Happy New Year!

After years of think­ing about it, I finally checked out Boston’s First Night fes­tiv­i­ties. What a fan­tas­tic array of arts and cul­ture events to attend, all within walk­ing dis­tance of one another! Here are some notes:

The Post-Meridian Radio Play­ers
The two radio dra­mas per­formed by this Somerville-based the­atre troupe were awe­some! The act­ing was excel­lent and the tech­ni­cal backup (a com­bi­na­tion of live foley and pre-recorded effects) was flaw­less. The first per­for­mance, “Count­down to Chaos!” is a mod­ern mash-up of 1930’s and 40’s sci­ence fic­tion. The sec­ond, “Chicken Heart,” is an orig­i­nal 1937 NBC radio pro­gram. Watch­ing a radio show live on stage—complete with fake com­mer­cials and campy humor—takes some adjust­ment, but it’s a great time. Thanks to Rhode for sug­gest­ing this one.

Light and Seri­ous Music for Organ
This AGO-spon­sored con­cert, held at the Arling­ton Street Church, fea­tured three per­form­ers at the helm of a very nice Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ. The first organ­ist, Brink Bush, per­formed the most tech­ni­cally com­plex pieces: Bach’s Pre­lude and Fugue in G Major and the pow­er­ful finale from Widor’s Sym­phony No. 6. He was fol­lowed by Fredrick Guza­sky, who appar­ently teaches piano at MIT. He pro­vided the “light” part of the con­cert, which included an arrange­ment of John Williams’s “Theme from Juras­sic Park.” Lois Toepp­ner con­cluded the show, and although I didn’t like any of her pieces (Mendelssohn?) I think I pre­ferred her style of play­ing. Frankly I was expect­ing some Vir­gil Fox moments, and there were none. These play­ers were sub­dued but quite competent.

Black Taxi
We arrived at this con­cert about two min­utes before its mid­night con­clu­sion, so I can hardly say much about the band (the pro­gram promised “woozy pic­tures of Ker­oua­cian mis­ad­ven­tures”). But I liked the way they built a musi­cal groove around the countdown!

Other thoughts about First Night: the events run like clock­work, start­ing and end­ing almost exactly as promised. That’s pretty impres­sive. But our attempts to get drinks in between events were less suc­cess­ful. There are sur­pris­ingly few bars within walk­ing dis­tance of the events, and a good major­ity of them were charg­ing astro­nom­i­cal cov­ers ($25?!) or com­pletely closed to the gen­eral pub­lic. If I do this again, I’m bring­ing a flask.