On Saturday, May 20th, Amber Coast Theatrical presents a unique concert event at Showplace’s Nexicom Studio. The Kawartha’s Rising Stars Mentorship Concert features some of Peterborough’s beloved musical theatre performers paired up with talented local high school students for a full day of mentorship, culminating in an all-star concert to be performed that night.

It will prove to be a memorable night of music featuring the talents of performers we already love, but spotlighting new voices who will form the future of Peterborough theatre.

“The event is very much like The Voice, minus the auditions,” explains Amber Coast’s founder Lucas DeLuca, the organizer behind the event.

“Each pairing of mentor and student will do a duet, and then the mentor will coach the student throughout the day on a solo number as well. After an intensive day of shaping the two numbers, all the pairings will come together for a concert in the evening. So you’ll get two numbers from the student, and one number from the mentor as part of the duet.”

A familiar face in the Peterborough theatre community, Lucas came to Peterborough from his home in Torrance, California to attend Trent University but quickly found himself wrapped up in the theatre community.

The Kawartha’s Rising Stars Mentorship Concert came out of inspiration from Lucas’ experiences as part of the local theatre scene.

“When I got to Trent, the community was bursting at the seams with talent,” Lucas recalls. “Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It was a total fluke. I got real lucky, and I was so blown away.”

I first noticed Lucas in 2014 with his show-stopping solo in The Anne Shirley Theatre Company’s presentation of Spring Awakening. Since then, he has become a highly regarded performer on many stages via a number of different companies.

“I started with the Anne Shirley Theater Company,” Lucas says. “There I was working with Brian McDonald who pulled me into Next to Normal, Art for Awareness’s’ inaugural show. Then I met Geoff and Rachel Bemrose, which led to me working with Justin Hiscox at St. James Players, and I was at 4th Line Theatre with Rob Winslow.

“It’s been a series of really lucky breaks in which I’ve met the most incredible people, and those people have been the most warm and loving and kind. In Peterborough I meet someone spectacular every day, and it’s such a blessing.”

The Rising Star Mentorship Concert is Lucas’ way to try to give local students the same sort of opportunity he has.

“I was coming into this community as a university student and never had this sort of experience before,” Lucas explains. “Some students are luckier than others; they get to experience one community connection and then are catapulted into another. But there are students who may not have those opportunities yet.

“The idea behind this mentorship concert was to extend invitations to all of the drama departments in as many schools as possible across the Kawarthas, including Port Hope, Lindsay and Peterborough, and see what we heard back. Because we are a fairly new drama company, the responses were a bit slow but we managed to get six students.”

Taking the spotlight at the concert include high school students Rene Frank, Keely Wilson, Jayde Taylor, Kate Bemrose, Meagan Vaughan, and Sydney Harwood Jones. They will be paired with local theatre favorites Kate Suhr, Hannah Bailey, Caitlin Currie, Erik Feldcamp, Brian McDonald, and Lucas himself, with musical accompaniment by Justin Hiscox.

“What we’ve done is pair up the students with individual mentors,” Lucas says. “We’ve been able to find people who have learned in multiple different ways. For example, Erik Feldcamp, who some would say is a fairly new talent, is entirely self taught but has an immense ability with performance and entertainment.

“Then we have Kate Suhr who is a homegrown talent who has made herself a name in Toronto. We’ve also pulled in Hannah Bailey and Brian McDonald, who have become Peterborough staples in their own way.”

Although the mentors and students will spend the day developing their performances for that evening, the matches have already been made and correspondence has already been happening between the pairs.

But, as Lucas reveals, this is only the first concert that Amber Coast Productions will be presenting this year. In September they will be doing a spotlight on Justin Hiscox’s nearly two decades of contribution to musical theatre in a show they are calling ‘Justin’s Jukebox’.

“We are going to try to get as many performers we can who have performed in shows where Justin has been the musical director,” Lucas says. “We hope that each can do at least one song from different shows Justin has done. Justin has been doing music for as close to twenty years. That will be another really exciting show for us.”

Amber Coast Theatrical has another production planned for the end of 2017, and then Lucas will be teaming up with Elizabeth Moody to direct the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2018 musical. However, for the time being the details of those shows are held tightly in the vault. For the moment, Lucas’ focus is on enriching the next wave of local talent and introducing them to Peterborough’s rich theatrical community.

“With all the community connections I had, it was like I’d meet one person and that would lead to another person,” Lucas says. “I want to find a way to gift the professional development and community connections that I had to young students.”

The Kawartha’s Rising Stars Mentorship Concert is going to be a fantastic night of music featuring many of my favourite local performers and a way to be introduced to the future of Peterborough theatre. It is a night that I’m highly anticipating, and a great way to welcome the newest batch of players into our community. Furthermore, at $5 admission, the show is an affordable night of performance.

