The storied career of AJ Mungo

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, who people also called AJ, although the initials meant something else.  The father was Andrew Joseph, the son was  Andrew John. That became an issue at his christening, when the parish priest insisted that, to avoid a lifetime of confusion Andrew John have "Jr." tacked on to his name, which is why the name on the box of "Thanks for Listening, a Memoir" says, "a film by AJ Mungo and" — talk about a name — "Amie Spiridigliozzi-Keefe" instead of "Andrew J. Mungo Jr." It's also one of the stories Mungo tells in the film, which gets a proper big screen premiere this week at the Screening Room, the city's hip, alternative cinema, which he owns, and which, after three decades in fashionable, trendy Blueberry Port, has propelled him to superstar status or, at least, relative fame, but only within the city limits. He still has to pay cash in Strawberry Port, and in Raspberry Port he has to show a photo ID. The movie, the film-maker and -shower says, tongue squarely in cheek, is his bid to bust the fame game open — beyond the Merrimack, even. And, at the same time, goose his rep here, in the most delicious of the Ports, because fame can be fleeting, and while most folks may know who he is, this guy behind the camera, or the popcorn machine, or, depending on the day, the ticket booth, what do we actually know about him? And, while we're talking about him, what's the deal with his freakishly large head? 

Read more »

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. 

Read more »

Powell play adopts new look

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 that came after a major rewrite just days before the latest opening. Something the actors must have been really happy about. Hey, everyone loves last-minute rewrites, right? It’s a story with a very long history — like the play itself. It's about a much-delayed, much- anticipated reunion, a get-together Elaine has played out in her head thousands of times over the years. She has not seen Grady since he was a little boy  — 19 inches to be exact — when she gave him up for adoption. He’s 27 years old now. She knows it was the "right" thing to do, but that decision has cast a shadow over the rest of her life, which has been shrouded in doubt and guilt for as long as she can remember, although the emotional ramifications have mostly simmered below the surface. He is the "ghost baby," who has been haunting her all his life. Wherever that played out. She has waited for the call for years, not expecting to get it, because in her heart she feels guilty, she feels like she is being — and maybe should be — punished because, after all, what kind of monster would willingly give away her child? No, no. Nobody ever said it. To her face. But she has felt the scorn of icy imagined stares through most of her adult life. No amount of comfort, reassurance from Jess, her lovie-dovie, long-time live-in will change that. Okey-dokey? 

Read more »

Once upon a time, Greg Moss wrote a play

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 globetrotting playwright, just back from a French premiere of his play "House of Gold," is a little distrustful of the form — "skeptical" is how he puts it — even though some of his work is built along similar structures. So when Edward Speck, artistic director of Theater in the Open, a company Moss had been involved with for more than 15 years, approached him, asked him to do an original adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale — any one, his choice — Moss thought ... I'm probably not the right guy to do a straight adaptation, but maybe I could take a different approach. So he dug into the literature, the folklore of fairy tales. He read the usual Freudian takes about what is going on below the surface of these creepy, disturbing, if you think about it, stories — or, at least, the ones that the evil genius Walt Disney hasn't gotten his dreck-stained fingers all over, and came up with something original, spellbinding — a modern Grimm-like fairytale set in the here and now, specifically Newburyport, or "this Puritan black hole of the universe" as our 15-year-old heroine Jenny Stone (Aisha Chodat) puts it — a little city by the laughing waters that geeky Froggy (Max Vye) — a characters whose name might ring a bell with all you clever kids out there — was told to avoid at all costs.

Read more »

Exit show a real kick(er) for Taylor

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, though the designation is by no means official) did a solo show. Malpica is pretty sure it was two years ago, a solo show in Portsmouth. At the Unitarian church, maybe? But, no, Taylor isn't buying it, even though she has nothing to contribute to resolve the question. "It's been a while,"  says the Port bassist, a fixture on the local music scene for a quarter-century, who fronted a list of bands longer than your arm. And that's ... OK? Yeah, it is, as far as she's concerned. It's actually better than OK, because now she only has to do the fun stuff: get to the show or rehearsal on time and play the bass and sing harmony, not the ugly-but-necessary stuff  — booking, budgets and promotion. "I'm happy as a Kicker,” she says. "This is way more fun, less pressure." It's also the reason people stop in their tracks when they see that Taylor will be performing solo in a benefit for Exit Dance Theatre, the modern dance troupe that will be celebrating its 25th anniversary next year. It's not true, not exactly anyhow. The Sept. 23 performance not so much a solo show so much as it is a collaboration. She'll be backed by a band, a kind of impromptu band, one that includes RC1 on percussion — as well as a performance by Exit, which will debut a new piece set to one Taylor tune, and a poetry reading.

