Brother and sister Lank (Darien Vaughn) and Chelle (Tayler Jones) face problems after they inherit their parent’s Motor City home in Detroit ’67. (Photo by Eastern Michigan University Theatre)

Historical events, when presented as a series of statistics and dates, have far less impact on us than they do when integrated into a human story.

This is why, of course, history is the backdrop for so many movies, plays, television shows, and novels. These entertainments let us briefly experience what it was like to be living when a specific historical moment was unfolding around us. And most recently, in our own backyard, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Riots/Rebellion — depending on who’s telling the story — spawned a number of creative works that helped us revisit this pivotal moment in the Motor City’s history.

University of Michigan graduate (and Detroit native) Dominique Morisseau got a bit of a jump on things, premiering her play, Detroit ’67, in New York in 2013. The drama — now being staged by Eastern Michigan University’s Theater Department — won the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, and ended up being the first in a Morisseau-penned trilogy focused on Detroit’s past. (Paradise Blue and Skeleton Crew were the second and third.)

But helping audiences go back in time, to a particular place, requires attention to detail, so expect to hear Motown tunes; spot script-specified images of Muhammad Ali, a black power fist, and The Four Tops on the walls; and see clothes and appliances from the play’s era. “We have a washing machine with a crank on top that I swear was on my mother’s porch back in 1962,” said EMU Theater Professor Wallace Bridges, who’s directing Detroit ’67. READ THE REST HERE

The cast of U-M’s phenomenal production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches.” (Photo by Kyle Prue)

It’s amazing how, when a brilliant script is masterfully executed, three and a half hours can seem to pass in the blink of an eye.

Yet that’s the experience you’ll have if you’re lucky enough to catch the University of Michigan Department of Theatre and Drama production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches — which is so terrific that it’ll remind you all over again why the play has earned its status as a timeless masterpiece.

For the first chapter of this two-part, epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning play premiered back in 1991 at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre and told an era-defining story set in New York City in the mid-1980s – the height of the AIDS epidemic. We’re introduced to three sets of characters whose lives intersect: Second Circuit Court word processor Louis (Jesse Aaronson) and his boyfriend Prior Walter (Jeffrey James Fox), whose health is rapidly worsening; a judge’s chief clerk, and a transplanted-from-Utah Mormon, Joe Pitt (Peter Donahue), and his hallucinating, Valium-popping wife, Harper (Savanna Crosby); and powerful right-wing lawyer/macher Roy Cohn (Sam Dubin), who pushes Joe to accept a position in the Justice Department in Washington so as to have a sympathetic ally in high places.

Joe’s and Louis’ paths initially cross at work, in a public bathroom, as Louis is crying over his struggle to stay with Prior as AIDS ravages his body. In that moment, Louis voices his assumption regarding Joe’s homosexuality — which Joe denies, citing his marriage as proof, but he’s visibly rattled by the observation. Harper, meanwhile, spends her days alone in the couple’s apartment, obsessing over the Earth’s deteriorating ozone layer, dreaming of traveling to Antarctica, and struggling to figure out why her husband goes on so many long walks and shows no sexual interest in her. Cohn is enraged by charges of ethical misconduct, as well as his own AIDS diagnosis. And Prior, finally, finds himself in and out of the hospital, facing his illness and his mortality alone. READ THE REST HERE

Chick Corea plays at Hill Auditorium on Saturday night, courtesy of UMS.

Bestselling author/illustrator Brian Selznick (Penny Stamps Speaker Series)
Thursday, March 29, 5:10 pm, Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty St., Ann Arbor. Free.

Selznick has been making children’s books since 1991. His illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the 2008 Caldecott medal and was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie Hugo. Wonderstruck, his 2011 follow-up, was made into a movie by celebrated filmmaker Todd Haynes. The Marvels, the third book in a trilogy loosely connected to Hugo and Wonderstruck by themes of family and discovery, was published in 2016. Celebrated as much for their stunning object quality as for their rich narrative, Selznick’s books are best summarized in his own words: “It’s not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.” His newest project is a 200-page illustrated book for beginning readers called Baby Monkey, Private Eye, written by his husband, Dr. David Serlin. READ THE REST HERE

This month, Lisa and I highlighted some upcoming cultural events and talked to Michigan playwright David MacGregor, whose latest play, “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Elusive Ear,” is having its world premiere at Chelsea’s Purple Rose Theatre. Listen to the eight minute segment here.

Susan Craves, Ruth Crawford, and the supporting cast of Tipping Point Theatre’s production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Ripcord.” (Photo by Megan LaCroix Photography)

Early in David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy “Ripcord,” now on stage at Northville’s Tipping Point Theatre (running time, just under two hours), an aging-but-perpetually-cheerful woman announces that she never gets angry. “It always leads to an ugly place, and I don’t care for ugly places,” Marilyn (Susan Craves) says.

This ends up being an ironic declaration, since it leads Marilyn and her grumpy assisted living facility roommate, Abby (Ruth Crawford), to make a bet that puts the ladies on the express train to ugly. For Abby, a snarky misanthrope, longs to have her own room again, while chatty, hyper-social Marilyn covets Abby’s bed by the window, which has a lovely view of a nearby park. So the two make a wager: if Abby can make Marilyn lose her temper, Marilyn will request a room change; if Marilyn can scare Abby – something Abby believes is no longer possible – they’ll switch beds.

