One of my favorite things about Theatre Nova is that it will never shy away from an unconventional story. Its latest production, Gracie Gardner’s Athena, is just that: a coming-of-age fencing dramedy that debuted to rapturous reviews off-off-Broadway in 2018.
Carey Crim has written some excellent plays. Unfortunately, Emma’s Wedding(s) is not one of them.
Gallery Nights opens the doors of seven galleries, plus coffee shops and artist-friendly boutiques throughout Kerrytown on the final Thursday evening of every summer month from 5–8 p.m. Every participating business has a set of balloons floating in front of their door to invite you in. This choose-your-own-adventure of engaging activities is designed to break down the barriers between professional artists and the public with a smorgasbord of eclectic, diverse art-making and art-viewing—all for free.
The musical Fiddler on the Roof opens with the protagonist Tevye saying, “Each one of us is a...
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Love, food, frivolity … who hasn’t sworn off a vice or two only to find temptation at every turn? Just ask the King of Navarre and his oath-bound cohorts, whose celibacy and studiousness will be put to the test every weekend in June as part of Shakespeare in the Arb’s twenty-fourth season. A staple of the summer calendar, SITA brings the bard’s early comedic gem, Love’s Labor’s Lost, to Nichols Arboretum, continuing a quarter-century tradition of outdoor theater in one of the area’s most bucolic natural spaces.
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The theater at Hear.Say Brewing + Theater is small and intimate, with rows of chairs facing a low, narrow stage backed by black theater curtains. On a cool spring evening, it was packed with couples on date nights and an excited group of improv enthusiasts behind us, who I gathered were students in one of Hear.Say’s classes.
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Murder is not often described as charming, but Purple Rose Theatre’s latest production manages to...
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Set in 1812 Moscow, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is a musical adaptation of seventy pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Natasha, a young countess, is torn between her love for two men, neither of them Pierre, who is dealing with his own crisis. Among the events in this saga are scandals, a suicide attempt, a duel, an awakening, and the arrival of a comet.
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White Russians will flow April 4 at the Blind Pig for the “Dude Revue,” a celebration of the music of the Coen Brothers’ 1998 cult comedy.
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I’ve never been much interested in the inner workings of a car dealership, and since watching the Purple Rose Theatre’s latest play, The Classic King, I can’t say that has changed. The comedy, which runs until March 15, follows four car salesmen on a mission to save their failing dealership. Directed by Jeff Daniels, the show is a world premiere and the first professionally produced play by Richard Johnson. Johnson began playwriting after retiring from a career as an automotive journalist, including serving as editor of Automotive News.
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When I try to capture, in charcoal, the foreshortened foot of today's model, the drawing looks a bit like a potato. No time to fix it; we're immediately on to the next 5-minute pose.
Some years back, I went to the Michigan Union Ticket Office to get tickets for a U-M Men’s Glee Club concert. But when I finally got to the front of a long line, the young clerk politely told me MUTO didn’t sell Glee Club tickets. This surprised me, I told him, because the Glee Club website said this was in fact the only place that sold them. He assured me that no, MUTO did not sell Glee Club tickets. I gently persisted: “Another indicator is the sign behind you that says ‘Glee Club Tickets Sold Here.’” This observation delighted the people in line behind me.
Read MoreWhen a friend texted that her niece had signed up for open mic night at the Ark and invited me along, I said sure. Despite proofing the Observer’s listings for the event for nearly a decade, I had never checked it out, and I thought it could be an interesting way to spend a rainy spring evening.
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Billed as “photographs of the Asian American diaspora in the Midwest,” Strange You Never Knew is an anthropological study as much as an artistic one.
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An impressive selection of Makielski’s landscape work can now be seen at the Michigan Art Gallery in Pittsfield Twp. This exhibit and sale, lasting until May, shows sixty-one paintings, almost all of them landscapes, painted en plein air in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.
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At the height of El Movimiento—the Chicano/Latino labor and civil rights movement led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez—a group of mostly Mexican American U-M social work students founded Trabajadores de la Raza, intended to support underrepresented students and promote justice at the university. This group would evolve into the La Raza Arts and Media Collective, part of a vast network of grassroots organizations throughout the country. In UMMA’s glass-walled Stenn gallery, La Raza: Arts and Media Collective, 1975–Today celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.
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The planetarium rotates three shows every month, but the Sky Tonight, which runs twice every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, is always the “star” attraction. The presenter, usually a U-M science student, leads an exploration of the current night sky, gives tips on how to find the cardinal directions, constellations, and planets on your own, and winds up with a trippy full-speed-ahead jaunt through the stars that feels both like a roller coaster and a ride on a spaceship.
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This year’s winter show from the Encore Musical Theatre Company is Annie, the classic 1976 musical by Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse, and Martin Charnin based on the comic strip about a gutsy redheaded orphan who escapes from her orphanage during the Great Depression.
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The legend of the Mothman originated in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where between November 1966 and December 1967, locals reported sightings of a winged humanoid creature with huge, glowing red eyes. While skeptics argued that the sightings could be attributed to sandhill cranes or large owls, the incidents led to widespread fear and speculation, some believing it to be an extraterrestrial or supernatural entity. After the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River in December 1967, killing 46 people, theories arose that the Mothman was an omen of impending disaster.
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