This year’s BCMFest Nightcap concert features the “Boston Celtic All-Stars” – Clockwise from top left, Katie McNally, Jenna Moynihan, Shannon Heaton, Natasha Sheehy, Christine Morrison, Rebecca McGowan, Janine Randall, and Bethany Waickman.

For two decades, BCMFest (Boston Celtic Music Fest) has spotlighted some of the Greater Boston area’s best musicians, singers, and dancers in the Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton, and other Celtic and Celtic-related traditions. The all-ages festival will celebrate its 20th year with four days of concerts, sessions, and other special events from Jan. 12 through Jan. 15.

Among BCMFest 2023’s highlights will be a concert featuring the “Boston Celtic All-Stars,” including Katie McNally, Jenna Moynihan, Shannon Heaton, Natasha Sheehy, Bethany Waickman, Janine Randall, Rebecca McGowan, and Christine Morrison – all of whom have performed at the festival over the years. 

Other BCMFest favorites coming to the 20th anniversary bash will be Matt & Shannon Heaton; Copley Street; Katie McNally & Friends; Jenna Moynihan; Scottish Fish; Molly Pinto Madigan; the Boston Scottish Fiddle Orchestra; Elizabeth & Ben Anderson; Fódhla; Leland Martin & Friends; Casey Murray & Molly Tucker; the Medford All-Star Ceili Band; Maura Shawn Scanlin & Friends; David Healy, Nathan Gourley and Eamon Sefton; and the Carroll Sisters Trio. 

Also confirmed for BCMFest 2023 are: James Kelly & Ryan Douglas; Sarah Collins & Jonathan Vocke; Kate Gregory & Brendan Hearn; Loud Weather; David McKindley-Ward; Adam Hendey with Eamon Sefton and Simon Lace; and the duo Mrs. Wilberforce.

BCMFest will be centered around Club Passim in Harvard Square (47 Palmer Street), with the First Round and Roots & Branches evening concerts on, respectively, Jan. 12 and 13 and a marathon “Dayfest” on Jan. 14, as well as The BCMFest Brunch on Jan. 15. The Sinclair (52 Church Street) will be the venue for the Jan. 14 BCMFest Nightcap with the Boston Celtic All-Stars.  

Also on the schedule is BCMFest’s perennially popular Celtic dance party, The Boston Urban Ceilidh, on Jan. 13 at The Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, and participatory sessions at the Cambridge First Parish Church on Jan. 14.

Flute/whistle player and vocalist Shannon Heaton, who co-founded the festival with fiddler Laura Cortese, recently recalled how she and her husband Matt moved to Boston in 2001 and quickly made themselves at home among the various music sessions around town. But while being in an Irish music “bubble” was “glorious,” she said, “I also loved hanging with Laura and other non-Irish players when we’d end up at parties and concerts.”

So when she and Cortese happened to bump into one another in Davis Square one afternoon in 2003, they wound up hatching an idea to bring the area’s various Celtic music and dance communities together. 

“We thought about creating a weekend where we’d all deliberately intersect and collaborate. We’d invite all the Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton musicians. And we’d pull in dancers and singers, too, since back then there wasn’t as much footwork or singing at the sessions,” said Heaton. “Boom: BCMFest.”

In addition to recruiting their musician friends and acquaintances to perform at that first festival, Heaton and Cortese also enlisted the aid of venues like Club Passim, The Burren, and the Canadian American Club to provide performance and participation space. The results were everything that the pair had envisioned, and more.

“I loved seeing and hearing everybody all mixed together, all taking turns to play and listen, all supporting one another,” said Heaton. “And there were some acts that had really taken on our invitation to ‘experiment, to try something new.’ We got people collaborating, just by putting all the different trad communities together in one space. Different styles, different ages. It felt way bigger than just the two of us organizing some weird concert.”

McNally, who has taken the lead in organizing the Boston Celtic All-Stars ensemble, said her vision for the Nightcap concert was inspired by “the BCMFest principles and goals that have been part of the festival from the beginning, especially the idea of uniting the Celtic music communities in the Boston area. So I wanted to be sure that the concert had the Scottish, Irish, and Cape Breton components, and keep everything in balance, including music and dance.”

She also thought about those “who have represented the festival over the years – people from different generations coming together, which is another important value of the festival,” citing Heaton as well as Randall, “who has been part of the Cape Breton vanguard in Boston for years, and has such a strong connection to traditional music.” Moynihan’s inventive Scots-style fiddling represents new directions in Celtic music, McNally added, while Sheehy is a fine exemplar of the traditional Irish accordion sound. McNally said featuring dance traditions in the Nightcap concert also was a must, hence the inclusion of stalwarts McGowan (Irish) and Morrison (Cape Breton/Scottish).

