player and founding member of All Together Now. She’s also the daughter of Les Harris Sr. and sister of Les Harris Jr., two of the most influential musicians to come out of the city, and the voice of the Newburyport Bank. If you’ve heard the commercials, or called the bank, you’ve heard her. She’s no Yoko. Or Linda, for that matter. Now, a collective sigh of relief from all you folks who remember “Don’t Worry Kyoko” from the Live Peace In Toronto album. There will be no Moptop missus caterwauling, but there will be a bit of the adventurous spirit Ono represented, with Moore singing backup as well as playing a couple, well, unusual instruments — more on that later — making her “our ace in the hole, our secret weapon,” says Moore.

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'Crazy' community: Maggy, friends at Firehouse

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. Ouellette, well, that he's got a screw loose or something. And he's not necessarily going to argue the point. "I ought to have my head examined,” says Ouellette, the frontman for Crazy Maggy and a fixture on the North Shore music scene for decades, who, aside from his preoccupation with work that borders on obsession, seems to be a regular guy. But, leaving stubborn mental health issues to the side, for now, anyhow — there are trained professionals for that —  the question becomes, is all work getting in the way of the "real" work, the personal vision, the creative stuff? And the answer is, sort of ... well, not really.

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Schooled! Ivy-tinged Tingle back in Port

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, Jimmy Tingle, a Harvard grad, with a master’s degree in public administration. Which sounds way too boring to be a bit and, again, we have the videotape to prove it. So, dude, what’s up? You gonna be a city administrator somewhere? Now that’s funny. Picture it: Jimmy Tingle standing up at a City Council meeting, giving budget recommendations. Or, wait a second, is he running for office? For real this time? A serious run for the funny man? Not like the comedic bid for the Oval Office documented on 2008’s “Humor for Humanity,” Tingle’s last album. Well, as the old Trickster used to say, let me be perfectly clear about that ... Which, by the way, the comedian is not doing. 

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It's another Pleasant Valley Saturday

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 exactly a joke, then a phrase tossed out with just a hint of irony — though, to be fair, it’s probably not “more like a medieval guild than a social club,” as Pleasant Valley Social Club drummer Jeff Philcrantz says. No, it’s not a medieval guild or a social club. Not quite. Even though the members of the “club” are all pals and hang out together at least one day a week. They get together after ditching their days jobs, they play some music, they have a good time. “It’s like we’re walking on air,” says Bill Plante, who has been playing music in the area since the fabled old days — the early ‘90s. “It’s exhilarating. We’re doing music for music’s sake, we con’t care about the music industry, we’re a social club. We just have a ball playing. We do it for the love of it.” Says Philcrantz, “We pay a lot of attention to craft, and we have open exchanges of ideas that are sometimes brutally honest. It’s definitely a check-your-egos-at-the-door vibe. But it’s also incredibly energizing. I can’t count the times I’ve showed up, beat from work, and left hours later with a bounce in my step.” 

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Frame kicking out the jams for schools

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 frustrating if you can’t give the fans the answer they want. But the long dry stretch is just about over: The first official Liz Frame and the Kickers CD will be released next week, just in time for Music Matters — a Kicker-powered Oct. 2 Firehouse concert that will directly benefit music programs in the city's public schools. It's not the full-length Frame fans would like to see, but it's a nice taste of what the band does. It includes three originals and a cover — a haunting take on Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," which strips all the groovy from the flower power classic to reveal a wold of hurt spinning in a subtext of sin.

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Exit Dance Theatre rises again

Funny thing is that when Fontaine Dollas Dubus takes the stage for a performance of “On the Third Day,” her new piece for Exit Dance Theatre, you might not even notice her, because you’ll be looking in the wrong place because she won’t be one of the dancers — not in this piece, at least. She’ll be in the chorus, one of 17 voices in the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Choir, lead by Don Argyrople, while nine dancers perform in front of her. Kind of a strange place for a dancer and choreographer to be, right? Um, yeah, if you look at it that way. Dubus doesn’t.

Yes, she’s a dancer and choreographer.Yes, she’s been performing with a modern dance company for more than two decades. And, yes, she’s also the owner of a Newburyport dance studio. But Exit has always been about more than “just” dance. Just look at the name — Exit Dance Theatre, spelled the fancy French way. It’s always related dance to theater and drama, and approached dance as more than movement, as a way of telling a story.