The Kawartha’s Rising Stars Mentorship Concert happens at 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 20th in the Nexicom Studio downstairs at Showplace Performance Centre (290 George St. N., Peterborough). Admission is $5 at the door, or pay what you can.

The Peterborough Folk Festival has announced that Buffy Sainte-Marie will be kicking off the annual summer music festival with a concert on Friday, August 18th at Showplace Performance Centre in downtown Peterborough.

The Cree-Canadian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, activist, and visual artist has won multiple awards over her 50-year-plus career. In 1983, she won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for “Up Where We Belong”. She’s also won four Juno awards, including two in 2016 (Aboriginal Album of the Year and Contemporary Roots Album of the Year) for her latest album Power in the Blood, which also took home the 2015 Polaris Music Prize for the top album in Canada.

Tickets for the kick-off concert are $49.50 plus fees and go on sale at 12 noon on Wednesday, May 17th at the box office at Showplace Performance Centre (290 George St. N., Peterborough, 705-742-7469) or online at www.showplace.org.

While the kick-off concert featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie is ticketed, the remainder of the 28th annual Peterborough Folk Festival weekend at Nicholls Oval in Peterborough’s East City is free admission.

The festival includes two days of free music featuring nationally recognized artists along with workshops and food and craft vendors.

While the complete lineup of performers will be revealed in the coming weeks, the Peterborough Folk Festival has also announced that legendary Canadian children’s performers Sharon and Bram will be playing at the festival on Sunday, August 20th.

“A big part of the Peterborough Folk Festival experience is bringing together the community and families to enjoy live music,” says Ryan Kemp, the festival’s Artistic Director.

The Juno award winning duo, who have sold more than three million albums worldwide, are best known for such songs such as “Skinamarinky Dinky Dink”, “Peanut Butter and Jelly”, and “Fish and Chips and Vinegar”.

The festival is now accepting submissions for artisans and craft and food vendors, and is also seeking volunteers are sponsors. More information is available online at www.peterboroughfolkfest.com.

VIDEO: 2017 Peterborough Folk Festival (featuring music from Mayhemingways)

While teaching a writing workshop, Toronto-based writer and comedian Deborah Kimmett received a message that her younger brother Kevin had been diagnosed with cancer. The unexpected journey that followed has become the basis for Deborah’s brand new one-woman show The Year of The Suddenly.

Directed by Linda Kash, the show is being called part standup comedy and part eulogy. Deborah, a Second City veteran and a regular on CBC Radio’s The Debaters, will perform her monologue at Catalina’s in downtown Peterborough for one night only on Saturday, June 3rd.

“I was in the middle of teaching a writing class about the word ‘suddenly’ when suddenly my whole life changed,” Deborah recalls. “So, as a writer, I was trying to write this story in my head as it should go. But as I started getting closer, it didn’t go that way at all.”

“The Year of The Suddenly is this journey of how I got the news that my brother had cancer, and I thought I was going to bring the casseroles and be a good sister. But I ended up having this other thing happen with my brother.”

Deborah admits that, despite knowing her brother his entire life, she really didn’t know him at all. The show she has written is about the new relationship created between herself and her brother at the end of his life.

“The premise is that this is a love story with a person who I didn’t know very well my entire life,” Deborah says. “One of the lines I use is ‘I found the brother I didn’t know I had.’

“You have this incredible love for your family, but you think you have enough time to be indifferent. It’s not that you hate anybody, but you put them in a category and they put you in a category. And then, a lot of people move around now, so you may have moved away twenty years ago, but your family still thinks of you the same way you were when you left.

“You just think you have time to not work this stuff out. I didn’t think in a million years this story would evolve the way it did. It was a surprise to me as a person that I could feel the way I felt towards my brother, in terms of the way it shifted in our relationship.”

Although the show deals with her brother’s illness, Deborah stresses that The Year of The Suddenly is not a show about cancer: it’s about the relationship that formed between two siblings in a backdrop where time is running out.

“At first I was just writing about what that process was all about because it was absolutely epic,” Deborah explains. “But as I got into it more, I realized it was about a brother-sister journey and not a cancer story at all. I really don’t deal with my brother’s treatments.

“It’s also about that idea of when are you going to show up for life as it is. It was like there was a time limit, so we had to make our peace. But I had no idea of the things that were going to happen that were going to challenge me.”

Part of the development of the show came from notes that Deborah kept after having phone conversations with her brother during his illness. It was through these conversations that she began to get to know Kevin in a way she never had before.

“We got to know each other through a series of phone calls, and after we’d get off the phone I’d write these things down that he’d say because they were so profound,” Deborah says. “I asked him if I could write them down and he said yes, because he wanted people to know what he could see now that he couldn’t see before in his life.

