When you see Nick Hartman’s work under the alias Chapel of Ghouls, the message is clear: Life is hard. Live it to the fullest. While always fascinated by art, especially music and film, he didn’t necessarily see himself as an artist. But a series of tragic deaths and visits to the hospital throughout his youth later bubbled up in the form of panic attacks, and also as an interest in the dark side of life—goth culture, horror movies, metal music and beyond.
Grace Close has been drawing ever since the moment her mom put a crayon in her hand and a paper in front of her, at around the age of 3.
It’s been said that nearly 88% of private book clubs are all-female, a fact that likely wouldn’t surprise Dot, Meg, Carol, and Ellie, the four women who gather in a Minnesotan cabin in Karen Schaeffer’s play Girls’ Weekend (onstage at Circle Theatre through August 23rd). They’re there to discuss their latest read—well, that’s the plan, anyway. But this is a farce, and farces mean complications.
“Sugar. Butter. Flour.” are the primary ingredients of any good pie, we’re reminded throughout Waitress: The Musical, as the words are the sung heartbeat of this marvelous show with exactly the right ingredients to make something far more creative and delicious than the mixture of its parts at Saugatuck Center for the Arts.
Since its public opening on April 20th, 1995, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has drawn visitors not only from west Michigan but from all over the world. Its beautiful, varied gardens and world-class sculpture collection are enormously popular; USA Today named it the best sculpture park in the US. If that weren’t enough, Meijer Gardens curates a series of events throughout the year.
Arts exhibitions and performances have returned in full swing to West Michigan. This season, there’s absolutely no shortage of concerts, symphonies, plays, musicals, ballet, visual arts and beyond. We have big Broadway shows, intimate and progressive plays, live performances with symphonies, dancers taking to the stage, and powerful art exhibitions. Here’s our guide to arts events for the month.
Celebrated modern dance innovator Martha Graham wrote in her 1991 autobiography Blood Memory that a dancer’s “body says what words cannot” and that “movement never lies.”
To love is to experience loss; in fact, to live is to be changed by loss. To know these truths is to be human, whether we like it or not. But to to feel them anew, by moving through the time and space of another’s experience, can deepen our understanding of and appreciation for what it means to be human. This is the powerful effect of Primary Trust, Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer prize winning play, directed with grace by Chuma Gault at Hope Repertory Theatre.
Michelle Obama called it the best piece of art in any form that she’d ever seen in her life. Its popularity is unprecedented, a cultural phenomenon that reinvigorated public interest in both musical theatre and American history.
In the ten years since Hamilton debuted, nothing in musical theater has emerged to challenge it; there has been nothing with as sweeping a scope, as grand an ambition, or as deep an impact.
On December 21st, 1981, a review of the new musical Dreamgirls appeared in The New York Times. “When Broadway history is being made,” wrote its author, Frank Rich, “you can feel it. What you feel is a seismic emotional jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wit. While such moments are uncommonly rare these days, I'm here to report that one popped up at the Imperial last night.” He was referring to “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” the fierce and defiant song closing out the first act of Dreamgirls.
“When do we add tension and stress?” The asker is serious: She’s wondering at what point she needs to perform a series of stiff, striking motions.
“Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” declares the Cat in the Hat in Dr. Seuss’s original children’s book, and that playful spiritedness and imagination is what drives The Barn Theatre’s colorful production of Seussical the Musical.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure raises important questions about justice and how some succeed as well as fail. “Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall,” is but one truism that speaks to political leadership today as much as it did in 1604, the year the play was first produced.
