Southwest Michigan is host to a variety of wonderful theater — professional light-hearted summer fare, often of the musical variety, and edgy, boundary-pushing new work from small, pop-up new companies abounds. However, it’s rare to find new, deeply relevant work of a professional quality, and to come upon such a production is to realize one’s hunger for it.

Actors’ Theatre’s Living on the Edge playwriting festival is wrapping up this month with a final showcase of the top five scripts, written by local playwrights here in West Michigan. Each play, once fully staged, will last 8-15 minutes and they’re all written under one theme: (un)breakable.

Golden Girls, Mary Tyler Moore, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Cheers, The Jeffersons — if you’re suddenly feeling nostalgic, Olive and the Bitter Herbs is the show for you.

A new performing arts company has manifested in Grand Rapids, with a mission to bring entertainment as well as empowerment to the people and performers of West Michigan.

At first glance, the large-scale wall installations and sculptures look like succulents and flowers, multi-colored woven rugs, moths and butterflies.

Half a century later, the contemporary glass movement continues to gain momentum with competitions, exhibits and college programs. With Global Glass: A Survey of Form & Function, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts is diving into this unique art movement.

Every summer, set along boardwalks, in waterfront parks and on closed-off city blocks, art fairs take over the lakeshore with handcrafted jewelry, paintings, pottery, photography, sculpture and much more.

This month’s Kalamazoo Philharmonia and the Bach Festival Chorus performance is personal for Andrew Koehler.

In Western music canon, Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the first freelance composers. Unlike his predecessors — Bach, Mozart and Haydn — he had no royal patron to please. Beethoven wrote music for himself, and for greater humanity. “What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose,” he said. Knowing this makes the impassioned plea for universal fellowship and peace in his “Symphony No. 9” all the more powerful.

If there is something inherently funny about women’s breasts and the seemingly endless quest for the sexual capital that comes from an augmented female form, then “Gay Deceivers” capitalizes on it — with a pseudo-feminist twist. The humor in this almost-farce also relies on the audience’s delight in seeing ostensibly straight men dressed (badly) as women.