WSCA 106.1 FM’s 50 MOST PLAYED 2010 METAL & HARD ROCK ALBUMS

1. Shredding The Envelope - The Call Of The Flames
2. Ratt - Infestation
3. Snew - We Do What We Want
4. W.A.S.P. - Babylon
5. White Wizzard - Over The Top
6. Enforcer - Diamonds
7. Ihsahn - After
8. Gamma Ray - To The Metal
9. Charred Walls Of The Damned - s/t
10. Accept - Blood Of The Nations
11. Skull Fist - Heavier Than Metal
12. Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier
13. Overkill - Ironbound
14. Murderdolls - Women & Children Last
15. Brainstorm - Memorial Roots
16. Bruce Kulick - BK3
17. Holy Grail - Crisis In Utopia
18. Armour - Armour
19. Gallows End - Nemesis Divine
20. Tod Howarth - Opposite Gods
21. Icarus Witch - Draw Down The Moon
22. Raven - Walk Through Fire
23. Barren Earth - Curse Of The Red River
24. Unleashed - As Yggdrasil Trembles
25. Circle II Circle - Consequence Of Power
26. Megadeth - Rust In Peace Live
27. Grave Digger - The Clans Will Rise Again
28. Witchgrave - The Devil’s Night
29. Heidevolk - Uit Oude Grond
30. Heathen - The Evolution Of Chaos
31. Paradox - Riot Squad
32. Texas Hippie Coalition - Rollin’
33. The Sacrificed - 2012
34. Lethal Saint - s/t
35. Armored Saint - La Raza
36. King Diamond - Voodoo (reissue)
37. Lordi - Babez For Breakfast
38. Fozzy - Chasing The Grail
39. Blind Guardian - At The Edge Of Time
40. Darkthrone - Circle The Wagons
41. Immolation - Majesty & Decay
42. Judas Priest - British Steel (reissue)
43. Thulcandra - Fallen Angel’s Dominion
44. King Of Asgard - Fi’mbulvintr
45. Masterplan - Time To Be King
46. Meliah Rage - Masquerade
47. Rhapsody Of Fire - The Frozen Tears Of Angels
48. Fates Warning - Parallels (reissue)
49. Dream Evil - In The Night
50. Charlotte - Medusa Groove

  
Dio was WSCA’s most played artist in 2010. The most played catalog albums included W.A.S.P. - s/t & The Last Command, Lizzy Borden - Love You To Pieces & Visual Lies, Vectom - Speed Revolution, Tyr - By The Light Of The Northern Star, Dio - The Last In Line & Holy Diver, Ratt - s/t ep & Out Of The Cellar, Swashbuckle - Back To The Noose, Thrash Metal Warriors compilation, Dokken - Back For The Attack.

 
WSCA 106.1 FM’s TOP 10 MOST PLAYED 2010 ALBUMS (all genres) 

1. Shredding The Envelope - The Call Of The Flames
2. Ratt - Infestation
3. Snew - We Do What We Want
4. Jeff Beck - Emotion & Commotion
5. W.A.S.P. - Babylon
6. White Wizzard - Over The Top
7. Neil Young - Le Noise
8. Dave Rave - Live With What You Know
9. Enforcer - Diamonds
10. Ihsahn - After

 
  
*Black Night Meditations (hosted by Mark Pruett) - Tuesdays 10pm-2am e.s.t. - Black, Death, Thrash, Power, Shred, Folk, Prog, Traditional - www.blacknightmeditations.com
*Turn It Up (hosted by Jim Alvino) - Saturdays 6pm-8pm e.s.t. - New & Classic Hard Rock & Heavy Metal - www.facebook.com/pages/TURN-IT-UP-RADIO-SHOW/176927815378?ref=ts
 

 photo by Mark Pruett

Mark Pruett - Metal Director
Black Night Meditations
WSCA 106.1 FM
909 Islington Street
Portsmouth, NH 03801 U.S.A.
ph-603.430.9722 fx-603.430.9822

Podcasts: blacknightmeditations.com

Listen online live @ wscafm.org/listen

Click here for BNM playlists!

