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The Good Doctor

There may be some people around who wouldn't like The Good Doctor at the Purple Rose, but I don't know who they would be. If you find Chekhov depressing, this is Chekhov on Prozac. If you like Chekhov, you'll enjoy...

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Max Klinger’s prints

A forgotten spark plug who helped fire up the surrealist movement, German fin de sicle artist Max Klinger offers images that combine lush beauty and a screw-loose creepiness so unsettling that I found myself flipping over one...

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Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry is the perfect singer to create new ways to hear Christmas. Sometimes sweet carols turn saccharine, all the old jingles are jingled out, and we need songs that are spiritual and surprising. That's what Siberry...

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Gregory Stovetop

If other bands have frustrated me recently by being too cool or too serious of purpose to fully experience their own artistic possibilities, I'm relieved to find Gregory Stovetop bursting onto the Ann Arbor scene. Affable,...

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Chava Alberstein

In a career that has spanned more than three decades, Chava Alberstein has captured the heart of a nation with her dynamic vocal range and broad repertoire. Israel's leading vocalist has recorded in Hebrew, Yiddish, and...

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Cellist Erling Blöndal

Remember Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly? The Swedish director’s meditation on madness presents life as unendurable, death as unbearable, and God as a malevolent spider just beyond the wall. Remember the...

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The Blind Boys of Alabama

If you've never heard the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama, by all means take the opportunity when they come to the Ark on Monday, November 17. Formed as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in the 1940s, they cultivated a sound...

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Charles Lloyd

Charles Lloyd is one of the great originals in jazz. He grew up in Memphis, where he learned jazz from players such as George Coleman and Phineas Newborn but also apprenticed with bluesmen like B.B. King. He moved to Los...

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Jayne Cortez

A couple of decades before anyone ever talked about performance poetry, long before the spread of poetry slams and their imitators, Jayne Cortez was creating a reputation for herself as a performer of her own poetry. Associated...

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Mark Feldman

The violin has never been considered a typical jazz instrument, but in recent years, in the eclectic atmosphere of improvised music, nontraditional instruments have been more welcome. A number of violinists have risen to...

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Masters of Movie Music

Let’s not debate the merits of movie music. That argument was settled long ago by the only people whose opinion matters: the composers. Stravinsky wrote music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre (although Twentieth Century...

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Odessa Harris

Last April, on the first Friday night when spring seemed truly possible, Odessa Harris sang blues, jazz, and R&B chestnuts and made them appropriately frisky and lustful. The buzz-cut, fluffed crowd at Goodnite Gracie...

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Charles Baxter

A few years ago Charles Baxter wrote a love story set in Ann Arbor, The Feast of Love, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. Last year I met a couple of Scandinavian writers in Greece who had a vague...

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The Balanchine legacy

In August 1913, nine-year old Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze became a boarding student at the Imperial Theater Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia. A week later, he ran away. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for the...

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Darrell Scott

People trying to make good music in Nashville more or less follow Darrell Scott's every move. He came on the scene with his Aloha from Nashville album six years ago, and it was an absolute gold mine of top- quality country...

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Glori5

I'd spoken to Glori5 guitarist Leighton Mann by phone several times before I saw the band perform. He's soft spoken — a downright respectful intellectual. I hadn't met his wife, Jennifer Albaum, until right...

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Halloween at the Museum

For years, we had to coax our preschooler into going to “the dinosaur museum” by downplaying the inherently scary aspects of dead creatures on display, some of them enormous. He wasn’t frightened, just...

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Gravure Á l’Eau Forte

In nearly five years of poking around local galleries, there have been only three occasions when I stared slack-jawed at a work of art, rapidly calculated my bank balance, and thought, "It's gonna be macaroni and cheese...

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Jimmy Pardo

What would life be like if we spoke our thoughts out loud? Jimmy Pardo knows. Onstage, he frequently undergoes a bizarre shift from an arrogant moron to an acutely self-conscious, self-doubting boy gone crazy with the...

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