McNally, who was 13 when BCMFest started, has appeared in almost every edition of the festival since then. She’s grateful for the positive impact it had on her as a young musician who had only been playing for a few years when she first performed there. 

“I found BCMFest so fun and welcoming, and I just remember learning lots of lessons about traditional music and how it could be played and presented. There were special events like the Boston Urban Ceilidh, which is so fun, energetic, and bright, and then creative, wacky bands like Tradbot. It was also where I learned reverence for older musicians who were rooted in the tradition; BCMFest was unique in that way, because not a lot of festivals made that kind of room for traditional players.”

The blending of generations, as well as “tradition bearers” and more modern-influenced performers, continues to be a hallmark of BCMFest, said Heaton. 

“I love the huge age span. I love that there are acts that have come out of local colleges who play really well and maybe are newer to traditional music; and there are also passionate amateurs and community music schools who also bring such beauty to the weekend.”

BCMFest is a program of Passim, a Cambridge-based non-profit that supports a vibrant music community through Club Passim, music school, artist grants and outreach initiatives. 

Updates, ticket information, performer bios and other festival details will be available at passim.org/bcmfest.

CAMBRIDGE — Club Passim’s Boston Celtic Music Festival returns for a 20th year Jan. 12-15 after two years of virtual performances.

Fans can enjoy more than 30 Celtic concerts, workshops, songs, and dance sessions during the festival. Events take place at Club Passim, The Sinclair, the First Parish Church in Harvard Square, and the Crystal Ballroom at Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.

Don’t miss the Boston Urban Ceilidh on Jan. 13, featuring instructional and participatory dances for people of all ages — no experience needed — and showcasing Irish, Cape Breton, and Scottish traditions (starts at 7:30 p.m.; $20 per person).

Dayfest on Jan. 14 offers concerts and workshops that focus on the different music styles, instruments, and techniques used in Celtic performances, while Nightcap Finale features a talented all-women, all-star ensemble ($28 per person for Dayfest, $28 for Nightcap Finale).

Wrap up the four-day event with Brunch and Tunes on Jan. 15, from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; no tickets required. Go to www.passim.org/bcmfest for more details.

Beacon Capital Partners has acquired a prominent office-and-retail building in Cambridge’s Harvard Square for $81 million. The property is in a high-visibility location but has been hit with a series of retail closures.

We’re in the final push to the holidays with Hanukkah starting Sunday and Christmas happening a week later. This stretch of year is busy with plan-making and gift-buying. But if you have some extra time on your hands, what better way to spend it than engaging with local arts? On Thursday, the MFA will host a celebration for the Jewish festival of lights. Elsewhere, there’s a poetry stroll happening in Harvard Square and a few performances of a unique bilingual play. Whatever you’re in the mood for this weekend, we’ve got you covered.

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Harvard Poetry Stroll

Through Sunday, Jan. 1

This is the third annual Harvard Square Poetry Stroll, and this year, the self-guided tour offers up work about hope from local poets. Eighteen poems are displayed all across the square, including in front of the Democracy Center, Brattle Plaza and Otto Pizza. The full list of poem locations is available online. A wide range of poets, including Mckendy Fils-Aimé, William Tilleczek and Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, are featured in this year’s stroll.

A fast-casual Indian restaurant in Boston’s Seaport District is planning to open a second location.

According to an article from Eater Boston, Madras Dosa Co. is opening in Cambridge, moving into a space on Eliot Street in Harvard Square. The new spot will have a similar menu to the original on Boston Wharf Road, including customizable dosas with such possible options as cheese, potatoes, green chili, chicken, beef, lamb, dried fruit, eggs, cashews, and more.

Madras Dosa Co. first opened in the Seaport District in the summer of 2021; the Cambridge outlet hopes to open later this month or in January.

The address for the upcoming Madras Dosa Co. in Harvard Square is 22 Eliot Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138. The website for the original location can be found at https://madrasdosaco.com/

Nearly three years and millions of deaths later, polities across the globe are still wrestling with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. But if most of the world appears eager to hastily move on from the “after times” so as to get to a new “before” era — to remove masks, enjoy global sporting events, and find a balance between epidemic preparedness and normalcy — one country has been insistent on doing the exact opposite.