 BLACK NIGHT MEDITATIONS
A heathenish foray along the shining path.
Aural ruminations of Black, Death, Speed, Thrash, Doom,
Shred, Folk, Power, Prog & Traditional Metal. 

Tuesday evenings: 10pm ~ 2am e.s.t.

Of course, if you ask Jean about the success of the Pledge Drive she will minimize her role and give credit to everyone else, but we all know how much work she did.
 

He lives with fellow NH Making Waves producer Amy Antonucci on their homestead with a cat, six chickens, countless honey bees, and soon, two Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats. Together Steve and Amy have just produced their 315th weekly public affairs program on WSCA.

Steve is our on-call resource for supporting all computer-related efforts as WSCA, and mentions that he is also available for a reasonable consulting fee to meet any of someone’s personal computing needs.

Like WSCA, they enjoying teaming up with local community organizations with their programming.  In the past they have worked with the Star Island Corporation, Historic New England, and Strawberry Banke in collaborating to provide innovative historical based theater.  When touring they like to visit various assisted living facilities, libraries and town halls in rural areas where people may not get much exposure to theatre. 

People can look forward to an eclectic line up for their current season.  For the 3rd year running, Vaudevillian show “Phyzgig” will be having a run at Pontine until New Year’s.  This will be  followed by a two person version of “Our Town,” as well as a one man show of “Moby Dick” from NYC’s Concrete Temple Theater. In the Spring they will be premiering there original adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “House of the Seven Gables.” 

 Please visit  www.pontine.org for more information and also tune in to my show Stage Door to get your weekly dose of performing arts.

On November 20th 2010 I interviewed Greg Gathers and Marguerite Matthews, the Co-Directors of Pontine Theater for my show “Stage Door.”  Below, you will find an transcript excerpt from the interview:

 April: Could you tell us a little more about that upcoming show “A Poet’s Christmas?”

 Greg:  Sure, we are actually going to be doing a group of Christmas poems. We are going to be doing a version of Clemet Moore’s “’Twas Night Before Christmas” as a Toy Theater production with little cut out figures from a 1904 illustrated version by William Wallace Denslow and then we are doing this piece you just heard (The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t) and we are also going to do Dylan Thomas’s a “Child’s Christmas in Wales.”  And in addition to our group of pieces we also have Angelynne Hinson who you probably know from the radio station here, a wonderful soprano who is going to do holiday music in between the pieces.

 April: Those of you who enjoy the holidays and spending time with your family sounds like a really great family outing too as opposed to just staying inside and watching a holiday movie or something. This sounds like something really special.

 Greg: Absolutely and there is going to be eggnog, cookies and a little Christmas party afterwords.

 April:  Oh well, you can’t miss that. Eggnogg? and cookies? and singing? and live poetry? And something of this caliber? That’s great.

 Marguerite:  And we’re doing, as Greg mentioned, Toy Theater which is a Victorian parlor entertainment that has become popular among some people who do Avant Garde theater like what Pontine does. We also do unconventional kind of stagings. So there is a table top proscenium stage and there’s a little curtain, the whole set is in miniature.

Both Clement Moore’s “’Twas the night before Christmas” as well as the poem we just did today “The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t” features a whole cast of really really colorful characters and for “The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t” Greg did all of the drawings himself and it’s all cartoon characters really brightly colored that act out all of these scenes.

 April: That sounds so fun!

 Greg: I wish I could show you some, but I guess you’ll have to come.

 April: Right, exactly its all the more reason to go see it live.

Marguerite:  We are also going to be performing our Christmas show on tour all over New England. Our first performance will be on Sunday the 28th right after Thanksgiving at the Hill Public Library in Hill, New Hampshire.  And then we go all the way through to Christmas Eve.

 April: Wow, so all of those pieces like the Ogden Nash piece and the Dylan Thomas piece and everything else and you’re taking on the road?