And Dubus, while primarily a dancer and choreographer, also studies acting and has sung all her life — in choirs, in schools. She recently returned to the Annunciation choir, after a long absence. She long ago found inspiration in how the old Slavonic texts mixed with the music, “which, to me, are the sound of old Europe,” she says, “All of my life I imagined movement with this music.” And this week, it all comes together.

The piece will include parts of five hymns rooted in Russian and Byzantine hymns, drawing musical pictures of lost, ancient times. It will premiere this weekend during “Sound Moves,” the new Exit program. Much, if not all of the lyrical content will likely be lost on the audience, but not the feeling.

But “On the Third Day” the is not the only choreography set to live music in “Sound Moves.” Byfield cellist Kristen Miller will provide the musical backdrop, with three original pieces for a trio choreographed and danced by Dubus, Susan Atwood, and Sarah George.

And it’s not the only surprise in the production. Gordon Pryzbyla will premiere a new experimental film, truly turning the “Sound Moves” into a multimedia event. And Dubus and recently returned Exit co-founder Stephen Haley, who is also suddenly all over the local scene, directing “The Agawam” at the Firehouse, “Waiting for Godot” at Wentworth and as a Theater in the Open fundraiser and currently working on a new production of Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano,” will team up together for the first time in a duet — “Bloodstone,” which examines the relationships of obligation, love and abandonment.

Erin Foley brings back an extended verion of ReRot, which was inspired by Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and its references to human existence as perceived through the philosophy of Nietzsche. The new piece continues the exploration of mortality and timelessness.


JUST THE FACTS, MAN: Exit Dance Theatre will perform “Sound Moves” at 8 p.m. May 14 and 15 at the Firehouse, 1 Market Square. Tickets are $18, $16 for members of the Society for the Development of the Arts and Humanities and $14 for seniors and students. For more information, log on to firehouse.org or call 978.462.7336.

JUST THE FOLKS, MAN: Performers in Exit Dance Theatre's Sound Moves show include: Susan Atwood, Darlene Doyle, Fontaine Dubus, Nicole Duquette, Erin Foley, Sarah George, Wendy Hamel, Stephen Haley, Jennifer Steeves, Edward Speck, Tricia Walsh. Also performing will be Don Argyrople and the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Choir and Byfield cellist Kristen Miller.

PORT PICK: How much does it cost?

Hmmmm, I always thought it was drug thing. You know? Orange Sunshine? Acid? It was all over the place just around the time Jimi was singing about another lysergical color and meteorological phenomena. C’mon, don’t play dumb. The grandkids aren’t around. Purple Haze! So we all thought “Sunshine” was some kind of anti-drug song. Turns out it was an anti-war song. Who knew? It makes sense, though, when you think about it. I guess we weren’t paying a whole lot of attention. Anyhow, Jonathan Edwards had a huge hit with the tune back in the day and has managed to stay afloat, creatively, through, yikes, four-plus decades. These days, he’s likely to be found on the road with his longtime accompanist Stuart Schulman on bass, piano, fiddle, and vocals and Taylor Armerding, formerly of Northern Lights, on mandolin. “I’ve been doing what I do best, which is playing live in front of people,” he says. “I’ve been concentrating on that and loving it.” He’s back at the Firehouse next week, but you better get a move-on because tickets usually go pretty fast. The show begins at 8 p.m. March 12. Tickets are $33 for SDAH members, or $35 for regular folks. Ask and I bet they’ll tell you how to become a member. Info: 978.462.7336, or firehouse.org.

Focus on hocus-pocus at Firehouse

Don’t take that old Pilot song literally. You know the one ... “Oh, oh, oh it’s magic. Never believe it’s not so.” ... There, now it’s stuck in your head, too. The point is, you can believe if you want, and a lot of people do, but it’s not mandatory. Peter Boie doesn’t need true believers to make the show work. And he doesn’t need a whole box of props to make it work. Bells and whistles-wise, everything he needs for his show, which pulls into the Firehouse this week, fits into a single suitcase — like the straitjacket, the toilet paper and the Tootsie Pops ... Huh? Yeah, Tootsie Pops, but that would be getting way ahead of the story and, worse, giving up the ghost — and a ghost, by the way, is also a part of the act. Specifically, one of the spirits said to haunt Dungeon Rock, located in a forlorn corner of Lynn Woods, where a pirate died after being sealed in a cave with his ill-gotten booty in the 1600s. And the TP? Hang tight, we’ll see.

