pt at large

Leah Souza, aspiring vocalist with good genes

Leah Souza and the Leah Souza Trio, with special guest Johnny Souza
Ryles, 212 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, MA
www.ryles.com

Leah Souza’s dream to break into the jazz scene may or may not happen but it won’t be from lack of support. The trio that played behind her last night at Ryles in Cambridge would have been at home sitting in with a singer with far greater name recognition. Pianist Michael Shea and bassist David Landoni were the chief instigators in the evening’s creations. Once Souza established the tempo and sang her first stanzas, this little duet went to town exchanging improvised riffs that had them grinning and the audience applauding.

“We don’t have formal arrangements for the songs,” drummer Rick Klane was overheard saying to a patron after the first set. “Michael gets an idea going and he and Dave take it on after that. I go along for the ride and fill in on my own.” The playing behind Souza was spirited and tight.

The other Souza on the stage, special guest Johnny Souza, happened to be Leah’s dad - and does have name recognition. The Chet Baker-smooth trumpeter has been a fixture on the regional music scene for years and sat in on several of his daughter’s songs.

Leah Souza’s been listening to music since she was a kid in Plymouth, MA. “I started singing pop music as a teenager. My dad introduced me to jazz a few years ago and I got hooked.”

The dark haired 24-year-old has a dusky mezzo-alto voice that can shift into a pleasing upper register.  It’s no surprise that she occasionally grooves on the scat style of her mentor, veteran Rebecca Parris,  Souza’s phrasing, as evidenced by her renditions of first set standards of “Autumn Leaves”, “Nearness Of You”, “September In The Rain”, “Night And Day”, and “Summertime”, was pleasingly fresh.

Souza’s singing meshed seamlessly with the elegant stylings of her dad’s trumpet. One of the night’s highlights was their sweet vocal duet of Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father” backed up by Johnny Souza’s velvety trumpet soloing.

The young songstress knows what she wants. “I don’t have a day job. I want to have a career in music. I really like Kurt Elling. Others who’ve influenced me are Diana Krall, Natalie Cole, Frank Sinatra, and Dianne Reeves,” she said. Singing professionally for nearly four years, she was at ease fronting a band. This was her third performance at Ryles.

While she’s clearly in tune with her band, Souza often seemed to teeter off pitch as she shifted between notes in her phrasing. If she can overcome this distraction, Leah Souza wont be scanning advertisements for a day job anytime soon.

For more about her, see www.leahsouza.com

The Little Coffee House That Could

Lincoln Street Coffee
15 Lincoln Street
Newton Highlands
617-244-1600

Sippy cups and coffee cups. That’s what you saw on the little round tables. Kiddies, adults in various states of advancement, and a sprinkling of teenagers sending and receiving text messages were plopped in wire backed chairs and well-worn sofas and easy chairs around the confines of the L shaped interior of, well, a coffee shop. Oh yeah, and two musicians in the far corner playing two sets of lovely music over the occasional ssshhhh-ing of a latte maker and yelps from toddlers wanting their mommy’s attention. All of it is incongruously chic.

Monday through Sunday this little locally owned emporium serves exclusively roasted premium coffees and a select menu of soups. salads, sandwiches, baked goods and homemade Italian gelato. But on Friday nights, it’s as if Cinderella’s prince stumbled in by mistake and discovered a perfect fit for the glass slipper. For only two hours, between 7 and 9pm the little place is turned into the most unlikely coffee house - as in live entertainment - that you’ve ever seen. By 9 pm, as if Cinderella’s coach has arrived to whisk her home, the night’s two sets of mu sic are over and Lincoln Street Coffee reverts to its quieter self.

Lincoln Street Coffee is delightfully unassuming. The terra cotta shaded walls give the L-shaped shop a cozy feel. Before Friday’s music begins, owner Peter Meyer shoves a few overstuffed couches and armchairs around to make a stage setting in the front corner of the room and voila, a stage is created.

It’s quite possibly the only time in ages that the young parents have been out en famille, aside from the shopping at Stop and Shop or a trip to the grandparent’s house. Patrons and musicians show forbearance for toddlers’ enthusiasm realizing this may be the rare night the young parents will have cultural contact with the civilized world. And in fact the place has set up a kid’s corner with a little library. As they say on their web site,  “We know how it feels, we have kids too.”

The music is as rich and various as the coffee beans the Meyer’s import from around the world. Tonight there’s singer-songwriter Michelle Cummings, a 24-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate, softly singing songs from her new EP “Wallflower.”

Two hours of music by up-and-comers. Whether they make it big-time or not isn’t the point here. The deal is that you’ll hear fresh music, watch couples make small talk on their first dates, see how moms or dads can sip coffee and hold a sippy cup up to their child’s lips at the same time, and maybe munch on one of the tempting scones or biscotti in the bakery case.

And it’s absolutely free.

