Arts & Culture

Our favorite content, all in one spit-polished piece of ear candy. 

This week, a program pairs juvenile delinquents with Russian literature, a musician asking NYC commuters what inspires them, a play about traumatic brain injury, Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth, and the healing power of a special horse named Chester.

The novelist and former television producer Kate Wenner is the writer behind “Make Sure It’s Me,” a play about five Iraq War veterans with Traumatic Brain Injury and the doctor devoted to helping them. The play is premiering in New Hampshire on June 1st at Portsmouth’s West End Studio Theatre. Leslie Pasternack is the show’s director – she’s also associate director of “Act One”. 

At the time of his capture in 2011, James “Whitey” Bulger  was wanted for 19 murders, extortion and loan sharking committed during his reign over Boston’s Irish mob between the 1970s and 1995. During 16 years on the lam, Whitey became the subject of myth; characterized alternately as a “good bad guy”, and, in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film, The Departed, a venal sociopath.

Shelley Murphy and Kevin Cullen, a pair of Boston Globe journalists have drawn on 25 years of reporting to create a more complete and nuanced portrait of the restless boy from the Boston projects who became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. Tonight, Murphy and Cullen will be at the Red River Theatre for a screening of The Departed and at a pre-screening reception and talk.

Tristan Omand, a Manchester based singer-songwriter tells stories of America’s rough edges, his songs tend towards characters who’ve been kicked around by life, their surfaces hardened by  booze, women, and lives spent on the road. Last week Tristan came in to play a few songs in Studio D and talk about the characters and stories in his songs.

We dug up this interview from 2008 with Jason Crigler, the composer of the musical score for Make Sure it’s Me.

In August of 2004, Jason Crigler, a highly-regarded guitarist, suffered a brain hemorrhage during a gig in New York City. His pregnant wife rushed him to the hospital and got the bad news: doctors told Jason’s family that he might not live through the night, and if he did, little of the Jason they knew would be left.

Vinx has performed, recorded and toured as a singer and percussionist with Sting, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and many others.  As far as we know,  he's the only R&B crooners of his caliber currently working and residing in the state of the New Hampshire.  This memorial day weekend he’ll be leading Soul Kitchen Volume 29 – that’s three days of collaborative jams and songwriting workshops hosted at Dreamsicle Arts and Entertainment Studios in Suncook Village.  But first, we invited Vinx to our Concord studio to tell us a little bit about the event, and maybe even give us a lesson or two.

Back in 2010, I interviewed Ray Manzarek, founding member of The Doors. I was sad to hear of his death earlier this week, and went back to listen to that interview...here it is in case you want to hear it, too.

While everyone else is going somewhere, musician Cathy Grier is staying still. She's the New York City Subway Girl.

“Books Behind Bars” is program which pairs undergraduates from the University of Virginia with inmates at the Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center to read classic Russian literature. Prison staff notice a marked change in behavior among inmates who take the class, and researchers have documented similar improvements in decision-making, social skill, and civic engagement among prisoners and undergrads who participate in the class.