But the real trick may be learning how to pronounce his name. He says “bwah.” No one else does, of course, but Boie ought to know, right? And the magician is sticking to his linguistic guns, “trying to maintain the integrity of the French pronunciation,” he says. Or maybe the real sleight of hand is how Boie, 27, was able to turn his “geeky little passion” into a profession that has him crisscrossing the country like a rock star. He calls himself “a magician for non-believers,” saying he tries to create an atmosphere where audiences don’t worry about whether it’s real or how he does it. There’s not a whole lot of spectacle in the show: Just a magician and his audience. “You just sit back and enjoy it,” he says.

Magic started as a way to get his mother to stop bugging him about stupid books. She always wanted him to sit around and read, and he, being a kid and everything, just wanted to be outside running around and playing. So one day, when Boie was 11, she dragged him off to the library, and he found a book on magic tricks. Mom figured, hey, reading is reading. His first professional show was at the Grange Hall in Topsham, Maine, a small town near Bowdoin College. He was 15 years old and took home $50 for his efforts ”... and I thought, ‘Wow, they actually paid me for this, for having fun?’” Tape of the event is available, he says, but no one is ever going to see it any time soon. Since then he’s been putting a tight focus on his hocus-pocus, creating and honing his craft over thousands of performances developing the act, winning honors at major competitions around the country (including a first place at the Columbus Magi-Fest and finalist at the Society of American Magicians National stage contest) and performing at college campuses and corporate functions. He’s doing between 150 and 200 shows a year.

He’s in Dubuque, Iowa, for a show at Loras College, explaining the whole “magic for non-believers” thing during a telephone interview. “A lot of people really want to believe, but you don’t have to. You don’t even have to like magic to like the show. Belief is optional. It’s all just entertainment, it’s just for fun,” Boie says. The show will feature comedy routines, funny escapes. He even contacts a ghost from Dungeon Rock. It’s kind of a creepy routine that may raise a goosebump or two, but shouldn’t worry people with pacemakers. There’s an escape routine. That’s what the straitjacket is for. And there’s some sleight of hand. A word of warning, the audience gets involved. That’s what the toilet paper is for. (Sorry, can’t give it away.) The show is evolving all the time. The Tootsie Pop routine, in which the audience will discover what science has never been able to ascertain: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. (Sorry, we can’t give it away here.) A friend, also a magician on the circuit (Yeah they bump into other on the road and talk shop) pulled that idea out of his hat and Boie picked it up and ran with it. It fit, not all new bits do — no matter how good they may be. He still has not delved into multi-media and bigtime Hollywood displays. “It’s just me on the stage,” he says. “It’s not about props, it’s about me and the audience.”

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: Magician Peter Boie performs at 8 p.m. Feb. 27 at the Firehouse, 1 Market Square, Newburyport. Tickets are $18 for adults, $15 for students and seniors. For ticket information, call 978-465-5336 To see a clip of the Boie in action, click here.

Sandy Farrier: Telling still-unwritten stories

Marc Clopton’s “Pie Boys” is one of those rare shows that emerge fully formed, that is so clearly a gift from the Muse, that a truly honest person wouldn’t take credit for creating it. And that’s exactly the approach that Clopton, founder of the Actors Studio, is taking. Not because he doesn’t want to bask in the glory, but because he didn’t write it. Because it doesn’t exist, despite the poster advertising its month-long run at Lincoln Center. The poster is a fake. Or, somebody cue the intro for “The Twilight Zone,” maybe it’s a portal to alternative reality, a signpost for the next theatrical stop, because this is definitely a story meant to be told. “I know, I know,” says Sandy Farrier, a graphic artist and self-described “acting wannabe,” whose play posters, both real and imagined, are on display through the end of January at the Firehouse gallery.


