“Passing Strange,” by Stew, is a beautifully raw story of a young African American boy searching for more out of life and the whirlwind of emotions he faces along the way.

Many renowned classical piano duos have kept it in the family — consider the Labèque sisters, the Pekinel sisters, or the Kontarsky brothers. The vast benefits of a musical partnership between siblings were obvious during Christina and Michelle Naughton’s concert with The Gilmore’s Rising Stars Series yesterday. The two 28-year-old pianists brought esoteric unity to their art form in a way only identical twins can. But as their spellbinding Sunday afternoon performance showed, the Naughton sisters are no gimmick. The two extraordinary musicians demonstrated uncanny harmoniousness and technical precision, even when expressing individual soulfulness and spontaneity across two separate Steinways.

In H2 Dance Company’s current modern dance program, “All About a Table,” the same sturdy rectangular table appears in all three pieces composed by Hope College dance department faculty members. The company of 11 select pre-professional student dancers move around, atop, beneath the table, at turns, as desperate housewives, birds, and tragicomic men in control of the world’s fate — all at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Holland.

Besides directing Muskegon Civic Theatre’s latest production, Jason Bertoia is settling in to what he considers his dream job.

Sibling rivalry and timeless family dynamics set the stage for laughs and bickering in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the Tony Award-winning comedy on its way to Beardsley Theater.

Full of romance, dancing and drama, An American in Paris is set in the city of love at the end of World War II. The city is coming back to life, and so are the people and the romances between them.

Controlled chaos. An amorphous, musical blob. A marching band that thinks it’s a rock band.

When an orchestra performs a concerto — a composition featuring a solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment — one can usually expect to hear technical pyrotechnics from a violinist, a mind-boggling performance from a pianist, or even a thrilling showstopper from a woodwind player on clarinet or flute. But while many musicians view mastering a concerto as a rite of passage, some instrumentalists have more opportunities than others.

Eight years ago, Marty Kiefer created the West Michigan Gay Men’s Chorus, the first and only openly gay men’s choir in Grand Rapids.

An entrepreneurial spirit may not be the first thing that comes to mind when talking about orchestra conductors, but David Lockington said that spirit is exactly what helped him launch a successful career.