This March, Billy Bragg took the stage at a festival in Florida, alone with his electric guitar. He tore into “To Have and To Have Not,” an explosive song from his first album about a working-class British kid trying...
Read MoreIn April of 2008, after making friends, dances, and songs in Ann Arbor for twenty-seven years, I moved away. For my husband, Al, born and raised here, it was, perhaps, an even more significant relocation. We’d planned it...
Read MoreRemember that old late-night TV ad that claimed some washed-up yodeler named Slim Whitman had sold more albums than the Beatles? Well, sit down for a similar crazy-sounding entertainment fact. The 1991 Guinness Book of World...
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Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening begins with a dress that the character Wendla’s mother wants to lengthen to hide her daughter’s emerging sexuality. In The Spring Awakening Project (TSAP), by Jason Sebacher in...
Read MoreChicago is notorious for many things: stockyards, railroads, architecture, theater, rough politics, and old jazz. But during the last few decades, the great city has also become known all over the world for its vibrant and...
Read MoreTwo things immediately stand out about Frontier Ruckus: the visually descriptive songwriting and the well-crafted instrumentation. Their singer-songwriter, Matthew Milia, writes articulate and intricate lyrics, like these from...
Read MoreFor many, the name Richie Havens is synonymous with the famed 1969 Woodstock Festival. His electrifying performance of “Freedom,” highlighted in the subsequent movie, made him internationally famous and boosted a...
Read MoreIf, as aged piano pedagogues aver, Bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues are the Old Testament of the solo piano repertoire and Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas are its New Testament, then Beethoven’s...
Read MoreThe Unthanks–Rachel and Becky, from northeast England–appeared at the Ark a couple of years ago under the name of Rachel Unthank & the Winterset. Their show was terrific. Grim ballads of the region, some of them...
Read MoreJohn Pizzarelli is no Frank Sinatra–though he does play him on stage, as he will in the Power Center on June 30 as part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.”Play” is the key word to understanding Pizzarelli. In...
Read MorePearls, Orpheum Bell’s latest album, sounds like it’s coming through a phonograph, all sepia-toned and ghostly. This is due in part to the band’s old-time mix of country and bluegrass with a few other...
Read MoreMy dad had three heart attacks, starting when I hit my teens. I saw him change from a larger-than-life 300-pounder to the trim but anxious nursing home resident he is today. We still share a fondness for good food and family...
Read MoreThe aptly named Harper is harmonica player Peter Harper, who was born in Britain, moved to western Australia with his family as a child, and has now come to rest in Grass Lake. He recorded six albums in Australia but moved to...
Read MoreNote: This review of the 2001 debut of Shakespeare in the Arb ran in the June 2002 Observer. A revival of this Residential College production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs Thurs.-Sun. June 3-20. (See Inside Ann Arbor...
Read MoreAs Odysseus discovered while flailing about the western Mediterranean, the region isn’t always hospitable. Even when the sky is blue and the seas are calm, there’s an ever-present danger of encountering an enslaving...
Read MoreI always smile when I drive down Scio Church Road and see the big copper dome topping St. Nick’s Greek Orthodox Church. I remember when they built it and moved from their former Main Street location, how proud the children...
Read MoreAfter a show at the Ark, a woman asked Christine Lavin if she had ever been a nun. No, the singer-songwriter replied, but she had gone out drinking with two nuns and a priest when she was a teenager. She’d also baptized...
Read More“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote, rather famously. Still, there are many experiences and parts of the world I know, however inexactly, only from learning about them in...
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