We should be clear about that: Farrier is a wanna-be who does it — as an actor and a playwright. For the past few years, he’s been a regular at the Firehouse and Actors Studio. He performed in “The Mediator” and “Coming Clean,” two edgy, sexually charged comedies that won honors at the 2009 Fringe Festival and were clearly crowd favorites at the Actors Studio during a follow-up production in November. His play “Mating.com,” which explores the notion that hope springs eternal and the fact that people lie, especially in the their online dating profiles, was staged at the New Works Festival two years ago. But he pays for his groceries with a paycheck from Endicott College, where he serves as head of the visual communications department, and as a graphic artist. He moved to the city in 2004. Three years ago, Hailey Klein, one of the founders of Random Acts, the Port play-in-a-day series, convinced him to take an acting class. He’s been a “theater addict” ever since. And the posters? They’re like methadone, or maybe piles of candy — something to take the edge off the jones.

But back to the fake posters or, if you will, advertisements for still yet-to-be-written stories. Farrier says the goal is to coax an idea from a combination of images, illustrations and other graphics. Sometimes he gets a clear vision, other times just a clue, a hint. “I start out with an idea and build on it,” he says. ““If there’s a spark, I see what I can do with it.”

With “Pie Boys,” the scenario emerged “in a minute, in a flash,” when the artist came across the photograph that dominates the poster. It shows a group of boys standing behind a long table in what appears to be, or what Farrier imagined to be, a Depression-era summer camp. It feels like Maine. It looks like the photo was taken moments before a pie-eating contest. The story came to him in a flash: He imagined a hazing incident that resulted in a young boy’s death. All of the boys know what happened. So does one adult witness. But nobody speaks about the “incident” until 35 years later, when they have a reunion. The play looks at how they lived with themselves, with what they’ve been carrying around with them. He doctored the image, adding blueberry schmutz around their pie holes. An eerie glow emanates from one of the boys, presumably the one who died. Contrasting type, messy and elegant, names the play while serving up a heaping helping of irony with the Maine state slogan, “The Way Life Should Be,” just above a solitary flying bird (a harbinger?) and the name of Clopton and other local scribblers, which Farrier says is meant “as a kind of homage” to the people who have helped someone who has “timidly observed and sometimes hung around the fringes” of the Port theater scene.

Other posters, other stories include “Lemon Wars,” which, with its combination of old photographs, calligraphy and maps, suggests an old-school imperialistic attempt to corner a particular market, and, a second story line that evolved with the discovery of an intriguing image of a younger woman, a love triangle that could bring the entire thing down. And “False Document,” which could either be a period piece or a modern-day monkey trial smackdown between creationism and evolution, focusing, as the poster does, on Chuckie Darwin but, perhaps, casting some doubt on documents that make up the big book itself.

The exhibit also includes work from real shows, created under a variety of circumstances: Straight-up design work, like the elegant poster for Michael Wainstein’s production of ”Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris” at the Actor’s Studio; work for shows the so-called wannabe actor was involved in, like Michael Frayne’s “Democracy,” which was staged at the York Readers Theater; and in-betweens, like the striking and kinda creepy poster for the 2008 production of Gregory S. Moss’s “House of Gold,” which, if you remember the production, was based loosely on the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, may dredge up some memories that you have been finally able to repress. The work, real or imagined, is all mixed together and only the designer, and perhaps the local theater hardcore, know for sure.

JUST THE FACTS: Sandy Farrier’s posters from real and imagined plays will be on display through Feb. 1 at the Firehouse Center, 1 Market Square, Newburyport. The exhibit is free. For more information, call 978.462.7336.

Enter Exit: A new view of holidays past

Nostalgia may be death, culturally, but it is also one of the things that, for better or worse, connects us, and there is probably no better example of this than the predictable, theatrical free-fall during the “holiday season,” when everything comes to a complete standstill and we relive our childhoods, and pass them on to the next generation, with the tiresome, but irresistibly uplifting classics of the season — the seemingly endless productions, for example, of ”A Christmas Carol” (which we read somewhere is being staged by a half-dozen companies within a sleigh ride of Newburyport) and “The Nutcracker,” the irresistible 800-pound gorilla of the season. Complaining only makes you look like a Grinch, an association we have finally come to terms with. And, besides, this is what people really want — something warm, comfortable, familiar. But one company has managed to find a way to, so to speak, eat the fruitcake and have it, too — combining the warm, fuzzy nostalgic core of the holiday zeitgeist with a hip, modern outlook. That would be Exit Dance Theatre, a modern dance company founded more than two decades ago, whose style is deeply rooted in theater techniques, improvisation and collaboration.

