Detroit could become home to the world’s first punk rock re-imagining of Shakespeare’s circular Globe Theatre, constructed with large, corrugated metal shipping containers.

The brainchild of New York-based New Zealander and Shakespeare fanatic Angus Vail — manager of the rock band Kiss’ business office since 1995 (via Joseph Young Associates), and former in-house business manager for INXS — the Container Globe would mimic the specifications of the original Globe in size and shape, and it would most likely be built along the Woodward Corridor. One possible site is a parking lot at Woodward Avenue and Canfield Street.

“The lot is under consideration,” said Bud Liebler, who owns that parking lot and the Whitney restaurant, in addition to running a public relations agency (with his son, Patrick Liebler) that’s working for Vail. “The theater would ‘fit’ there, and because of its location in the heart of Midtown and the Cultural District, it could be an ideal location, but no final determination has been made.” READ THE REST HERE

“The world is yours, dude!” a skinny teenaged boy in ripped jeans declares grandly to his pals standing in the recording studio at the Neutral Zone teen center. But the kid freezes when photographer Adrian Wylie aims a camera his way.

Executive director Lori Roddy knows what to do. “Let’s see you play with the word ‘roses,'” she says, inviting the boy into an improv game. He snaps into a confident monologue: “Roses. Everyone likes roses … you see them at cemeteries.” Wylie gets his shot.

The Observer’s designers didn’t end up using the photo, but it was a glimpse of the skills that helped Roddy rise from intern to the top job at the local teen center. John Weiss, her mentor and predecessor, says that when he stepped back to focus on sharing the NZ model with other communities, “I couldn’t see anyone else but Lori” as a successor. READ THE REST HERE

Former foreign correspondent Scott Savitt, who’s called Ann Arbor home for a little over a year now, is celebrating the release of his new book Crashing the Party: An American Reporter in China with local appearances on Tuesday, November 1 at 7 pm at Nicola’s Books, and on Tuesday, November 29 at 7 pm at Literati Bookstore.

The book starts with Savitt’s harrowing account of spending 30 days on a hunger strike in a Chinese prison; and it later explains how the tragic death of his high school girlfriend set him on the path to spending years of his life in China. But the last section he needed to write to complete the manuscript – about Tiananmen Square, where Chinese political protesters were confronted by tanks and military force in 1989 – may have demanded the most courage.

“I had never revisited that, even in all the years since it happened,” said Savitt. “You have to move on somehow. And speaking as a journalist, the story continued. People were arrested, people went into exile – you had to keep covering the story. … So I wrote that section last. My publisher got to a point where he said, ‘Maybe you just can’t do it,’ and I said, ‘No, I can.’ So I finally cranked it out one sleepless night, and then the next morning, I read it to [U-M faculty member Dr. Rebecca Liu], and I started sobbing uncontrollably. It just made me realize how repressed that emotion was. It was still there. I don’t like calling things ‘syndromes’ but post-trauma – that’s real, and I still have it for sure. … It was something people are not built to see.” READ THE REST HERE

This month, on WEMU’s Art & Soul segment, Lisa and I chatted with Joe York, director of PTD Theater Company’s new production of “Noises Off,” and also talked about upcoming author events (Colm Toibin, Celeste Ng, Lisa Kron and more), a local women’s variety night at Pointless Brewery called HERsay, Suzanne Vega at the Ark, The 1975 at EMU Convocation Center, ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimbukuro and more. Click the link to listen to the 8 minute segment!

Randolph Mantooth and Michelle Mountain in the world premiere production of Carey Crim’s “Morning After Grace” at the Purple Rose Theatre. (Sean Carter Photography)

Retirement can, in some ways, feel like a second adolescence. You’ve got time to pursue your passions and focus on yourself; you can experiment and make some adventurous choices; and if you’re single, you can take home someone you just met and let hormones take the wheel.

The latter happens in Carey Crim’s “Morning After Grace,” now having its world premiere at the Purple Rose Theatre.

For after attending a funeral the previous day, retired lawyer Angus (Randolph Mantooth, of John Gage/”Emergency” fame) wakes up in his Florida condo with Abigail (Michelle Mountain), who’s wearing nothing but a comforter on his couch. When Abigail goes looking for her missing clothing, she stumbles upon a woman’s dry cleaning in a closet, causing her to believe that Angus has a wife.

But before she can get a cab to come out to the Amelia Island retirement community, a neighbor and former professional baseball player, Oliver (Lynch Travis), drops in to introduce himself to Angus and offer condolences. But an incorrect assumption – one of many – leads the three to spend a strange, sometimes funny, sometimes painful few hours in each other’s company. Continue reading →

The cast of The Encore Theater’s “The Full Monty” showed everyone a good time. (Photo by Michele Anliker)

For a recent date night, I took my husband Joe out to see men strip down to their birthday suits.

No, we didn’t trek to Windsor for the evening. Instead, we’d traveled to Dexter, where the Encore Theatre was staging its closing night performance of “The Full Monty.” For Joe had been a huge fan of the original, Oscar-nominated 1997 British film comedy of the same name, so I thought he’d enjoy seeing Terrence McNally (book) and David Yazbeck’s (music and lyrics) stage musical adaptation, which earned 9 Tony Award nominations in 2001.

