For those who couldn’t catch it on Broadway: Memphis isn’t just another jukebox show.
In the 1950s, Father Knows Best was one of the most popular shows in America. The classic family sitcom starred Robert Young and Jane Wyatt, among others, including the youngest actress on set, Lauren Chapin, who played Kitty, Father’s youngest child.
Randy Wyatt is a local playwright and professor at Aquinas College, where he directs the theater program. A native of Marshfield, Mass., Wyatt went to college in Grand Rapids and grad school in Texas and Minneapolis. After getting his master’s of fine arts in directing, he worked in Chicago for six months before Aquinas contacted him about a position. It’s been 10 years since.
The Grand Rapids Ballet School Junior Company members, all students between the ages of 10 and 19, have an opportunity to perform limited roles throughout the year in the Grand Rapids Ballet professional shows; however, once a year they present their own performance. It is, in essence, a very sophisticated and demanding recital for developing dancers to push themselves as performers, perhaps before they’re fully fledged artists in their own right.
Danny Gurwin’s tribute to Tony Bennett, Rags to Riches, currently at Farmers Alley Theatre in Kalamazoo, is a sweet love fest. Love for Tony Bennett, love for the music, especially those for which he’s known, and love for friendships that withstand the test of time.
When the lights come up on The New Vic Theatre's new folk musical revue, “Trios," eleven actor singers play stringed instruments and sing "Walk Right in, Sit Right Down," the easily familiar song for those who remember the Rooftop Singers' making it a hit in 1963 as well as those who don't. So much of American folk music is simply part of our collective consciousness because of the ways it has permeated popular culture and music and been handed down through the years from artist to artist.
To close out its “Outsider”-themed season, Kalamazoo College has picked the Pulitzer-nominated, Tony-winning musical In the Heights, conceived by future Hamilton star/creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, with a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes and a score by Miranda.
“Largo al factotum” is perhaps one of the most recognizable arias in opera. The boastful tongue twister (try saying “-issimo” ten times fast) is the quintessential display of operatic bravura as Figaro explains why he’s the most popular guy in Seville.
Of the seemingly infinite binaries into which the world can be divided, a telling one for theater-going audiences is those who are drawn to musicals that feature singing nuns and those who must be dragged kicking and screaming to such shows. This critic falls squarely in the latter camp.
Not long after the 1955 play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” earned renowned 20th Century American playwright Tennessee Williams his second Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award, he published an essay in Playbill magazine about the playwright’s relationship to the director of his plays.
The songs outshine the script — how could it be otherwise? — in “Motown the Musical,” written by none other than Motown founder Berry Gordy (adapting his autobiography, “To Be Loved: The Music, The Magic, The Memories of Motown”) and scored with more than 50 of the immortal tunes his record label issued between 1958 and 1983.
Lizzy Stone, a music theatre major at Western Michigan University, said her parents enrolled her at Portage Northern High School specifically for its esteemed drama program.
Rube Goldberg is more than just a man — he’s also an adjective. Defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply,” the iconic American cartoonist and illustrator’s work — including his famous invention drawings — will be on display this month at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in its latest exhibit.
Many people recognize and collect Edward S. Curtis’ portraits of Native Americans and canyon and desert landscapes in America’s west, but his real intent was to document the lives of the indigenous tribes he spent nearly 30 years studying.