Meet China’s controversial “zero covid” policy, a set of stringent city-wide lockdowns, forced quarantines, and mass testing meant to keep the country’s infections as low as possible against a mandate-less domestic backdrop defined by low vaccination and herd immunity rates. The government’s commitment to minimizing cases of a disease that’s arguably on track to become endemic, particularly in its sometimes draconian application of restrictions, has left behind a smattering of tragic stories: a bus on its way to compulsive quarantine that crashed, killing 27; residents urged to remain inside buildings during earthquakes; ethnic minorities in border regions, already antagonized by the regime, who faced alleged food shortages; residents of locked-down cities who reported orders to adhere to protocol and stay inside even as a massive earthquake unfolded.

Raising blank sheets of white paper, about a dozen people gathered in Harvard Square’s Pit by the T station entrance Tuesday afternoon in solidarity with Chinese demonstrators protesting censorship and the country’s Covid-19 restrictions.

The demonstration follows a wave of protests across China against the country’s “Zero-Covid” policy after an apartment fire killed 10 people on Nov. 24. The fire occurred in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, where strict Covid-19 lockdowns have confined residents to their homes for several months.

Tuesday’s demonstrators raised blank white sheets of paper to protest China’s crackdown on free speech and honor the country’s blank paper protests.

Late last month, Chinese citizens took up a creative means of protest over the nation’s strict “zero-COVID” policy. In a place with little tolerance for large public demonstrations, protesters have been holding up blank pieces of paper. Their ingenuity inspired a local artist Yolanda He Yang to stage a public art demonstration to subtly communicate their dissent.

Yang was born and raised in mainland China and watching the protests from afar gave her a visceral feeling. Every piece of skin and muscle in her body was jittery upon viewing images from home. And when asked about the protests, she often felt like she couldn’t speak. “That’s when I realized that reading all of this news from my home was affecting me in a very intense way,” Yang explained.

Home | Business + Money

How Cambridge lost the World’s Only Curious George Store

The last page to this story got lost in the Covid pandemic

By Molly Farrar

Monday, December 12, 2022

The World’s Only Curious George Store opens in Harvard Square in April 2012. (Photo: Ron R. via Yelp)

Curious George’s long history in Cambridge came to a close quietly during the Covid pandemic, when a potentially reimagined, relocated store lost its licensing and closed its virtual doors.

“Today we say goodbye to The Curious George Store forever,” owner Astra Titus wrote April 28, 2021, on the store website and via social media. “I cannot quantify the grief that’s consumed me this past year as I have struggled to hold onto and breathe life into this entity that I love with every cell in my body.”

News about the store’s reprieve from closing during Harvard Square construction and an expected bricks-and-mortar move to Central Square were widely reported; coming at the height of Covid, this bad news wasn’t reported at all.

The site at John F. Kennedy and Brattle streets no longer features H.A. and Margret Reyes’ drawing of a precocious monkey and their book series’ iconic yellow and red; it’s been replaced by a quick-service Starbucks and its equally recognizable green-and-white mermaid logo.

The Starbucks that has replaced the bookstore at JFK and Brattle streets in Harvard Square. (Photo: Marc Levy)

What happened was explained by final owner Astra Titus by phone Nov. 24 from upstate New York.

The original store, Curious George Goes to WordsWorth, closed in 2011; Adam and Jamie Hirsch reopened The World’s Only Curious George Store at the same prominent 1 JFK St. address a year later.

When Equity One bought that and surrounding properties to build The Collection at Harvard Square, it looked like construction and an inevitable rent increase would mean another end to the iconic store. But Regency Centers took over the site, changing the name of the project to The Abbot, and there was new hope.

Curious George could stay at The Abbot under a long-term lease “favorable” to all, even keeping a ground-floor entrance somewhere else in the building, said Sam Stiebel, vice president of investments for Regency, in November 2017. “Given that one of our priorities for this project is maintaining a dynamic and interesting retail mix in Harvard Square, we knew it was imperative to find a way to maintain Curious George as a tenant,” Stiebel said.

The former bookstore space under construction in August 2020. (Photo: Marc Levy)

At the end of the initial two-year, construction-era lease, though, the Hirsches were barely breaking even, according to Titus, a consultant who took over operations in 2018 and eventually bought the store in May 2019.

Though she had no experience running a bookstore, she had an advisory board filled with people who did, she told Publishers Weekly.

Harsh truths

The end of the short-term, lower-cost lease meant she was “more or less effectively evicted” from the building as of June 30, 2019, Titus said. “It became three times what the rent originally was.”