“He was an engineer and he was just an amazing guy. He was very smart and very funny and had a lot of wisdom. Even at the very end, he had a lot of insight into life. That was a surprise for me — not knowing him at that level until the end.”

For the past few months Deborah has been traveling to Peterborough to develop the show with Linda Kash, and she performed an excerpt in April at Linda’s annual fundraising event for Hospice Peterborough called “Paul’s Left Ball”, which also celebrates the life of Linda’s late husband Paul O’Sullivan, who died in a tragic car accident in 2012 at the age of 48.

“Linda has been good to work with because she lost her husband and we just knew the sensibility that we wanted to have about it,” Deborah says. “This is not just some sort of ‘precious piece.’ When these things happen it brings out the best and the worst in people. It’s been fun to develop it with Linda because she has that same sensibility.”

Although cancer and loss are sensitive topics, Deborah has also been able to find comedy in the story.

“This show walks that tightrope between humour and drama because everything is heightened by what’s going on,” Deborah says. “Where the comedy comes in is when life doesn’t happen as you plan it. We have expectations of ourselves when someone is sick, and we also have expectations of how a dying person should act. It never goes the way you thought, and life is often very messy.

“I don’t think you can make jokes at the expense of a person, but I think it’s always funny that in the middle of something so tragic there can be the most ridiculous behavior that happens. I make fun of how badly we treat things. The humour comes in the human condition butting up against something serious. There’s humour in how we are all incompetent in how we soothe and comfort each other at the time that we need it the most. As a comedian, I find the humour in my own incompetence and then I laugh at that.”

Deborah will be premiering the show in Toronto at Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre on May 27th and 28th before bringing it to Peterborough on June 3rd. There are possible plans in the works to continue performing it in other cities as well.

All proceeds from the Toronto performances of The Year of The Suddenly will be going to The Kensington Hospice in Toronto. So that Deborah can donate all the ticket proceeds to Kensington Hospice, she has created a crowdfunding campaign to raise $2,500 to help her cover the fixed costs of doing the Toronto shows. You can donate to her campaign at www.gofundme.com/kevin-suddenly.

“Linda says I’m very brave for telling this story,” Deborah says. “I don’t feel brave. I don’t know if it’s brave or not. It’s just got a lot of nice conversation going on about it already. I just want to work it out and see what we have.”

The Peterborough performance takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 3rd at Catalina’s (131 Hunter St. W., Peterborough) and will also feature musician Jack Nicholson providing accompaniment. This is a rare opportunity to see a newly developed show in our community before it travels to larger cities.

Tickets for The Year of The Suddenly are $25 and are available in advance from Deborah’s website.

Fans of Celtic and Americana music are in for a double treat this month at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in Peterborough with back-to-back concerts featuring two outstanding roots music duos.

On Friday, May 26th, Cape Breton fiddler Mairi Rankin and Scottish harp player Ailie Robertson perform together and then, on Saturday, May 27th, New Mexico singer-songwriter Max Gomez and Peterborough’s own bluesman extraordinaire Rick Fines get together for an evening of song and story called “South Meets North”.

Mairi Rankin and Ailie Robertson

Cape Breton fiddler Mairi Rankin and Scottish harp player Ailie Robertson have just launched their first-ever Canadian tour this month, after returning from a tour of Europe as members of the Scottish-Irish-Canadian supergroup The Outside Track.

Mairi and Ailie will be performing at the Market Hall at 8 p.m. on Friday, May 26th, with Peterborough singer-songwriter Missy Knott opening.

VIDEO: “Brandy” by Mairi Rankin and Ailie Robertson

After their recent tour in the five-piece band The Outside Track, Mairi and Allie have joined forces for a new duo project. They are touring together in May and June and are hoping to record their first album as a duo in the fall.

Mairi, who is best known as a member of Canada’s Rankin Family, plays fiddle, sings, and also step dances. Now living in Vancouver, she was born in Nova Scotia and has been influenced by some of the best Cape Breton traditional musicians and instructors on the island.

As well as performing in The Outside Track, she is a member of the Cape Breton Celtic group Beolach and has performed with the Rankin Sisters, Unusual Suspects, Bruce Guthro, and more. She has recorded one solo album, two each with Beòlach and The Outside Track, and been featured on numerous compilations and recordings.

VIDEO: “Set You Free” – The Outside Track featuring Mairi Rankin and Ailie Robertson

Ailie Robertson has been living in Montreal for the last year, but she’s a native of Edinburgh and is considered one of Scotland’s leading young traditional musicians. A master of the clàrsach (the Celtic harp), she began playing when she was 11 years old and, through training in both clàrsach and piano, developed a love for both classical and traditional music.

