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Boston Globe
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Just like the North End, but in Lynn, Scopa offers Italian American classics
Calamari at Scopa. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff What to eat Fried calamari with a thick, crisp batter and hot cherry peppers in the mix, alongside a mayo-based dipping sauce (you can also request the house marinara). Big, juicy pork and beef meatballs served with marinara on their own or with pasta. Chicken Parmigiana on pasta tossed with the house sauce. You'll also find eggplant rollatini, chicken or veal piccata, orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, lobster risotto, and much more. What to drink The wine list is disappointingly dull, and in a region where craft beer is a thriving industry, not a single one appears here. Advertisement An exterior shot of Scopa in Lynn. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff The takeaway The 55-seat dining room, when full, is so noisy it's hard to hear above the din. But it has a lively, fun vibe with large parties and multi-generation diners. A covered outdoor patio with strings of lights overlooking the Saugus River is quieter with a pleasant view (except for some industrial buildings). Many of the Italian American classics are well done but in dishes with the house marinara, too generous with sauce. One night after an endless wait for pizza, we are told that the kitchen burned it and another is on the way. Then more wait and one arrives — too burned to eat. 'This is not how we run the place,' says Matthew Gateman later on the phone and I do think it was an anomaly. There wouldn't be so many people having a jolly time in the dining room if this were routine. 829 Boston St., Lynn. 339-231-7047. Appetizers and salads $5.95-$16.95; pasta $13.95-$22.95; entrees $19.95-$25.95 (seafood dishes are market price, about $30 to $32). Advertisement Sheryl Julian can be reached at
Boston Globe
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A professional puppeteer builds a world with its own set of rules
In 'Party Animals,' five friends try to throw a birthday party. It features original music by Boston composer Puppeteer Sarah Nolen will perform her show "Party Animals" on Boston Common July 5. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff 'I told him, 'I want to make a show that has hand puppets and rock 'n' roll. I want it to feel in the vein of ' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up One character wields a yo-yo, another wraps a gift. Both posed engineering problems for the puppet designer: How do you manipulate a poet and his yo-yo? She only has two hands. 'I'm cueing all my music with my foot,' she said. 'It's very much like a one-man band.' Advertisement Sarah Nolen demonstrates how she holds her puppets "The Cheerleaders" when performing. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Where to find her : Age : 38 Originally from : 'I grew up in the hippie cowboy town of Austin, Texas.' Lives in : Waltham Making a living : Puppets are Nolen's full-time job. In addition to her work at Puppet Showplace Theater, she designs and builds puppets for other productions and films, performs her own shows locally, and teaches. Advertisement In Sarah Nolen's Waltham studio, "everything's on wheels." Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Studio : The puppeteer lives in the loft of her Waltham Mills studio. 'I'll come down in the morning and be like, I need to make some breakfast,' she said, 'and then it'll be 11:30 a.m. and I'm in my robe hot gluing something.' Downstairs, 'Everything's on wheels,' she said. 'It's a rehearsal space. Sometimes it's molding and casting. Sometimes it's painting, sometimes it's sewing, sometimes it's woodworking.' Using L200 foam and pool noodles for the mane, puppeteer Sarah Nolen made 'Aslan' for a 2021 Boston College production of 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.' The large puppet calls for three puppeteers. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff How she started : In fourth grade, Nolen created a show about Rapunzel in her living room. 'Toilet paper was the hair,' she said. After college, she worked as a production assistant on reality shows ' What she makes : 'What don't I make?' Nolen said. 'With puppetry, you're building a world that is not human-centric. That world has its own rules, it has its own aesthetic, and it has its own needs. Whatever world that is, it's going to come with different starting points.' A wooden marionette is posed on Sarah Nolen's work table in her Waltham studio. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff How she works : 'You're learning on the job every time,' she said. 'There's always a surprise.' To make giant puppets for an Advice for artists : 'You never know when inspiration will come from,' Nolen said. 'Don't limit your palette of curiosity.' Advertisement Puppeteer Sarah Nolen poses with "Sammy." She made "Sammy" with assistance from puppet builder John Cody, for the 2021 movie 'Don't Look Up.' Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Boston Globe
16-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Fancy condos, BMWs, and Bulgari: Why international students are so valuable to Boston's economy