Read more »

New day, new band, new name

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 the actor who played Shane, the world-weary gunslinger who just wanted to settle down, but gets dragged into into that complicated ethical world once again — and the name North Shore rocker Gary Lavenson adopted so many years ago because ... well, because it was way more rock and roll than Lavenson. Go ahead, try it out: Gary Lavenson and the Detour. Just doesn't work, does it? But, yeah, funny name, Tabasco Fiasco. Shane didn't come up it. His banjitarist, a guy with a familiar name, having ... What? Banjitarist?

Read more »

Maudsley: Duo slaying them in Europe ... we think

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 Marseilles. They'll be singing for their supper, tightening what they have and writing and posting new songs born on the road as well as shooting video to document this tour and to acquire raw material for future projects. They'll be dragging around their gear, crashing in hostels, making mad dashes through puzzling train stations. And they'll also be blogging about the tour and writing to the folks back home and .... and it's beginning to sound a lot more like work than fun. But, like all good plans, it's not set in stone. "It's about living in the moment," Plante said during an interview just a couple of days before mandatory groping by the TSA. "We'll know what to do when we get there."

Read more »

A deserved buzz about 'The Flies'

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 the French existential drama, blending chaos and pathos, one that finds the poetry and visual clarity in a difficult and sometimes tiresome work, one ultimately wrestled into submission by director Stephen Haley. No mean feat considering the nature of the beast. Because Sartre was a philosopher, not a playwright. A straight production of "The Flies" is a gabfest, about three full hours of audience-numbing blah blah blah about the absurdity of life  — wonderful, thoughtful, perceptive blather, but treatise rather than drama, and one that doesn't really fly, so to speak, on stage. Not for the audience, anyhow. Yes, we are alone. There's no God, there's no Devil, to save us, to trick us. There's no transcendence, nothing beyond the immediate, what can be sensed. Meaning is illusion. We're condemned to live in freedom, free to curse the gods or blame the "other" political party or whatever evasion strategy is required or comfortable, but escape is not possible. Whatever is wrong can be left on our own doorstep — a terrible responsibility that we, naturally, ignore — especially, being Americans, when it taxes our attention span.

Read more »

Notable: Smith's 'Truths' looks at Port's past

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 obsession: By the time he gets around to writing the music, he sometimes will have spent months digging through biography and history, selecting and rejecting and editing texts. Like, with "The Waking Sun," a piece commissioned by The Crossing, a 20-plus voice Philadelphia chorus, which is based on Stoic Roman philosopher Seneca. An interesting guy, to be sure: Playwright, scholar; banished by Claudius for having an affair with Caligula's sister, brought back to tutor a preteen Nero and eventually forced to kill himself for plotting to kill the little firebug. Supposedly. "They wanted a Seneca piece, and there’s a truckload of his writings," says Smith, "so I read reams, including all the plays, and the piece eventually came from those. Lots and lots of editing." And he went through the same process, pretty much, for "Plain Truths," a 20-minute piece for baritone and string quartet based on texts of prominent Newburyporters from the community's storied past, including the pot-boiling 19th-century novelist Harriet Prescott Spofford, the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and of course, self-appointed Lord Timothy Dexter, who presided over High Street, if nothing else. In fact, the title of the piece, which gets its NCMF premiere on Aug. 20, comes from Dexter's "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones; or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress," an 1802 work that is part political screed, part sermon and part diatribe against anyone who owed him money — in addition to being "one of the most remarkable writings ever produced," according to NCMF Artistic Director David Yang, who commissioned the piece. He was able to find all this material online. As usual, Smith got caught up in the history, especially the Dexter — so much so that he considered building the whole piece around just this one of the city’s most colorful figures before being talked off the literary ledge by Yang, a fellow Philadelphian. He admits to his weakness, his infatuation with words and history. Just don't call him a buff: "I love words and I do enjoy history," he says. "I’m no buff. Didn’t George Costanza say that? 'I'd love to be a Civil War buff. What do you have to do to be a buff?'”

Read more »

Talking about a 'Conversation'

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 something from the song jumped out at them, there was never that “aha moment” when the name emerged out of nothing, like grace, clarifying everything they were trying to do, says Pelsue, now living in Cambridge, but using his hometown as a staging area for productions of "The Dangling Conversation" at the Actors Studio, and “The New New England,” a show in Salem in which Latino youth from the St. Peter’s Summer Theater Project interweave their experiences with those of immigrants from the past. No, they’re “not totally crazy about the name,” says Pelsue, but it will have to do until inspiration finally shows up. Besides, the song, which is about a couple's inability to communicate, does bump up against what they are trying to do, which is ... well, complicated: It's about a nuanced relationship between two people that is created in the present — the actual present, at the very moment the show takes place, right before your eyes. The story continues next week on the Tannery stage.

Read more »