Grammy-Award winning pianist and composer Sullivan Fortner, the inaugural winner of the Gilmore’s new Larry J. Bell Jazz Award, kicked off the 2026 Gilmore Piano Festival with a joyful, 75-minute solo performance in which he used four different keyboards to literally play with what’s possible musically on International Jazz Day Thursday night at The Parrish Theatre in Kalamazoo.
17th century writer, lawyer, and politician William Prynne wrote that “popular stage-playes are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions.” Given that relatively widespread attitude, it’s perhaps unsurprising that English women weren’t allowed to act onstage.
The 2025-2026 Grand Rapids Ballet season has been record breaking in its numbers of ticket subscribers, and it’s ending with a bang. In The Countenance of Kings is an exquisitely high-octane celebration of the present and future of ballet, according to Michigan’s only professional classical ballet company.
In his heyday, Oscar Levant was a household name. A celebrated mid century composer, conductor, and concert pianist, he took turns on Broadway as a musician, and in Hollywood as an actor in feature films, including a role as Gene Kelly’s wingman in An American in Paris.
So much has changed on Broadway in the last 30 or so years in the ways big, live theatre productions push boundaries to transform theatre into artful spectacle unique to live performance. However, Disney’s The Lion King remains the same, for better and for worse.
The Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival is, not to put too fine a point on it, enormous. 2026’s festival brings over 75 events to many venues in multiple cities over a little less than two weeks (April 30th through May 10th).
Less than one month after record-breaking ticket sales for Swan Lake, this season’s big storybook ballet, Grand Rapids Ballet offered their annual performance of new short works choreographed by the dancers themselves. “This is going to be NOT Swan Lake,” said Artistic Director James Sofranko in his opening night curtain speech.
Known as the “Mother of Modern Dance”, Martha Graham wrote in her memoir Blood Memory that “the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.”
Grand Rapids Civic Theatre recently announced its Centennial Season, featuring eight titles to be produced by one of the oldest and largest community theatres in the nation.
What if Juliet doesn’t kill herself in William Shakespeare’s enduring 16th Century tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”? This question, asked of Shakespeare himself by his wife, Anne Hathaway, is the inciting incident of “& Juliet.”
