Laura Brereton
Singer-songwriter, music teacher, and arts administrator Laura Brereton has had her hands full lately. She’s been helping to manage and assist the OnStage Music Series at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Massachusetts. Brereton’s OnStage series are shows that take place with the audience on the stage with a band or singer-songwriter in a café style setting. With a capacity of 112, it makes for an evening of intimate music.
“The idea came from a woman named Susan Fairchild who is on the Chevalier Theatre commission, which is the group of people who run the theater,” Brereton said. “She and I have worked together in other capacities and she approached me with the idea and she and I developed it.”
Brererton’s roles include being the co-founder and program director for the OnStage Music Series. She also recently became the coordinator for rental events at the theatre. Her goal, for OnStage, each season, is to aim for a variety of music styles.
“This year we’re featuring Americana, folks, blues, Irish, bluegrass,” she said. “We try to get a bunch of diversity there, in genre.”
This Saturday, October 22, OnStage will feature Jess Klein and Gaelynn Lea. Klein is a national touring act who had started her music career in Boston in the late 1990s. Lea is an interesting artist from Minnesota and who won the most recent NPR Tiny Desk Contest out of 6,100 entries. Born with Brittle Bones Disease, she is small and sits on a motorized wheelchair and has had to learn to play her fiddle by holding it more like a cello.
“They’re on a national tour together,” Brereton explained.
On November 12, OnStage will take things back to the local music scene with a double CD Release Party for Boston’s Laura Vecchione and Western Massachusetts’s Pamela Means.
“Pamela does more of a gritty folk but she’s also a really great guitar player. She uses some jazz and blues into her music,” Brereton said. “Laura classifies herself as Americana, but I think she touches on a lot of different genres as well. She’s a powerhouse vocalist. But the common thread there is that they write a lot of music about social justice. They come at from slightly different angels and slightly different styles, but they have a common theme there.”
On January 21, OnStage will feature Boxcar Lillies, a trio of women who perform folk and Americana in three part harmonies. Newer member Susan Cattaneo has already been known in the Boston-Cambridge music scene. “They’re awesome,” Brererton said. “They’re folk and Americana.”
Virtuoso guitarist Shun Ng, along with his backing vocalists the Shunettes, will bring blues to the Medford theater. Winner of several Boston Music Awards for International Artist, Ng came into the OnStage program after the Medford organizers couldn’t schedule him for last year’s season. “We wanted to circle back around with him because we were so impressed with his sound,” Brereton said.
The day after St. Patrick’s Day, March 18th, the OnStage Series will feature a triple bill of Irish music. Laura Cortese solo will perform as a vocalist and fiddler. A trio called Fodhla (fo-lah) will feature a Medford, Massachusetts based musician. Third, Matt and Shannon Heaton will perform a set before all three acts come together at the end. Matt Heaton is known for his children’s shows. “He’s pretty versatile. He also does a lot of Irish and traditional music,” Brereton said. “His wife Shannon plays the flute and sings and he plays guitar and sings.”
Brereton has a couple more shows schedule, one for April and one for May, but she couldn’t discuss those acts with the press because contracts have yet to be signed. That makes up the OnStage program for this season. She won’t be booking any further acts for this year, as the theater is going through a transformation, needed changes so the facility will be able to provide more programming.
Shun Ng
“That’s still in the process of happening. We’re holding off on booking OnStage for next season for the moment,” she said.
Last year’s season was very successful. OnStage had presented eight shows, two family shows on Saturday mornings and six evening shows. Four evening shows sold out, one nearly sold out, and one was not as sold out. “We’re estimating we have about an 80 percent-ish sell out rate,” Brereton said.
Brereton and her husband Raleigh Green own Medford Music Studio, a studio in their home in Medford. She and her husband, in addition to playing out, teach guitar. She teaches singing and songwriting while her husband teaches music technology.
Brereton is also very active in her Medford arts community. She belongs to CACHE, Coalition For Arts Culture And A Healthy Economy in which she is a programming coordinator for annual events called Circle The Square in June, July, and August, a street festival in Medford. Brereton is also the music director for an outdoor arts festival in Medford at the end of September called Mystic River Celebration. For now, she’s focused on promoting her OnStage music series at the Chevalier Theatre. The OnStage shows are specifically marked OnStage among the theater’s events.
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