For the menu, music schedule, and other facts about Lincoln Street Coffee click
http://www.lincolnstreetcoffee.com/index.html
To hear Michelle Cummings, click
http://www.michellecummingsmusic.com/

Sacred Hearts: a provocatively layered play - parishioners consumed by miracles and media

Sacred Hearts, a play in two acts by Colleen Curran
Zeitgeist Stage Company
Black Box Theater
Boston Center for the Arts
Tremont Street, Boston, MA

This play has it all. Relationships, popular culture, religion, miracles, the odd skeleton that’s buried within everyone’s closet, and the piranhas known as the media.

A woman witnesses what is construed as a miracle. The overwhelmed woman’s reluctant and confidential disclosure to her priest is overheard by a church busybody. Within five minutes of the play’s opening scene, the secret is out. For the next two hours, the story deepens, widens, and is resolved - perhaps.

Through an alternating series of deliciously well-acted flashbacks and real time drama, the play gains momentum by the minute. Everyone angles for a way to profit from the “miracle.”

Busloads of the faithful arrive in the small town. Secrets are divulged or divined or speculated. Reputations are maligned. Religion becomes a commodity. Reporters trample over private property and personal rights to privacy. The woman’s veracity is questioned. Speculation becomes news. Talk shows natter.

A sensational event. An all-consuming media response. People on the margins of the story craning their necks or raising their voices to be seen or heard on TV or radio. Does the parade of events sound familiar?

Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist web site

The power of the play stems from the way each character poaches on the personal boundaries of the miracle’s solitary witness, Bridget (Eliza Lay), a dropout law student turned shepherd in rural Canada.

Small town newspaper owner, editor, and married man Evan (Curt Klump) sees a chance to boost circulation. He threatens to use confidences he learned from Bridget as he thought about straying from his marriage when he befriended her.

The parish priest Father Phil (Ed Peed), apparently shuttled off to this Canadian outpost because of his radical activities on behalf of the poor in El Salvador, sees a chance to reinvigorate his advocacy for Third World causes.

Bridget’s brother Tim (Greg Maraio) visits with an agenda to persuade her to complete her degree and return to the lawyerly destiny he sees as hers.

If you’re lucky, you witness one over-the-top performance in a play. “Sacred Hearts” has two and several excellent ones. They drive the plot with the force of a pile driver. Gretchen and Violet sparkle. The audience in the tiny Black Box Theater spontaneously applauded after scenes in which these actors shined.

Gretchen (Melissa Baroni) dreams of becoming the next Geraldo. Disarmingly ditzy and possessed with exquisite comic timing, she nonchalantly invades Bridget’s home with a video camera and an agenda to manufacture an “investigatory feature” on why the miracle occurred to Bridget. Her mimicking of a Fox News-type reporter is farcical and a terrific send up of how networks sensationalize news.

Violet (Renee Miller) is consumed with the fact that a miracle has occurred in the midst of this small town. The fact that she’s learned of it by eavesdropping on a confidential conversation does not deter her from wanting to trumpet it to the public. The fact that Bridget doesn’t want anyone but her parish priest to know sets Violet off on a “public’s right to know” crusade. Violet’s belief that she’s acting on behalf of the “faithful” is unshakable. That we begin to wonder whether she’s got a point is a credit to Miller’s simple fervor and conviction.

Lay’s Bridget anchors the drama. Bridget’s life is complicated and messy but on a scale we can relate to. She’s smart, vulnerable, and has faith in her religion. The miracle she may have experienced ironically threatens to unearth a secret that propelled her to migrate to this tiny village and abandon a promising career.  In the back of our minds, mightn’t we all wonder whether a secret in our lives could surface to embarrass us if our lives were put under a microscope, as Bridget’s is?

Playwright Curran and Director David J. Miller provide us with complex, very human characters, not stereotypes. By the play’s final scene, we have enough knowledge to think that their basic humanity may insulate them from the brittle ending that might befall them if Geraldo Riviera were to come to town.

For more about the Zeitgeist Stage Company see  

How I Learned To Drive

How I Learned To Drive
A play in two acts by Paula Vogel
Devanaughn Theatre at the Piano Factory
791 Tremont Street, Boston, MA  02118 (617.247.9777)
February 1 - February 18

How I Learned To Find The Devanaughn Theatre could be the prelude to witnessing your first play there. Just locating the entrance at the edge of a parking lot behind Bob’s Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston’s South End is an adventure.

The term ‘theater’ might be a stretch in the case of the Piano Factory, the home of the Devanaughn Theatre. Inside, you can fly a paper airplane from one end of the room to the other. The two rows of audience chairs are practically on top of the spare but effective set. Romanesque arch patterns in the two exposed brick walls rise twenty feet to the ceiling and once could indeed have surrounded an industrial piano enterprise in the early twentieth century.

Watching a play in a space not much larger than a living room can be an intimate experience. Add a generous helping of good acting and a tightly constructed play and the result is powerful. Throw in a theme of sexual abuse and the space becomes downright uncomfortable.