This weekend, the troupe doing all that — and more — in its show “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a monster collaboration that brings together members of Exit and Joppa Jazz Dance Company, as well as unaffiliated dance students who answered an open audition call, as well as local singer-songwriter Kate Redgate, who will emcee the show — a total of over 60 performers in all. The show grew out of Exit's “Nutbuster,” an original, modern and amped-up version of “The Nutcracker,” which played to rave reviews for the past two years. In “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the idea is the same, but the choreography by Fontaine Dubus, Erin Foley, Sarah George, Pam Smith, Jen Steeves and Cheryl Schwind is new. Each “day” is told through movement, bringing a new approach to the traditional song. And it’s “a mixed bag of styles,” says Dubus, one of Exit's founding members — and not necessarily your idea of traditional Christmas atmospherics, with music by Rusted Root, which manages to mix Dead-like psychedelia with African and Middle Eastern rhythms, and Gilbert Bacaud, known as “Monsieur 100000 Volts” for his energetic performances (for the French hens a-laying day, natch). But the company, while presenting new approaches to the original song, has connected it to the past — to the nostalgia and the magic of our collective youth with Redgate, who will sing the original song and — be forewarned — lead the audience in a sing-along between dance pieces.

Of course, the philosophical question becomes, what happens if Exit's “Twelve Days” becomes an ingrained part of the holiday fabric in Newburyport? Will future generations of blogging Grinches gripe about it?

Let's call it a question for another generation.

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: Exit Dance Theatre presents “The Twelve Days of Christmas” through Dec. 6.The show features choreography by Fontaine Dubus, Erin Foley, Sarah George, Pam Smith, Jen Steeves and Cheryl Schwind. Kate Redgate will emcee. Tickets are $16, $15 for members of the Society for the Development of the Arts and Humanities, and $12 for students and seniors. For more information, call 978-462-7336 or log onto the Firehouse web. Photo is courtesy of Brent Mitchell.

Name of the game is DiPietro

Remember that old commercial — what was it, shilling sauce or salad dressing or something — with the slogan “Now, that's Italian?” Well, it’s not quite the immediate impression you get looking at names like Anne Rehner, Alan Huisman, Josh Bresette, Meaghan Willis, Carol Davenport and Danny Gerstein, the cast list for “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the Joe DiPietro comedy about an extended Italian family being forced to deal with unwelcome change, right? “Yeah, we’ve thought about changing the names,” says Stephanie Voss Nugent, executive director of Artists Collaborative Theatre of New England, which is bringing the family comedy to the Firehouse this week — and a woman whose name indicates she might herself be, well, ethnically challenged, at least from an Italian perspective. “They’re all over the board, and there’s not a single Italian in the group.” But Nugent, who will direct “Over the River,” says the heart of the story, the thing that accounts for its staying power, is not the idea of ethnicity, but the concept of family. “It’s about an Italian family, but it could be any nationality,” she says. The fact that the company grabbed four Seacoast Spotlight nominations for the show — with the current, decidedly non-Italian cast — demonstrates that you don’t necessarily have to be a paisan to be la famiglia.

Nugent is taking a quick break from the load-in for “Over the River,” which runs Nov. 20-22 at the Firehouse. “I think the show will sit pretty nice on this stage,” she says. The Arakalian Theater stage is roughly the same size as her home base, the West End Theater in Portsmouth, N.H., but the seating capacity of the Islington Street theater is much smaller, comparable to the Actors Studio. It’s her first show at the Market Square venue since 2004, when Act One staged two productions, “Noises Off” and “Forever Plaid,” in a three-way co-production with the Society for the Development of the Arts and Humanities and Hackmatack Theater Company. Act One, although founded in 1997, really started taking off during its five-year residency at the massive Winnacunnet Performing Arts Center, located in Winnacunnet Regional High School in Hampton, N.H. Nugent put the company on hold in 2004 after scheduling issues with the school district came up. When the West End — a “magical” space, she says — opened up in 2006, Nugent revived the company, which has mounted three short-run productions of “Over the River” over the past two years. It has been a consistent draw because it’s a nice play and a warm story about ordinary people. “These are realistic people you can identify with right away,” Nugent says.

