Deos Contemporary Ballet’s 2024-2025 season finale, Awaken 25, reflected the mood of our times, offered a balm via movement, and showed the small but mighty company’s artistic and stylistic range in the wonderfully intimate space of Gezon Auditorium at Calvin University.
The next best thing to being a good person is appearing to be one, which is why four Broadway stars—well, two Broadway stars, one chorus member, and one actor-turned waiter—decide to find a cause to take on. Poverty’s too big, so they nix that idea. But reforming a small Indiana town that canceled prom rather than let a lesbian attend with her girlfriend? Easy as Hoosier pie. So they think, anyway, in The Prom, onstage at Circle Theatre, May 15-31. The musical takes a warm-hearted, funny look at the trouble we can get into when trying to do good, and the good that can result from it anyway.
As a haven for the arts, it’s no surprise West Michigan is home to a vibrant and diverse dance scene. We have a number of companies providing both classical ballet and contemporary dance at the highest level, constantly pushing dance to new spaces and new heights.
"I want the fairytale” reads a T-shirt for sale at DeVos during the run of Pretty Woman: The Musical. It echoes the iconic line from the 1990 film starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Much of the musical, in fact, is an echo of that celebrated rom-com and takes the fantasy of the film’s story to the next level by putting it to music.
Grand Rapids Ballet’s 2024-2025 season finale “Be Here Now” promised to capture the spirit of the 1960s but in ways far more nuanced and complex than the audience members who show up wearing giant round pink-tinted glasses, mod floral print mini dresses, and white go-go boots expect.
Daniela Liebman was 11, maybe 12, when it began to make sense. She had moved to Texas, where she was studying piano with Tamás Ungár. She was practicing the opening of a Mendelssohn piece on a little upright piano, trying to understand what a festival teacher was explaining, when suddenly she did.
Arts exhibitions and performances have returned in full swing to West Michigan. This season, there’s absolutely no shortage of concerts, symphonies, plays, musicals, ballet, visual arts and beyond. We have big Broadway shows, intimate and progressive plays, live performances with symphonies, dancers taking to the stage, and powerful art exhibitions. Here’s our guide to arts events for the month.
The core group of residents at Placid Pines Senior Care Center in the Adirondacks may identify with the fish in an aquarium swimming around and around, nothing much new of any given day, except a compatriot going belly up only to be soon forgotten. However, they actually are a gang of wits not unlike the members of the Algonquin Round Table—Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Tallulah Bankhead, among other literati luminaries of the 1920s who met regularly for lunch at the famed New York hotel.
The appeal of a jukebox musical is simple: audiences are drawn to music they know and love, to see a concert of hits, often part of the soundtrack of their lives, while also being told a story through those songs. It hardly matters in terms of popular opinion that the stories are often formulaic, the plots thin; it’s still a value-added experience to take in a live performance with singing, dancing, and storytelling that also takes you back to gently revisit poignant moments of your own life through familiar tunes. “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical” fits the bill quite beautifully, indeed.
Whether or not you know the name, you know the music. Monumental in its power, Carmina Burana has been used to score hundreds of commercials, television shows, films, campaign events, and Olympic contests.