The Devanaughn Theatre’s production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is a twisted love story. The play centers around a relationship between a young girl and her uncle, who teaches her to drive. He’s patient, compassionate, and the only one who will listen to this conflicted adolescent. He’s also a predator. He teaches her how to drink and how to make love.

The story repels us as it draws us in. Li’l Bit, insecure, fatherless, growing up in rural Maryland, is vulnerable. She’s growing up in a dysfunctional family, has no friends in school, and becomes fascinated with what she perceives as the calm worldliness of the man who married her aunt. Of this play, Paula Vogel has said, “We receive great love from the people who harm us."

Li’l Bit was eleven years old when she took her first driving lesson with her Uncle Peck. The reenactment of that drive is one of several disturbing scenes in the play. Telling the story at that point as a woman in her late thirties, Li’l Bit said of that day, “It’s the last time I lived in my body.”

The play is set between 1971 and 1978 but jumps around in chronology. It’s sometimes hard to figure out the sequence of events because Li’l Bit tells stories from various points in her adult life and in the next breath the play returns to reenactments of disturbing experiences in her childhood relationship with her uncle.

Photo credit to Devanaughn web site (see below).

The relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle is as complex as it is wrong. He’s the anchor who grounded her during seven years of a painful adolescence. He’s the man who dragged her into a miserable adulthood, which she may just survive, not only in spite of but possibly because of him.

The play does not in any way justify the Uncle’s pathetic behavior. Alex Zielke as Li’l Bit and Kevin Ashworth as Uncle Peck bring the right quantities of obsession and self-loathing to their characters.

It’s a tribute to Vogel’s writing and the Devanaughn Company’s acting that we feel anything but antipathy for Uncle Peck. She examines the tricky terrain between Li’l Bit’s vulnerability and her complicity in their relationship. Questions about the roles of denial and forgiveness linger long after Li’l Bit has taken her last drive.

Wayne Fritsche, Molly Kimmerling, and Jacquelyn Therieau Stachel serve as Grandpa, Grandma, Auntie and a host of other small parts throughout the play. Under the thoughtfully balanced direction of Dani Duggan, they work seamlessly as characters and a sort of Greek Chorus.

The play mercifully has moments of levity but it rolls to its downhill conclusion with the power of an eighteen-wheeler. We know it’s out of control. We know it’s going to crash. We just don’t know who will survive.

The small venues in Boston continue to offer some of the best values and theater experiences. No matter where you live, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is worth the trip to the Boston’s South End.

For more about the Devanaughn Theatre http://www.devtheatre.com/  

Copley Society "Shades of Frost", Cool for Collectors of All Stripes

The Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 / 617-536-5049
Tues - Sat 11 - 6, Sun - Mon 12 - 5
“Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost”
Lower Gallery, January 18 - March 10, 2007

The Copley Society of Art is a little oasis of accessible, affordable visual art in the midst of the priciest, toniest street in Boston. It’s the only gallery on Newbury Street where the collector has a chance to purchase artwork that won’t require taking out a second mortgage on the house.

The lower level of the two-tiered gallery is the place to start. Many of the approximately 500 artists who make up the society launch their careers down there. Of the 300 artists who apply for membership each year, only 30 are admitted. Consider the fact that their work passed through this firewall as a sort of provenance. The review committee here has high standards.

Each member may contribute three works to the society’s quarterly exhibitions, some of which are juried, some not. The current show, “Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost,” is not juried and is full of oils, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, photographs, monotypes, drypoints, gouache, and collages. This tapas approach is a great way for neophytes to develop their taste in art and veterans to capture the work of an artist they think might skyrocket into the firmament. Everybody wins.

Elisabeth Pearl's trio are 4 1/4 x 4 1/4, $165 each, oil on panel

Good things come in small packages - pieces are limited to 100 square inches. The walls are covered with lively contrasts in color, texture, theme, and imaginations. The relatively few pieces that are abstract are not so challenging that they defy comprehension.

Richard W. Field, 'Robbie’s Towing', $1200, acrylic, 9 x 12

Art lines the walls and is stacked in display boxes on the floor. As soon as a piece is sold, another takes its place. Once in a while, Assistant Gallery Manager Katherine Millet will move pieces around “If the space begins to look a little tired.”

Best of Show: Dianne Panarelli Miller, “Sidewalk Café”,  oil, 12x9, $650

The prices range from $200 to $1700. Don’t panic. Only a handful runs more than a grand. At least half are less than $500, with scores of pieces falling between $250 and $400. The price tag of “Best of Show” was $650 (see photo). And all the art is framed. Collectors know full well that it can easily cost $100 to frame an acquisition.

One of the most endearing features of the gallery is how comfortable a visitor feels asking questions about the art on the walls. They’ve developed the non-snooty knack for answering questions from curious visitors into an art form. 

The Copley Society’s web page features photos of some of the  “A -Z” artwork http://copleysociety.org/home.html