In the play, written by DiPietro, author of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” in 1996, Nick Cristano has been offered the job of his dreams, far far away. Now he has to deal with the nightmare — telling the family — the grands especially, that the Sunday dinner that has been a family ritual for close to three decades will soon be coming to an end, that their precious little boy(and they always think of you like that, no matter how old you get) is going away. And, nope, they don’t take it well. They become increasingly desperate as they try to hold on. “At first you laugh until you cry,” says Nugent, “then you end up just sobbing. It’s so filled with love that you get a lump in your throat. It's about loving and letting go, or trying to let go. It about trying to figure out how to say thank you for for loving me so much. It’s a beautiful story.”

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: Act One will stage Joe DiPietro's "Over the River and Through the Woods" Nov. 20-22 at the Firehouse. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $20, or $18 for students and members of the Society for the Development of the Arts and Humanities. For more information, call 978.462.7336 or log onto the Firehouse web.

'Terezin' revisited: Powerful play returns to stage

OK, let's sort out the numbers: The one being thrown around the most is 30, but 40 is probably more accurate and you certainly could make the case for 25. Fact is, Anna Smulowitz has been doing theater in Newburyport for three decades, so when the poster says she will be staging her 30th-anniversary production of "Terezin: Children of the Holocaust" next week at the Firehouse, it is an accurate statement. But "Terezin," which depicts two days in the lives of children who share a cell in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, actually predates her arrival in town. Smulowitz wrote the play 40 years ago while a student at the University of Cincinnati. It premiered there in 1970 — close, but no cigar for round-number anniversaries. It was first staged locally 25 years ago, back when Smulowitz's fledgling Children's Theater still bounced from location to location. That 1984 production was filmed by Tom Bergeron, now the host of "Dancing with the Stars," but back then a reporter with WBZ-TV — which is how the production grabbed the American Children's Television Award.

Some more numbers:

• Seven years: That's how long since "Terezin" has been staged; the performance hiatus came as Smulowitz pursued spiritual goals, becoming an Interfaith Minister through the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. She is now the Rev. Anna Smulowitz Schutz, chaplain of Renaissance Gardens at Brooksby Village.

• Fourteen years: That's how long it's been since "Terezin" has been staged locally. The last show was a somewhat controversial performance at Triton Regional High School that vividly illustrated why the play is so important: A student threw a paper airplane on which he had written "Hile Hitler" at the actors during cast call. "I remember being especially annoyed by the spelling," Smulowitz recalls.

But the most important numbers are never directly mentioned in the play, but cast long shadows over everything: The six children represent the 15,000 children who died at Terezin, representing only a fraction of the 97,000 Jews who died in this one camp, representing only a fraction of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. And another number, 132 — the number of the children who survived Terezin — some of whom were in the audiences in the mid-'90s, when Smulowitz took the show to Europe for chilling, emotional performances at the site(s) of the crimes.

The daughter of Buchenwald and Auschwitz survivors who was born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of World War II, Smulowitz describes "Terezin" as a prayer and a testament for the million-plus children who were victims of Nazi war crimes. She won the North Shore Anti-Defamation League's Leadership Award last year for her work with the play — bringing it into the schools, linking its lessons with contemporary issues like bullying and homophobia. She sees theater "as a kind of ministry," and the school shows — especially after-show dialogues — as “a way to connect the dots of intolerance,” she says. "”That's why I do it."

After the Firehouse show, "Terezin" will begin a short tour of area schools.

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: Anna Smulowitz's "Terezin: Children of the Holocaust" will be staged Oct. 15-18 at the Firehouse Center, 1 Market Square, Newburyport. Show times are 7:30 p.m. There will also be matinee performances at 3 p.m. Oct. 17 and 18, and a dress rehearsal performance at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14. All ticket are $12 and available at the box office only. For more information, call 978.462.7336 or check out the Firehouse web.