Their seemingly boundless spending materializes in flashy and unmissable ways — in the Maseratis students park along Commonwealth Avenue, the Balenciaga sneakers they wear to class, and at the tables of the poshest restaurants, including Yvonne's, Trade, and Contessa. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Perhaps nowhere is foreign students' influence more striking than the high-rise buildings in Downtown Crossing and Fenway, where families frequently purchase condos for children studying oceans away, and students rent top-dollar apartments in the city's swankiest buildings. Advertisement Now, as the White House moves to revoke some student visas and The Newbury Street outpost of designer jewelry brand Bulgari. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff To be sure, not Related : Advertisement It's not yet clear how many of those international students will return in the fall, as legal challenges against Trump's moves to restrict visas wind through the courts. But even if his mandates are reversed, they're hitting during 'high season' for student visa applications, said Tom Dretler, chief executive of the international student advising service Shorelight Education. 'This is like deciding you're going to stop all retail sales right before Thanksgiving and saying maybe you'll open it on Dec. 26,' Dretler said. 'At colleges, you can do four years' worth of damage in a month and a half.' The fallout is starting to emerge. Boutiques that retain Mandarin-speaking sales staff are waiting to gauge the drop-off in Chinese customers, and real estate brokers are watching to see how a plunge in foreign students could transform the housing market. That population has long accounted for a big slice of the city's condo market, dating back to Kuwaitis who came to Boston in the 1990s. Families from abroad typically buy ahead of a student's freshman year and sell after graduation at a profit. Many of the priciest condos in Boston are occupied by young adults from China and Saudi Arabia, said Brett Star, principal broker at Star Residential. Advertisement 'The number of times I listed something in Boston for sale, had someone from outside the country tour it on FaceTime for a student, and then saw an all-cash offer almost immediately is exceptional,' he said. 'You basically expected that.' In January, for example, an apartment at Millennium Place was vacated by a few international students abruptly. They had just moved out of the Downtown Crossing luxury condo building, where nothing sells for under a million, and left behind a small fortune's worth of stuff: guitars, designer clothes, three MacBooks, $1,000 worth of liquor, and in the bathtub, a pile of copies of a drinking board game named 'Wasted' that the residents had apparently produced, and then abandoned, like everything else in the apartment. That might be an extreme example, but Millennium Place on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing. Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff 'When you all of a sudden start to think about a force of individuals who fuel the housing market with no way to replace them, what happens?' DeRocker asked. 'Will there be a pullback in home values? Will there be a surplus in inventory?' Those worries have given way to uncertainty in neighborhoods like Allston, where foreign residents have reshaped the streetscape. Over the past decade, Advertisement 'They would both have a lot less customers and revenue if these mandates go into effect,' he said. The same goes for luxury retail. Many foreign students purchase Dior saddle bags and Le Labo perfume in Boston because the products are more affordable in the US compared to the same goods back home, said one Boston-based luxury retail executive, who was not authorized to share his name by his employer. Boutiques rely on that steady flow of sales year after year. 'A good portion of the stability in luxury retail in Boston is sustained with the consistency of the student population,' the executive said. 'It's like the tide. You know it's going to come in at this time, and go out at this time. If we were to start to see a cap on how many international students are coming from any university, that is going to have severe repercussions.' Employee Cristian Petre detailed tires on a Porsche for sale at the Boston Foreign Motors lot in Allston. David L. Ryan/ Boston Globe Staff For Riccardo Dallai Jr., foreign-born students are a good chunk of the customer base at Riccardi, the fashion boutique he owns on Newbury Street offering Comme des Garçons sneakers, Moncler bomber jackets, and Loewe hoodies. At least once a week, he said, a Turkish master's student browses his selection in search of new styles, one of many international students who frequent the shop. Advertisement 'Hopefully, they come back to school next year,' Dallai said. 'That is the main wild card.' At Boston Foreign Motors in Allston, business also follows the academic calendar, said owner Milad Farahani, thanks largely to international students. For 20 years, he has watched students — especially from Malaysia — refer him from friend to friend, creating a never-ending line of clients looking for BMWs, Mercedes, and Land Rovers. They sell cars back to him in May, and he flips them to a new buyer come fall. Offers are typically all-cash, even for the six-figure vehicles. Related : 'We do think it could affect things to not have those people come into the country or into Boston,' Farahani said. The slowdown may already be here. Leonardo Solís, owner of the International Student Guest House, a short-term rental service that caters to foreign students, once owned seven apartment buildings in Back Bay and a transportation company, mostly catering to foreign students. At his peak, he hosted 100 students a year. But those numbers began to dwindle during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have fallen again this year. Today, his client list from abroad is closer to five. 'Boston has always been a beacon for international students with money,' Solis said. 'But that wealthy population of international students just doesn't seem to be coming as they used to, and I don't know if they are ever going to come back.' Leonardo Solís checked the mail at International Guest House on Beacon Street in the Back Bay. David L. Ryan/ Boston Globe Staff Take Big Night Live. Ed Kane, co-owner of Big Night Entertainment, thought it would be a slam dunk when he booked Alan Walker for a show. The Norwegian DJ had filled stadiums in China and India during a record-breaking 2024 world tour, and foreign students from those very countries are the lifeblood of nightclubs in Boston, snagging tables and bottle service. Advertisement But Walker's May 30 show at the 1,500-person venue didn't even sell out, Kane said. A fifth of the general admission tickets went unsold; a few tables stayed empty. Kane said he saw it coming. 'I feel like the international market is exactly where I thought it was, which is not great right now,' said Kane, who also operates The Grand, Memoire, and Scorpion Bar. 'It's been coming for 12 to 18 months, and here it is.' Andrew Brinker of the Globe staff contributed to this story. Diti Kohli can be reached at
Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Artists turn the tables on healthcare cuts: ‘Where Does It Hurt?' they ask medical staff
Advertisement A doctor who sat for a portrait agreed to share what he wrote on the intake form for "Where Does It Hurt?", a performance and exhibition by artist Mary Lacy and co-creator Hugo Hernandez. (Pat Greenhouse/ The Boston Globe Staff) Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Lacy and collaborator Hugo Hernandez launched 'Where Does It Hurt?' in Los Angeles in March, where they had about 100 sitters. In Boston, their second stop, they've had closer to 400. 'Boston is fired up right now,' Lacy said. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up This summer, they hope to visit Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, and Cleveland facilities in the fall. Lacy explores the healthcare system's toll on its personnel, and more. 'Why does it matter that it's a human in front of a patient?' she asked. 'On a spectrum of artists to AI, where is the doctor?' Mary Lacy at her easel in Joslin Park. "Where Does It Hurt?" takes place inside a curtained area in Joslin Park. (Pat Greenhouse/ The Boston Globe Staff) Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Where to find her : Age : 34 Originally from: Jericho, Vermont Lives in : Belchertown Making a living: Lacy's work as a Advertisement How she started: In 2023, she went to a conference of artists and medical professionals. At the end, one participant raised his hand. ''This weekend was amazing,' he said. 'But I have 15 minutes with my patients Monday morning. How do I apply any of this?' And the room exploded,' Lacy said. 'To me, as an artist, that's a prompt. My profession is to build bridges between silos. That was a call-to-action moment.' Pencil shavings are collected in front of Mary Lacy's easel during the performance project 'Where Does it Hurt?' in May. (Pat Greenhouse/ The Boston Globe Staff) Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff What she makes: 'Conversations,' Lacy said. One doctor told her that despite the fear and stress during COVID, 'she felt seen – all the work they do,' Lacy said. 'And she said, 'It has to get better after this. If this doesn't do it, nothing will.' But she said it's only gotten worse.' Then there are the NIH cuts. 'It's not just researchers that are writing about it,' the artist said. 'Doctors are writing about how much they need researchers.' Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center groundskeeper Nakeo Murray sits for a portrait by artist Mary Lacy. (Pat Greenhouse/ The Boston Globe Staff) Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff How she works: 'Where Does It Hurt?' started with deep reading, meetings, and emails. Then came the performance: 'From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every single day I have 15-minute appointments. Everyone books in advance. They're given a reminder email and asked to show up a few minutes early,', Lacy said, to fill out the intake form. 'When they enter the exam room I start the clock.' Advice for artists: ' Trusting myself as an artist, what I see, what I believe, and what I have to say is where my power is and where my best work comes from,' Lacy said. Also, she counseled: Collaborate. Hernandez provides strategy; she makes the artwork. 'Where Does It Hurt,' she said, 'is the creative brain of two people.' Advertisement "Where Does It Hurt?" co-creator Hugo Hernandez makes an appointment for a sitting with Dr. Margot Yopes in Joslin Park, in late May. (Pat Greenhouse/ The Boston Globe Staff) Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A mini megachurch is slowly taking over the Liberty Tree Mall
People mingled outside Netcast. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff No one ever guesses it's a church, let alone a church that now fills a huge chunk of the innards of the mall, hosting 1,000 people during two services on a typical Sunday. Its membership is growing so rapidly that Netcast recently leased a third storefront to create overflow seating for people who couldn't fit into the main church. If you find it weird for a booming 'mini' megachurch to be located in a mall across from an arcade that just has claw machines, Matt Chewning, the church's founder and lead pastor, would agree with you. But he would also tell you it's working. Advertisement 'It's been amazing to see people rolling into Marshalls to return something and suddenly finding themselves checking out our church,' he said. Others find their way into the coffee shop, asking about what's going on. 'It happens every week. A large part of our church has simply stumbled in.' Netcast — think casting a net, a reference to a story from the Gospel of Matthew — has been around since 2010, when Chewning, a former college basketball player, started preaching out of his Beverly home. Netcast is a Christian church, but unaffiliated with any denomination, and intentionally laid-back. This isn't the kind of church where people show up in their 'Sunday best'; Chewning is fond of preaching in a T-shirt and sneakers. Advertisement Pastor Matt Chewning delivered his sermon on a recent Sunday. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Chewning first had the idea to move his church into the mall when he walked out of the AMC one day in 2018, noticed a store with the ridiculous name 'Kids 4 Less,' and kind of joked to himself that they'd let anyone in there. At the time, Netcast was searching hard for a place to move the church, after a long run at Briscoe Middle School in Beverly, which began in 2012. When the middle school moved into an And why not the the opposite of claustrophobia, you can find it quickly on the walk down the Olympic-length walled-in corridor that leads to Kohl's. That's because the mall is structured around big box retailers such as Target, Best Buy, and Total Wine & More that you enter directly from the parking lot, rather than the mall proper. Chewning knows all about how important a mall can be for building community. He's 42 and grew up in New Jersey when its mall culture was the stuff of legend, and it's not like Netcast is the first church to set up in a mall. Just across Route 114 at the Advertisement It took 18 months to build out the main church, which has 350 seats and is entered through the coffee shop, and on March 12, 2020, Netcast received its certificate of occupancy. It never got the chance to hold a service before the world shut down. The mall it returned to after COVID was more tumbleweedy. The movie theater was doing nowhere near its former numbers, and the food court became barren. Yet Netcast thrived by betting on two things: people were looking for a church that didn't feel like a church; and Pastor Matt Chewning called his wife Beth Chewning up to the stage to acknowledge her on Mother's Day during a service. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Chewning gives off the vibe of a cocky ex-hooper but has an earnest self-deprecation to his conversations and his preaching, leaning more toward the questions he's asking himself than the answers he's found. He came to Christianity somewhat accidentally, after he was recruited to play basketball at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. He said he had zero interest in religion, but he was surprised to find himself drawn to a group of fellow students at the Christian college who were committed believers, including his soon-to-be wife Beth. He went all in quickly, and after college, when he and Beth were living in North Carolina with their four children, he felt called to start a church of his own, affiliated with nothing except the Bible. Advertisement To accomplish that goal, the couple set their sites on a return to Massachusetts, which they describe as 'under-reached.' In 2010, a 27-year-old Matt Chewning held the first Netcast service in the living room of their home for 30 people he met on Facebook. His message, and Netcast itself, has been under construction ever since, by design. 'Other churches tell you what they believe and want you to adopt those beliefs. We think it's a process, and we want people to feel comfortable being in process.' Chewning said the mall, like the elementary school before it, was a perfect fit for his style of church, because he always wanted it to feel like it was in the center of a community, not tucked away on the outskirts. But even he has been surprised by the growth of the church since moving into the mall. 'We didn't move in thinking it was some marketing idea of 'Location, location, location.' It was never about growth. It was about having enough space for the people we had. And now . . . we just don't have enough seats.' A woman followed along with the Bible reading from the overflow room at Netcast. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Chewning said he's in talks with the mall about building a 1,000-seat auditorium. Already, Netcast is hosting Sunday school-type classes in two of the theaters at AMC, and it just opened the 200-seat overflow room, where people can watch the main service on a video feed. Chewning always tells everyone the church is about Jesus, and the rest they try to keep simple. 'People don't have a problem with Jesus, they have a problem with churches,' he said. 'Even the word 'church' comes with all sorts of baggage. We don't hide that we're a church, but it's not on the door.' Advertisement Chewning said the church has a loose congregation of about 2,000 people and that typically half of them come to church on a Sunday. (There are services at 9 and 11 a.m.) And Netcast, as well as nontraditional churches like it, are growing in an era in which Claire Simmons prayed during a worship song at Netcast, inside the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, on May 11. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff So what is a Netcast service? On a recent Sunday, the 11 a.m. service began, as usual, with a full-on concert, a 40-minute set performed by three guitarists, a drummer, a keyboardist, and two singers, working their way through several modern Christian rock songs while a multimedia display accompanied them on the giant screens that ring the stage. When Chewning finally swaggered on, carrying an iPad and a Bible, he was wearing white Reeboks and a baggy T-shirt that read 'Living Testimony.' He preached for nearly 50 minutes on a theme of ' It's a new concept of 'church' for a new age. And it's all happening inside the Liberty Tree Mall, next door to a Five Below, for an audience that was on its way somewhere else and instead found a church — and then kept coming back. The Quadros-Lopez family, of Peabody, left the Liberty Tree Mall after attending a Netcast church service. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Billy Baker can be reached at
