Some might assume the musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” remains a show of its time, based as it is on the Academy Award winning 1954 MGM film. And in many ways, this classic musical romantic comedy is just that, with its melodic score, grand dance numbers, family friendliness, and a story that riffs on a stock battle-of-the-sexes theme.

“Omigod, omigod, you guys!” may not be the musical phrase you think you want running through your head when you walk out of a feel-good musical and into the next day. But it very much is, when the show you’ve walked out of is “Legally Blonde: The Musical” at Mason Street Warehouse in Saugatuck, the extravagant, joyful kickoff of their 20th anniversary season this summer.

Director Kathy Mulay wanted to bring the homespun bluegrass musical “Bright Star” to Farmers Alley Theatre in Kalamazoo since she saw it debut on Broadway six years ago. Its premiere at the regional theater was slotted for the 2019-2020 season, but was thwarted by the pandemic.

For more than three decades, local nonprofit organization Broadway Grand Rapids has been host to some of the best that New York City’s “great white way” has to offer. Regularly, year after year, musical theater superfans from around West Michigan will venture downtown to head inside the DeVos Performance Hall for some high-production, high-energy entertainment. 

Mean Girls was released 18 years ago, in 2004. Children born at the time graduated high school this year, having survived the gauntlet that the film depicts: a gauntlet of pettiness, deception, and casual cruelty.

Whether you consider yourself an artist or not, being creative can be an intimidating process. Saugatuck Center for the Arts is working to change this narrative through their latest community exhibition, Spaces for Discovery.

One of the immutable Laws Of Marketing states that, having written a prequel or sequel, you must declare that it can stand on its own. You can no more disobey it than you can disobey the law of gravity.

When Charles Morey adapted Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais’ 18th Century “The Marriage of Figaro,” best known as a Mozart opera, in 2012, it was a success at least in part for how it reshaped the original farce, a wicked satire of the French aristocracy, to speak to the Occupy Wall Street moment.

In the midst of the pandemic, playwright Jim Lair Beard found himself with two particularly valuable raw materials: energy and time. Rather than use them to bake sourdough bread, as so many of us did, he baked a trio of plays.

Six years ago, I started writing about music, theater and art. I had the sense that a lot was going on in Grand Rapids (I was right about that) and that I could write about it in a compelling way (the jury’s still out). For a while, I hugged the shore, writing mostly about what I knew best, and avoiding deeper waters.