Michael Kimball: A guy with a thousand stories

Michael Kimball has real-life stories that are every bit as unlikely as the stuff he writes for the stage, like the Richard Cycle, where a disembodied penis starts hassling the guy in the sexual driver’s seat because he doesn’t get out much any more — and the star of one of Kimball’s collection of dirty plays that will be staged next week at the Firehouse Center ... Okay, maybe not quite that unlikely. But stories? Yeah, he’s got ’em. Like the one about a depressed, down Maine middle school music teacher who becomes a successful novelist after Steven King, the king of creep, cracked up over an article about, um, farting that he had written for CoEvolutionary Quarterly, the grandchild of the Whole Earth Catalog, he had casually dropped in with the draft of what would become his first published novel he had sent to King. Completely true. Or the one about the teacher-slash-novelist who turns his back on a gig that people around the world dream about — being a big-shot writer, not teaching scales to snot-nosed monsters in middle school — because he likes hanging out and drinking with actors. Also completely true. Well, sort of. It’s a long story. With Kimball, in town to chat about “I Fall For You,” the new production, but, sadly, not long enough to tie one on with the cast, it usually is. The conversation bounces from one thing to the next, with plenty of colorful diversions that will wind round and round before circling back to the point. Which is that it’s fun hanging out with actors: They’re colorful people and, like the playwright, know how to tell a story, and he does enjoy tipping the occasional glass with them — something he learned after turning the page on his thriller-writing years, after his publisher dropped him, not long after the firm "misplaced" the entire print run of his new novel. Yup, true. He started writing plays six years ago, mostly as a way to get a director friend of his off his back and discovered he loved it.

Yeah, he’s got literary game, and lots of unlikely-but-true stories of his own, or from his pals, that provide the starting points, at least, for the seven sex-themed plays that make up “I Fall for You,” which opens Sept. 18 at the Firehouse. Like the one about his buddy, a gynecologist, who runs into a patient in a singles bar. Uncomfortable! Or the playwright's uncle, who used the occasion of a family reunion to announce — to everybody — that he was the most sexually frustrated man on earth. “The silence that followed was devastating,” says Kimball, “Complete silence. No one knew what to say.” That story ended up morphing into “Say No More,” the play that closes "I Fall for You." And he’s got stories about dirty plays that aren’t especially dirty, where the filth is in someone else’s mind, or religious/political positions earn you the label “banned author.” Which happened last June, when the new guy at the Utah State Theatre decided he didn’t like the incest themes in Kimball’s “Ghosts of Ocean House” and replaced it at the last minute with “An Inspector Calls,” a tired, sixty-year-old British farce. Problem is, the play isn’t “about incest.” It's about a haunted house. Well, actually it’s about a guy who uses religion as a weapon to browbeat someone much weaker than he is. Hmmmm, interesting. He was angry when the play was banned, and even more so when they asked him to “do the right thing” and return the advance. Which he did, even though it probably really wasn’t the right thing, and decided to wear the banning as a “a mark of distinction.” You’ve got to wonder how they would have reacted to the Richard cycle — especially if they saw him in full plumage, or even the head-hat he will be wearing in the Firehouse production.

He's not "from here," as people from here like to say, but he's got deep, historic roots in the region. Yes, he's one of "those" Kimballs, one of the first families to climb out of the boats in the 17th century, and a guy with, his words, some pretty horrible ancestors, who, for better or worse, owned stuff (like Plum Island, for a while) or ran things (like the trial against Susanna Martin, the Amesbury woman twice accused and once executed during the Salem witch hysteria.) And while he may not be "from here," he's certainly been around here. His 20-minute play "Good Golly Miss Molly at Recess," about three adolescents burying a beloved pet in the schoolyard, premiered at the 2005 New Works Festival. And while the current production of "Say No More" is getting its official premiere this weekend, it grew up in workshops at the Actors Studio and was staged, in a different form, at the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative — And, word of warning, if you know he's going to be "around here," look both ways before crossing the street — guy says he can make it from York, Maine, to Newburyport in a half hour. He lives in York, which used to be part of Massachusetts, even though the ingrates declined the Bay State’s invitation, which was kindly delivered at the end of a Puritan gun. That’s another story, one that Kimball tells in “Submit,” which, given the content of his recent plays, sounds like it could be a little kinky, but actually gets right to the point — something it took the playwright a while to do. Again, a long story. So back it up a little bit, back to the Reagan years.

