August often seems to be the most peculiar month for the Peterborough Theatre Guild, but it’s also often the most interesting. Perhaps because producing the last of its “off season” shows before the main season begins gives the Guild room to take risks and stage edgier productions.

Downtown Peterborough was buzzing for the fifth annual Hootenanny on Hunter Street last Saturday, August 8th. kawarthaNOW photographer Linda McIlwain was there to document the self-described “Street Festival for Everyone”.

Vocal country music? Country a capella? Beatbox barbershop country? However you want to label the group’s music, Home Free is one of the most unusual success stories in recent music history and brings its unique style of music to Peterborough Musicfest on Wednesday, August 12th at 8 p.m.

Music documentaries: when they’re good can be transcendently powerful experiences (see Gimme Shelter, Searching For Sugarman, No Direction Home), but when a documentary is bad — and unfortunately most are — it can tarnish a piece of gold or even dull the legacy of whatever it alleges to be celebrating.

Revolving exhibition of gallery artists at Christensen Fine Art

Peer and Lori Christensen have good eyes for appealing artwork ranging from classical landscapes to pieces with some flair and contemporary risk-taking.

The daughter of diplomats, Jane Bow grew up in Canada, in the U.S., in fascist Spain, in England and in communist Czechoslovakia. The French and British schools she attended could have come out of a Charles Dickens novel and her teenage holidays were spent behind the Iron Curtain. This background has given her insights that inform her history-based fiction.

Sarah “Sass” Jordan may be best known to some from her five-year stint as a judge on Canadian Idol, but did you know she once unknowingly auditioned as the lead singer for Van Halen and was rumoured as a possible replacement for Aerosmith’s lead singer Steven Tyler?

Are you ready for the unsexiest sexual farce ever produced? Globus Theatre continues its summer season with Michael G. Wilmot’s No Tell Motel at the Lakeview Arts Barn in Bobcageyon. A good-natured sex comedy — despite having absolutely any sex — No Tell Motel is a true crowd pleaser where everybody seems to be in the wrong room and infidelity hasn’t ever been funnier.

The music of singer-songwriter legend Neil Diamond is infectious. I still remember the scene in the 1996 movie Beautiful Girls, where Timothy Hutton plays the piano while leading the bar in a drunken rendition of the song “Sweet Caroline”.

This is one of the many Neil Diamond tunes you can sing along to at Peterborough Musicfest when Nearly Neil performs on Wednesday, August 8th at 8 p.m.