Ailie fuses Irish, Scottish, and contemporary harping technique into her own unique style, which earned her a 2009 nomination as Up and Coming Artist of the Year in the BBC Alba Scots Trad Music Awards. Not only is she a harp virtuouso, composer, arranger, and improviser, but she’s a much-in-demand teacher who has published six books of harp music.

VIDEO: Swerving for Bunnies – Ailie Robertson

General admission tickets are $20 plus fees ($17 plus fees for students) and assigned cabaret-style table seating is $25 plus fees.

Tickets are available in person at the box office (140 Charlotte St., Peterborough), by phone at 705-749-1146, or online at tickets.markethall.org. Tickets are also available (cash only) at Moondance (425 George St. N., Peterborough, 705-742-9425).

South Meets North: Max Gomez and Rick Fines

New Mexico songsmith Max Gomez joins Peterborough’s award-winning bluesman Rick Fines at the Market Hall on at 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 26th for an evening of song and story.

At this concert, the two singer-songwriters will perform separately … but Rick says they’ll also be playing a few songs together too.

Max Gomez hails from the hamlet of Taos, the most northern of the New Mexico pueblos, about an hour and half drive north of Santa Fe. The son of an artisanal furniture craftsman, Max grew up watching and learning the tools of the trade from his father, while also learning how to play guitar.

A blues enthusiast from an early age, Max immersed himself in the Delta and traditional folk blues of Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and Robert Johnson. Having honed his chops on the blues, he then turned his interest to traditional American folk music, and then became influenced by master songwriters like John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark, and John Hiatt.

VIDEO: “Ball and Chain” – Max Gomez

Max began performing his original tunes along with country and blues classics in bars around Taos when he was 15 years old. After high school, he moved to Los Angeles to study music and pursue his musical career.

At 24 years old, he released his debut album Rule This World in 2012. The 10 songs on the record cover themes of heartbreak, regret, young love, desperation, and redemption.

“The songs I write are not real straightforward,” Max says. “You have to decode them. I like when the listener has to create their own story, rather than be told what’s happening.”

VIDEO: “Run From You” – Max Gomez (directed by Kiefer Sutherland)

While local music fans may not have heard of Max before, there is a local connection. Canadian-born actor Kiefer Sutherland — who himself has embarked on a music career and played at Peterborough Musicfest last summer — directed the video for Max’s song “Run From You”.

“The thing that I seem to gravitate most to in music is the basic fundamental of the telling of the story,” Sutherland says. “When I heard this record, not only did I find it unbelievably beautiful and melodic, but there was such a rich tapestry of storytelling that I couldn’t help but gravitate to it.”

Local music fans don’t really need an introduction to Peterborough’s own Rick Fines. A veteran of the blues and folk circuits, Rick is well known both for his captivating songs, his signature vocal growl, and his diverse guitar playing.

He’s also familiar to many for his 15-year membership in the legendary acoustic blues trio Jackson Delta and his collaborations with singer-songwriter Susie Vinnick. As part of Jackson Delta (along with Gary Peeples and Al Black), Fines received both Juno and Handy award nominations. With Susie, he earned a Maple Blues Songwriter of the Year Award.

As a solo artist, Rick has won two Maple Blues Awards for Solo Act of the Year, and eight other nominations.

VIDEO: “No Expections” – Rick Fines

Aside the songwriting chops that won him a 2003 International Songwriting Competition, he is a master of the guitar. He has played for legendary blues piano player Pinetop Perkins, songstress Colleen Peterson, folk icon Penny Lang, and many others.

Rick is also an enthusiastic teacher, and is often found sharing the transformative power of music with students across Canada, including work with the Blues In The Schools programs in Ottawa, Saskatoon, Toronto, and Yellowknife.

VIDEO: Driving Home CD Release – Rick Fines

Rick has recorded 14 albums with Jackson Delta, Suzie Vinnick, with others or on his own, with his latest solo record Driving Home released in 2015.

He has performed almost everywhere, from the National Gallery and Governor General’s Garden Party to Montreal Jazz, Ottawa BluesFest, the Edmonton Folk Festival, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Internationally, he has toured France, Italy, Scotland, Newfoundland, BC’s Gulf Islands, and even the Northern Arctic.

VIDEO: “Back Up From Zero” – Rick Fines performing with Jackson Delta

General admission tickets are $30 plus fees. Assigned cabaret-style table seating is $40 plus fees.

Tickets are available in person at the box office (140 Charlotte St., Peterborough), by phone at 705-749-1146, or online at tickets.markethall.org. Tickets are also available (cash only) at Moondance (425 George St. N., Peterborough, 705-742-9425).