Face Off Theatre Company is only in its third season as part of Kalamazoo’s Black Arts and Cultural Center, but its unwavering commitment to excellence is clear. By consistently producing powerfully relevant and necessary work that no one else in the region is doing, they’re raising important questions and dialogue about race in America — primarily generated by people of color. And it’s perhaps the only company in the state fully committed to this work.

Cyndi Lauper made famous the notion that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in 1983, but in 2013, she convincingly made the argument that it’s actually drag queens who have the most fun with the enormously delightful, multiple Tony-Award winning musical “Kinky Boots,” for which she wrote the score.

Draped with fishnet and spider webs and dressed with ouija boards, skulls, a crystal ball, a chainsaw, a coffin, a skeleton, a lamp made of a human head, a noose, an old radio, and a sarcophagus, the stage of the New Vic Theatre in Kalamazoo embodies the spookiness of the Halloween season and is set to creep folks out in the most festive of ways.

Deborah Cox is a Grammy Award nominee and R&B powerhouse, and a distinguished national touring artist. To put it simply: She’s a pretty big deal. Unfortunately, she’s also a human who gets sick (or at least that’s what the woman seated next to me heard), and wasn’t able to perform during opening night of The Bodyguard: The Musical at Wharton Center in Lansing. Cue the understudy, Jasmin Richardson.