Having spent his life spreading joy with his outlandish costumes and unique style of playing the piano in concert halls, on television and as the consummate Las Vegas act, Liberace has returned from the dead to set the story straight, so to speak, because he feels redundant in heaven where everyone’s just perpetually happy.

• Kalamazoo
• Gilmore Keyboard Festival
• Liberace
• Farmers Alley Theatre

Wei Luo, recipient of a 2018 Gilmore Young Artist Award, shares a music teacher with another Chinese pianist: Lang Lang, who also left his home country for America as a young teenager.

• Gilmore Keyboard Festival
• Wei Luo

Bell’s Eccentric Cafe was abuzz and looked a bit different than usual Thursday night. From the sounds of things, it could have been a club in Greenwich Village at any point in the 20th Century — but without the cigarette smoke and with better beer. 

• Kalamazoo
• Gilmore Keyboard Festival
• bell's eccentric cafe

Much like being named a Gilmore Artist, winning the International Frederic Chopin International Piano Competition carries much significance for a burgeoning concert pianist. 32-year-old Polish pianist Rafał Blechacz has claimed both accolades. Blechacz swept the Chopin Piano Competition in 2005 — the first Polish pianist in 30 years to win the top prize — and later won the Gilmore Artist Award in 2014.

• Grand Rapids
• Grand Rapids Symphony
• Gilmore Keyboard Festival
• Rafal Blechacz

The play “Mama’s Girls” by Marilynn Barnes Anselmi opens with two siblings in fraught play with Barbie dolls. Though symbols for conventional gender norms, the dolls’ are smooth between their legs, a revelation to Sammy, the emerging trans girl who both catalyzes and suffers from her family’s toxic dynamic.

Anyone who says ballet-based modern dance doesn’t go with hip hop has been proven entirely wrong by Wellspring Cori Terry & Dancers’ Spring Concert of Dance, Seeing/Seen, a collaborative performance that breaks down both real and perceived boundaries from start to finish and beyond.

For 127 years, Carnegie Hall has showcased phenomenal soloists, orchestras and ensembles. An estimated 50,000 performances have taken place in the iconic New York City concert hall. Its walls are embedded with stirring musical history, from Tchaikovsky conducting one of his own works on the night the building opened, to the first assembly of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in 2009. Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Beyonce have all performed on its stage.

The inhuman experiences of the 20,000 children orphaned and traumatized by civil war that began in the late 1980s known as the Lost Boys of Sudan have been documented by journalists, documentarians and novelists, among others; yet their incredibly harrowing journeys and often triumphant stories deserve greater attention.

Disney’s The Lion King, billed as the world’s number one musical, is credited with having launched the new Broadway, the one that’s emerged over the past 20 years from a tourist- and family-friendly Times Square, cleaned up of grit, and some may argue, heart.

In the original iteration of “The Queen of Bingo,” known as “the play you play along with” by Jeanne Michels and Phyllis Murphy, its central characters, two middle-aged, bingo-obsessed sisters, were played by men in drag. This is but one way the audience played along, as intermission also included a bingo game for which the winner received a 10-pound turkey.