And although the women launch into this venture with obnoxious-but-harmless pranks – such as putting their phone number on Craig’s List, with a claim that Marilyn was giving away a houseful of items and a car, and calling in a fake message from Marilyn’s daughter (Vanessa Sawson), claiming she’d be coming to take her mother out to lunch – things ramp up fast. Marilyn drugs Abby to dope her up for an involuntary skydiving excursion (courtesy of Marilyn’s family’s business), and Abby posts painful records of Marilyn’s past life all over the building. As their bemused caretaker Scotty (Dez Walker) observes in one scene, these very different women may be more suited to each other than they even realize.

To discuss the play, fellow critic Don Calamia and I (Jenn McKee) thought we’d try something new, since we both attended Tipping Point’s opening night performance of “Ripcord”: a joint review – the first of what I’d love to call Platonic Theater Date Reviews, since Don and I have attended many shows together lately – that’s ultimately a conversation between two local critics about the show.  Continue reading →

Cast members from U-M’s production of the opera, “The Marriage of Figaro.” (Photo by Peter Smith Photography)

56th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival. Though it’s still considered a best-kept-secret by some locals, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest experimental and avant-garde film festival in North America, running six days each March (through March 25 this year), and primarily housed at the Michigan Theater. AAFF shows over 200 films from nearly 70 countries, offering approximately $20,000 in awards each year.

You can check out wrap-up award screenings on Sunday, or you can dive in anytime. Thursday night features “Out Night”; Friday night offers up the always-popular (but not necessarily kid-friendly) animation program; the all-ages program happens Saturday; and also on Saturday this year, at 1 p.m., a new documentary titled “The Big House” will have its premiere. The film eschews gridiron glory to look closely at the labor – from cooks to snipers – that goes into hosting 100,000 people. READ THE REST HERE

Let me start this review with a confession: I’m a person who ugly cries upon hearing Olive, the sweet-but-overlooked young heroine of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” sing “My Friend, the Dictionary.” Why? Because I, too, was once a girl who seldom had a playmate, even at school, so I regularly turned to books – including the family’s dog-eared, red paperback dictionary – for company. Words never pointedly picked you last for their team, or refused to let you sit next to them on the bus. They were always there, a seemingly endless supply of them, and they offered escape and refuge to kids like me.

Which brings us to Echo, one of three characters in Lee Blessing’s 1985 drama “Eleemosynary,” now on stage at Livonia’s Schoolcraft College. In Blessing’s play, precocious, isolated young Echo (Kate Hoin) hungrily studies words, too, enthralled by both their music and their meanings; she also aims, however, to win the national spelling bee, believing that this will somehow bring together Artie (Julia Garlotte), the damaged mother who abandoned her, and Dorothea (Linda Rabin Hammell), the eccentric, doting grandmother who raised her.

To tell this story, Blessing jumps around in time, providing impressionistic snapshots of life within this highly dysfunctional matrilineal line. And while Blessing’s intentions appear to be admirably feminist in scope – all three females are extraordinarily smart, independent (particularly from men, who are notably absent), and forge unconventional paths for themselves – the self-consciously quirky quirks with which Blessing saddles the characters ultimately undercut their ability to make the leap from author-constructed devices to human beings. Continue reading →

Ann Arbor-based novelist Camille Pagán (Forever Is the Worst Long Time, Life and Other Near Death Experiences) was in the midst of writing a book that wasn’t going anywhere when she had an unnerving grocery-store experience.

“This guy, a college kid … bumped into me and didn’t even look at me or say anything,” said Pagán, who also noted that on other occasions while out shopping, she’d observed “when a cashier would talk to and make conversation with a middle-aged man but then not talk to the middle-aged woman who was next in line. This seemed to me to really be saying something about our society and how we view and treat women as they age.”

Indeed, Pagán’s grandmother “once made the observation that it was better to be an old woman than a middle-aged woman,” said Pagán. “She said, ‘When you’re an old woman, people open doors for you, they offer you a seat, they talk to you.’ … And I was on the cusp of middle age, so I already knew what things looked like from that perspective.”

These incidents planted the seed for Pagán’s newest novel, Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties, which tells the story of Maggie, an anxious, 53-year-old empty nester in Chicago who’s blindsided when her husband, Adam, suddenly announces he’s in love with a 30-year-old and wants out of the marriage. When Maggie decides to still take the trip to Rome the couple had been planning for their upcoming anniversary, she meets a new friend — a female painter named Jean who’s heading to Italy for a six-month-long fellowship — who offers Maggie the chance to have a change of scenery by house-sitting her place in Ann Arbor. READ THE REST HERE

Dan Johnson and Luna Alexander in Slipstream Theatre Initiative’s “Tartuffe.” (Photo by Jennifer Jolliffe)

While watching Slipstream Theatre Initiative’s zippy take on Moliere’s “Tartuffe” – the company’s adaptation runs a fleet 75 minutes – I noticed how much more angry and repulsed I felt while watching the titular con-man (Jay Jolliffe) press his unwanted advances on the lady of the house (played by Luna Alexander) than I had been when seeing previous productions of this classic.

Which is to say, I found myself suddenly having a #MeToo moment right there in Slipstream’s space in Ferndale.

But in this Weinstein age – when ugly, hard truths related to gendered power structures and cruel abuses are finally being brought to light – it’s hard not to start seeing everything through this highly charged lens.

And that kind of makes this a perfect (if complicated) moment for “Tartuffe.” The seventeenth century comedy – which employed physical humor and character types drawn from commedia dell’arte – tells the tale of a bloviating swindler and his mark (Dan Johnson), who becomes so blinded by worship that he signs over his possessions and invites Tartuffe into his home to stay. Everyone else in the family sees through Tartuffe’s false piety, but to convince the utterly smitten patriarch, the family must plot a way for him to witness Tartuffe’s hypocrisy for himself. Continue reading →