Event Reviews

The Polish Muslims

The Polish Muslims, whose name is a purely fanciful oxymoron, have been characterized as a Hamtramck counterpart to Weird Al Yankovic. They do traffic in parodies, and for a drive-by blurb that’s adequate, but several...

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Robert Randolph

he tradition of so-called sacred steel, the pedal steel guitar as used in African American churches, developed within a single Pentecostal denomination with a very long name: The House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living...

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The Glen Levens

The Glen Levens are a classic example of a band that exists not out of necessity but out of desire: its members all have solid day jobs but just can’t stop getting together to play the music they love.The band started out...

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Rachel DeWoskin

I claim no expertise on the parameters or expectations of young adult fiction. I read the Harry Potter books, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Laura Ingalls Wilder when my own child was the right age, and I read Sherman...

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Encore’s South Pacific

Rodgers and Hammerstein had huge hits with their first two collaborations, Oklahoma and Carousel, but their third, Allegro, flopped. So in staging their fourth, South Pacific, they hedged their bets in a number of ways,...

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Arbor Opera Theater

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is perhaps the most-performed opera ever. The tragic story of Violetta, the courtesan with the heart of gold, who sacrifices her last chance at true love to protect the honor of the man she...

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Loren D. Estleman

Many years ago, a friend passed along a copy of Whiskey River by Michigan writer Loren D. Estleman. The book is a crime novel about booze smuggling set in Detroit during Prohibition, and I burned through it in record time. I...

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Marcus Elliot

The greatest moments of the celebrated Detroit jazz tradition took place at times when jazz was a popular art and when music was widely taught in the schools. In recent years other kinds of music have achieved a broader appeal,...

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Cheap Shots

In the photo exhibit Cheap Shots III: Blurred, Not Shaken–a clever take on James Bond’s shaken, not stirred martini–the Ann Arbor Area Crappy Camera Club pays homage to an older, slower, more artistic...

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Rollie Tussing

Watching Rollie Tussing play, you get the feeling that the Ann Arbor-born guitarist and singer ought to be holding court in a college classroom rather than brightening the corners of noisy bars. Tussing’s knowledge of...

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Duo Mosaic

Classical composers have long used the rhythms and structures of folk dances, but Bach’s gigues or Beethoven’s minuets were never intended for the dance floor; they don’t often back Riverdance routines or...

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Art NOW: Painting 2015

Opening night! Nothing else is as thrilling, even if the “performers” are works of art, and especially when the curtains open on a new era. For its inaugural exhibition of the “Art NOW” series, the Ann...

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Talley’s Folly

The Purple Rose’s founder, Jeff Daniels, has a special relationship to Lanford Wilson, and every time the company produces one of his plays, the program tells some version of the story. Wilson may be best known for his...

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A Slavic Soiree

he year 2015 marks Tchaikovsky’s dodransbicentennial, a fancy way of saying it’s the 175th anniversary of his birth. Vladimir Putin’s government is sponsoring commemorative concerts; Leonard Slatkin and the...

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Bruce Holsinger

Crime fiction (and its best known subcategory, the murder mystery) is one thing; historical fiction with its meticulously researched re-creation of a time period is another. These genres have often been married, with various...

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Tradition Renewed

The late folklorist Alan Lomax, born 100 years ago this past January 31, collected and first recorded a good deal of what has become known as American traditional music, laboriously dragging huge open-reel tape machines around...

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Keith Taylor’s Fidelities

Just inland from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula, a field of jagged, white stumps named the Kingston Plains stretches as flat and bare as the nearby cliffs are high and crowded with tourists. Most people...

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Mark O’Connor

Editor’s note: This event has been cancelled.Stephane Grappelli once said of Mark O’Connor, “He’s not what you would call … human.” No small compliment coming from one who many agree was...

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The Artemis Quartet

In the words of poet Jacques Prevert: “It is spring, the needle goes wild in the compass.” Conditions are ideal, then, for a visit from a chamber ensemble named after an uncontainable forest goddess. On April 19 the...

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