This month, Grand Rapids Symphony offers two spectacular, accessible, festive shows: Holiday Pops and Cirque de Noël. 

Two and a half weeks before Wellspring/Cori Terry & Dancers opened their first live, in-person performance since before the pandemic, one of the dancers tested positive for COVID-19, causing them to scrap one of the central dances they’d been rehearsing for “Unbound,” their fall concert of dance that opened Friday.

It’s been more than five years since the original Murder for Two, the musical murder mystery featuring more than a dozen characters but only two actors and a singular piano, wowed Kalamazoo audiences as part of the Gilmore Keyboard Festival with the high-octane, madcap, vaudevillian, award-winning comedy.

The 2020 Gilmore Festival was thwarted, like so many live performances, by the pandemic; however, the Rising Stars Series has returned, offering eager piano enthusiasts an opportunity to experience playing from the world’s best and brightest keyboard stylists either live, in-person, or live streamed from Kalamazoo.

Arts events across West Michigan in November 2021.

It would be incorrect to say that St. Cecilia Music Center returns to live music this month; during the pandemic, they staged many virtual shows. 

In 2016, Murder For Two ran at Farmers Alley Theatre, in Kalamazoo. The musical, which centered (antically) on a detective’s interrogation of thirteen suspects, was a hit; co-founder and artistic director Jeremy Koch told me that it is among the theater’s most requested re-stagings.

The Barn Theatre in Augusta is making people’s dreams come true in bringing their magnificent, fan-favorite rendition of cult-classic “The Rocky Horror Show” to the stage just in time for Halloween.

The idea of transforming visual art into an immersive experience is not new, and the tremendous success of the touring Van Gogh Immersive Experiences recently is but one extraordinary example.

Though first appearing Off-Broadway in 1995, Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” feels aptly named now, especially in its beautiful form as the first show at Farmers Alley Theatre in 600-or-so days since the pandemic shut them down.