By the 1980s, Kimball had spent more than a decade teaching music and, well, that was enough. Actually it was way more than enough. “I was having a breakdown, basically,” he says. Unemployment office was a waste of time: What are you qualified to do? Um, be a middle school music teacher? Then the Gipper cut funding for a federal migrant education program, so Kimball found himself without a summer job. Now what? He decided to write a novel. He found an agent, who explored conventional approaches to publishing while Kimball took a different approach: He wrapped up the manuscript, with a serious piece he had written on farting (“Why not? Brooke Shields farts," he says. "Tonto farts, swans fart. In fact, research shows that people fart 5.64 times a day.") and mailed it to Stephen King, Bangor, Maine. ("I didn't know his actual address," he says.) It was the farting article that saved Kimball, because King usually just tosses the stuff into the fireplace. ("Do you know how many idiots send Stephen King unsolicited magazines every year?" Kimball says. "I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what else to do.") He loved the farting story enough to read the accompanying novel, and he liked the novel enough to get behind what would become the comic novel "Firewater Pond" personally.

Kimball spent the next decade writing original screenplays and adaptations for motion picture companies, including three episodes for "Monsters," then returned to the novel in 1996 with "Undone," a thriller that went on to become a London Times best-seller and earned him the distinction of being the only American to receive the "Fresh Talent Award," given out by W.H. Smith, Great Britain's largest bookstore chain. He followed up "Undone" with the thriller "Mouth to Mouth" and "Green Girls," which actually started out as a script for the "Tales from the Dark Side" television series. ("My agent told me that if I got rid of the zombies, it would be a great thriller," he says. ) Published in 2002, that was also the thriller that "went missing" in William Morrow's network of warehouses — right before the publisher dropped him and pretty much soured Kimball on at least that dark corner of the industry. And that's when Joe Dominguez got ahold of him. Dominguez is, Kimball says, a "pilot who got involved in theater because he wanted access to his emotions." He was also trying to find someone to write a short play about the 350th anniversary of the founding of York — and the Pilgrim thugs who made it possible. Essentially Kimball said "yeah, yeahHe had just been through the wringer emotionally and professionally, and wasn't really in the moment. But he agreed to work on a script with Jennifer Saunders — "and give it a weekend," he says. He wrote a first draft. There were some problems, including the fact that he had written a whopping 47 characters. They eventually worked out all the kinks and came up with a manageable production — another long story — and staged three shows that may have lacked a certain professional quality, but the spirit was there, Kimball says. "And I was hooked."

Since then, he hasn't looked back. It's not the most secure or profitable of careers, necessitating a return to the classroom — not listening to rotten kids with their horrible squawking instruments, but as full-time faculty at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast master's program in creative writing. He says the playwrighting gig is "feast or famine," and that it's almost impossible to get original work staged these days, which may or may not be true, but he seems to be doing all right for himself: "Say No More" will have a short tour after completing its Firehouse run. “Say No More” will also be part of this year's New England Fringe Festival. His "Santa Come Home," which looks at how dysfunctional families celebrate Christmas, will be staged in November at the Players Ring in Portsmouth, N.H. (and which, like "I Fall for You," will be directed by Timothy Diering of Amesbury). An updated version of "Submit" will be staged at the Tavern Museum of Old York at 7 a.m. on Nov. 22, the time and date the deed was done — assuming he can get the actors up at that hour. Then there was the "Ghosts of Ocean House. Okay, score that in the "almost" category.

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: "I Fall for You," a co-production of the Society for the Development of the Arts and Humanities and New York Theatre Company, runs Sept. 18 to 20 at the Firehouse, 1 Market Square, Newburyport. Tim Diering directs. The cast features Kathleen Anderson, David Houlden, Jack Rushton and Jennifer Wilson. Tickets are $15, or $13 for students and SDAH members. For information, call 978-462-7332 or click here.