 Marguerite:  That’s right. We have a grant from a foundation called the Burn Foundation which is located in Etna, New Hampshire and they are underwriting our tour. We will be in Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. We’re doing about 25 different bookings.

 April: It sounds so extensive, but it must be great to share this with so many people. I always think that people put so much time, effort and energy into staging a production or even something like this with all kinds of different elements to just perform it like 3 times is still great but to be able to expose it to so many other people must be very satisfying.

 Marguerite: We feel that way too.  It’s wonderful to be able to get out and travel around New England. We are able to get to rural areas and little towns.  We perform mostly in libraries and town halls and its just the best way to spend a day.

 Greg: It really is. And quite a few of the performances are going to be seen by seniors in assisted living communities, retirement communities and nursing homes.  We’re really trying to take this out to people who really can’t get out too see live theater.

Marguerite: We’ll also be performing just “The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t” as a part of Strawberry Banke’s candlelight stroll on the first and third weekend of their run.   In their second weekend we will be performing it in our space so we won’t be performing it that weekend.

 April: I was also wondering how Pontine Theater all started?

 Greg: Actually, Marguerite is the founder. And it was founded in 1977.

 It was actually was founded as a mime troupe after Marguerite studied with a French mime named Étienne Decroux in Paris for a few years.

For quite a few years the theater’s work was silent and we still use the physical acting training that the company was founded on as the basis for our work and it’s really where we all got the focus on actor centered theater where the actors all create the aspects of the production.  So, Marguerite and I are self-directed and we write our own scripts when there are original scripts. I create all of our costumes, sets and props and so forth. So, that’s kind of how we have developed over the years as a true ensemble theater where the actors are the creative arts behind it and through both inclination and necessity we’ve also developed as both a resident theater and a touring company at the same time which is an unusual hybrid. We have our permanent home at the West End Studio Theater but every season we usually do 30-40 performances and educational programs on the road all over New England.

 Marguerite: We moved to the West End Studio Theater 6 years ago and we share that space with New Hampshire Theatre Project. Through the years we have had 3 different spaces. The first space was above what was then Teddy’s Lunch then became Café Brioche and now is Breaking New Grounds. And from 1977-1987 we had our Market Square Studio up there.

Then we were at the McDonough Street Studios on McDonough Street, we were there for about 12 years and then we had the opportunity to move over to right next door to you over at 959 Islington Street, and you are at 909 Islington Street right?

 April: Right, 909 Islington. It’s good part of town.

 Marguerite: It is.  It’s a wonderful part of town.  We rent the space with New Hampshire Theatre Project we each have our own offices there.

 Greg:  Most of our work is based in New Hampshire and New England history and literature and right now we’re working on another piece we will premier this spring in May which is our original adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables.”

 April: With New Hampshire and New England history there is a lot material there.  Was there a specific person or historical event that really inspired you to go into historical theater?

 Marguerite: Definitely. It was Sarah Orne Jewett.  For years I lived in a little school house in South Berwick, Maine which is where Sarah Orne Jewett lived.  Her home was preserved by Historic New England as a house museum so you can go and visit there. She had such a presence in South Berwick, she died in 1909 and I was living there in the 1970s and early ‘80s and people still have wonderful stories about her.

There was a sense of her connection to the community.  She did a lot of writing about the landscape there so that there was a sense of poeticism about the whole way South Berwick looked and felt because of the way Sarah Orne Jewett described it. I became addicted to her writing, it was very beautiful and we decided to bring some of her work to the stage and that’s when we began working with history plays but also working with words because before that we were doing all silent theater. So, it was definitely though Sarah Orne Jewett that we came to this work.

 April: I’m just thinking about her life and the historical richness of this area and I think it’s so great that you are doing historical based theater because these stories won’t get lost in history and you are keeping the stories of these persons lives alive thanks to you.

It seems like some of your shows are educational too, and it seems like people would be learning things without realizing they’re learning.

