Between the two acts of Seeing/Seen, Wellspring/Cory Terry & Dancers’ Fall Concert of Dance, the audience is invited onto the stage to interact and make noise with drumsticks on the Singing Wall Sculptures, an enormous set of suspended gongs and other metalwork created by Lisa Renee Coons and Steven E. Pierce that is prettier to look at than to hear.
German conductor Hans von Bülow coined the famous snap judgment of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass: “an opera, though in ecclesiastical robes.”
Regardless of the form it takes or how much time has passed since a now-famous adolescent girl documented her life in a red checkered notebook while in hiding from the Nazis during World War II in Amsterdam, “The Diary of Anne Frank” remains powerfully moving.
“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.