Though McNally and Yazbeck transplanted “Monty” from Sheffield, England to Buffalo, New York, the story’s basic premise remains intact. In a blue collar town that’s fallen on tough economic times, a group of depressed, unemployed steel workers watch as their wives and girlfriends flock to a Chippendales-style men’s revue at a club. One of the men, Jerry (Eric Parker) – who’s divorced, unable to make child support payments, but desperate to stay connected to his young son Nathan (Alejandro Cantu) – hatches the idea of a locally produced male strip show featuring “real men.”

Gradually, Jerry persuades other despairing men in town to be part of the show; but when he learns that ticket sales are slumping, he ups the ante by promising that unlike Chippendales dancers, his troupe – which calls itself Hot Metal – will get completely naked on stage. Continue reading →

Former U-M football player Dan Williams, and former U-M gymnastics captain Chelsea Kroll, are key players of the Maven team, which oversaw renovations for the HGTV “Urban Oasis” house in Ann Arbor.

In the fall of 2015, the Ann Arbor-based building company Maven Development got a call from “potential clients” about renovating a house located at 730 Spring St. At first, it didn’t seem like an unusual request for the company, which is led by three former U-M athletes. But then they learned a little more.

“They gave a brief description of what they wanted to do, and it sounded kind of unorthodox,” says Chelsea Kroll, ’05, Maven’s project coordinator and a former U-M gymnastics team captain. “We thought, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Maven’s principal/founder Dan Williams, ’00, and chief project manager Jeff Backus, ’00, met with the men who’d made the phone call. They learned that the house would be the focus of the HGTV show “Urban Oasis”—which renovates and gives away a home via a sweepstakes that began Oct. 4—and that Maven was being tapped to oversee the project.

Now, after approximately six months of extensive renovations, the house is starring in its own TV show, with air dates on Oct. 7, Oct. 17, and Oct. 26. In the weeks leading up to the program, the house as well as Ann Arbor and U-M alumni have been featured on the program’s website. READ THE REST HERE

Margaret Atwood spoke to a sold out crowd at Rackham Auditorium on Oct. 21, 2016. (Photo by Barb Chaffer Authier)

The full-capacity crowd at Rackham Auditorium on Friday night not only got to hear witty insights from one of our era’s greatest, most accomplished writers, Margaret Atwood (decked out in black and orange for Halloween); they also got to hear the septuagenarian Canadian novelist/poet rap.

Why? Because her newest novel, Hag-Seed, features prisoners putting on their own version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and one excerpt Atwood read included an inmate’s extended riff that ends with “Oh no! Oh no more Prospero,/Too bad, how sad, that’s what they said:/He must be dead./So now I’m the man, the man, the big man,/I’m the duke, I’m the duke, I’m the duke of Milan.”

Hag-Seed is one of a group of books that have been published as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project, wherein Shakespeare plays are retold by acclaimed contemporary novelists. Literati Bookstore sponsored Atwood’s Ann Arbor appearance. READ THE REST HERE

The Penny Stamps speaker series recently hosted an event at Ypsilanti’s Dreamland Theater.

Though the University of Michigan’s Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series—which spotlights cutting edge contemporary artists of all stripes, from across the globe, on Thursdays at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater—has grown in popularity and esteem for more than a decade, it’s still tough to put together a lineup each fall and winter semester.

“These are people who don’t make their living by speaking,” said series director Chrisstina Hamilton. “They make their living by doing work, and they’re really successful at it. So speaking is not the first thing on the agenda they want to do. It doesn’t move their work forward. … And on top of that, these are people who are really busy. … It often takes six years from an initial contact before we can finally get it on their agenda, in terms of importance, and before they work it into their schedule.” READ THE REST HERE

[Editor’s note: I published this essay on my personal blog, but because it touches on a recent local comedy performance, I thought I’d cross-post it here as well.]

Dear Amy:

Let me start by saying I’m a big fan. (I originally wrote “huge,” but that word feels like it’s been co-opted by a certain Presidential candidate lately.)

I love the unapologetic feminism that runs through your work; I admire the candor with which you revealed tough things about yourself and your life in your book, “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo” (which I pre-ordered and read immediately); and there’s no small number of sketches from your Comedy Central show that I’ve watched and howled at repeatedly (“Football Town Nights,” “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” “Lunch at O’Nutters,” “Last F**kable Day,” “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” and “Compliments” – which actually helped alter my own reflexive, self-deprecating behavior).

So when your stand-up comedy tour stop in Detroit was announced several months ago, I got so antsy about getting tickets that I checked out on a big group of lady-friends who were figuring out what they could and were willing to pay in terms of ticket levels, how many would go, etc., in order to cash in on the pre-sale. I did not want to miss this show, and I wanted a good seat.

I loved hearing about the public response to your nearly-nude photo shoot, and your Ritz cracker binge blackout, and the food poisoning that you and your boyfriend experienced during a romantic trip to Paris. But you quickly got frustrated with the crowd when you ventured into commentary about gun control and felt us shutting down. You mentioned outright that we were offering more resistance to that portion of your act than any audience had previously – and that for that reason, you were going to keep pushing and go even further down that road, as the best comedians do when sensing discomfort in their audience. READ THE REST HERE