She also felt blindsided with new information about the store apart from the rent costs. “I was not made aware of certain knowledge that the previous owners had,” she said, declined to be more specific.

A Regency Centers spokesperson said Tuesday that the company sees it differently. The company “worked side-by-side” with the store from 2017 to “even after Curious George’s ownership changed hands,” said Eric Davidson, senior manager of communications, emailing from Jacksonville, Florida offices. “Ultimately, we couldn’t reach a mutual agreement on the structure of a new lease … We parted on good terms, and sincerely wished them the best of luck with their future endeavors.”

“Coming up to market rents was discussed at some point, as the original Curious George lease had rent that was below market, but it was not the only reason a new deal wasn’t struck,” Davidson said. He declined to elaborate.

Leaving Harvard Square

After the rent went back to market price, Titus looked away from Harvard Square — 1.2 miles away to Central Square, where she imagined turning the store into a community space with interactive elements, with a focus less about toys than about learning and creativity.

“Although people really cared about the Curious George store, [Harvard Square] was all big-box. There weren’t business owners really to support me,” Titus said. That led to a change in thinking to “the building of the Black community and the focus on small business in Central Square.”

“Education is a key to attacking inequalities,” said Titus, who is Black. Her approach to the store was as “the means to which people can find this place of belonging and not feel like they can’t go to college or they can’t read because they’re in a disadvantaged situation.”

Spaces under consideration in Central Square included new retail square footage at the base of the Watermark Central tower where Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street meet and at the 907 Main boutique hotel, said Michael Monestime, executive director of the Central Square Business Improvement District at the time.

A risky ”labor of love”

Shoppers crowd the Curious George store in May 2015. (Photo: Samuel G. via Yelp)

But it’s not that Harvard Square was unwelcoming to Titus, said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, in a Dec. 2 call.

“The whole idea was lovely, but it was not sustainable,” Jillson said. “I said to [Titus], don’t walk away from this deal – run away. We knew how much community support was given to Adam, who had experience in the industry and she didn’t, and he still could not make it, even in a prime location.”

Jillson, who has watched over business in the square since 2006, knew that Curious George was crowded with customers who would “walk in, look around, take a photo and order the same thing on Amazon for less money without the inconvenience of walking around with a bag.” Unlike Amazon, the Hirsches were setting rates not just to pay the rent but to give employees a living wage.

“It’s my job to bring in commerce, but also to help them be successful,” said Jillson, who watched Internet competition remove bookstore after bookstore from the square over the years. She knew that what Titus was buying from the Hirsches in addition to the Curious George name was the store’s debt – and a struggle. “It was such a mistake. I knew this would never be successful. She didn’t have to do it, but it was a labor of love.”

Losing licensing

Curious George dolls for sale at the Harvard Square store in August 2017. (Photo: Todd M. via Yelp)

Titus’ plan to move to Central Square meant leaving the home of not just the Curious George store for almost 20 years, but the home of the series’ authors, H.A. and Margret Rey. German-born Jews, the couple met in Brazil, fled Paris before Nazi occupation with the Curious George manuscript and eventually settled in a home near the square in the 1960s.

The move didn’t pan out, as Covid arrived early in 2020. A drop in revenue meant the store missed hitting the dollar amount needed to retain the license; NBCUniversal, Curious George’s license holders, declined to let her renew for use of the name and iconography, Titus said. The store’s license was the only ever granted for Curious George imagery, and that deal was made when publisher Houghton Mifflin owned the rights.

“It is so close-fisted – like [NBCUniversal] will not let anyone touch that imagery,” Titus said. “I wasn’t able to pay the licensing fee and I wasn’t bringing them any revenue, and so it was an opportune time for them just to finally close the door on it.”

It was the most heartbreaking part, Titus said, because it is difficult and expensive to get a new license instead of inheriting one.

In the end

Astra Titus with a family member in an Aug. 19, 2019, post from the World’s Only Curious George Store page on Facebook.

Letting go of the store was hard, she said, but the licensing issues made it certain that the fight was over. She wrote her note to the community and put the failed business venture behind her.

Her interest had never been in the commerce. Upon starting work with the Hirsches, she immediately felt the connection between the character of Curious George – the store and the monkey – and learning.

“Curious George showed us in the best way possible that you can belong anywhere, and that it’s okay if you make mistakes and it’s okay if you’re naughty or whatever,” she said, “because in the end, you’re still loved and you’re still worth everything to someone.”