 Marguerite: That’s certainly an intension and we really like to do plays that are connected to places.  So if you have seen one of our Sarah Orne Jewett plays, you can go to South Berwick, you can go to Vaughn Woods, you can go to her house, you can go to the Hamilton House because all of that is available to really experience first-hand as well as reading read her book.  So to our mind it opens up a whole avenue to new ideas and exciting experiences that you can have with all of the richness we have around us

 Greg: One thing that Marguerite and I really enjoy too is that it connects us to other cultural originations in the area like when we had done our Jewett pieces. We had done collaborations with Historic New England who operate the Jewett House.  Last spring we did a piece about the Isles of Shoals and we actually worked with ISHRA(Isle of Shoals Historical and Research  Association) and Star Island Corporation to take our production out to be performed out at the Oceanic at Star Island  and we’d been also been touring it this fall with a grant from ISHRA. We did a piece about “Story of a Bad Boy,” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich whose house is in Strawberry Banke and did collaborative projects around that with Strawberry Banke. So, it’s a really nice way to connecting our work to the larger community and hooking up with other organizations beyond arts organizations.

 April:  Besides “A Poets Christmas” can you tell us more about your current season that is going on right now at Pontine?

 Greg:  Yes.  We are going to be doing a production of “Our Town”

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play and actually it’s a 2 person version which Marguerite and I will play all the parts with help of a cast of puppets and some masks.  Then we have Concrete Temple Theater coming from NYC with a piece called “The Whale” which is a one man adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

 April: I’ve actually read about that show somewhere.

Marguerite:  It’s beautiful.

 Greg:  The lead actor, among other things, a dancer.  There’s movement and beautiful props in it too.

 Marguerite: We heard he has to cover his body in Vaseline in order to wiggle all over the floor, since he turns into the whale during the production. They asked me before they checked my booking to make sure our floor was alright with Vaseline on it so I had to get a jar of Vaseline and rub it all over our theater’s floor, just to make sure. And everything’s okay and we are good to go.

 Greg:  Then as I mentioned we are going to close our season with our production of “The House of the Seven Gables.”

Marguerite:  In addition to our own series, we are doing for the 3rd year in a row Phyzgig South.  Phyzigig started about a decade ago up in Portland, Maine and it’s all new vaudeville performers like jugglers, acrobats and clowns. They are going to be performing in our space every day from the day after Christmas through New Year’s Eve day.  Each performance will be at 2pm and there will be a different line up of performers for each of the shows.  There will be 3-4 performers for each production. So, when they are not performing in Portland, a group of them will come and perform in our space

 April: That sounds like a great thing to go see during holiday break.

Marguerite:  It is. Also, it’s for family audiences too. We’ve had really good response for it.

 April: I have just one more question for both of you.  I know it’s probably hard to choose, but I was wondering what your favorite show you’ve done or memorable show you’ve done through Pontine?

 Greg:  Oh the favorite one is always the one we are working on.

 Marguerite:  It’s like children you know, we love them all.

 Greg:  There are some in our repertoire that we will never perform again because we were so young when we made it that physically we aren’t capable of doing it anymore.

 Marguerite: We had one piece that was a Commedia dell’arte piece that had tons of backstage changes and costumes and we got where we just couldn’t do it anymore.

 Greg: (Laughing) It gave ourselves heart attacks.

Marguerite:  We got to a point where the audience was concerned about our safety because we were so out of breath.

 April:  I just want to thank you both for being on my show “Stage Door” today.  It was great having both of you here.  I was thoroughly entertained.  Call or check out their website pontine.org for information about any of there shows. I mean, that’s how I found out about you and also from hearing about the theater around town as well.  Since your theater has been around for so long, it’s like you have a stamp on this town.

 Marguerite:  This is our 33rd season.

 April:  It’s very inspiring to see you guys have this kind of longevity.  It’s wonderful.  I think it says something about your character to have this much passion about theater and have lasted this long.  So, thank you Marguerite and Greg.

 Marguerite: Thank you April, we enjoyed being here.

 Greg: Thank you.