2016 March

When you think of improv comedy and beer, you think of fun and lighthearted times. And while Jason and Tori Tomalia’s Pointless Brewery & Theatre grew out of a very dark period in the Tomalias’ lives–in...

More than 150 years ago Walt Whitman, who might indeed have been blindly optimistic, wrote, “O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!” American literature since Whitman has had a few celebratory moments, but we...

Few musicians carry on the true spirit of American roots music the way Chris Buhalis does. Younger players working in what’s been branded alt-country or indie folk look back on American musical tradition with a sense of...

Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of Purple Rose’s current production, began their life on Broadway in 1965 and continued their friendship on TV for five years in the 1970s, gradually acquiring cultural baggage that was not...

According to soprano Martha Guth and pianist Penelope Crawford, the best acoustics for chamber music in North America are to be found in churches. This is especially true for art songs, which in the Germanic tradition are called...

Honestly, I stopped by the Ann Arbor Art Center to rule out the current exhibit, Mid-West Furniture Zoku, as a review subject. Furniture? As art? I left two hours later, tripped out, my art heart pierced. I’d taken 109...

The Everyone Orchestra is, to paraphrase James Thurber, something very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before. The project offers improvisation with a conductor. There are just a few prior examples of this in the whole...