Last night, the University of Michigan School of Music’s production of Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) opened in the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Michigan’s music students always bring their best to the opera stage and pit, and I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of this semester’s collaborations. Luckily there are still three more chances for you to see this beloved, classic opera this weekend!
Friday, March 23rd at 8pm
Saturday, March 24th at 8pm
Sunday, March 25th at 2pm
Student tickets are just $12 and can be purchased here or at the Michigan League.
One of the world’s most popular dance companies is coming to Ann Arbor this weekend! This Nederlands Dans Theater will be performing March 23rd and 24th at the Power Center at 8pm. This Dutch company’s shows are full of bold repertory and breathtaking movement by some of the worlds most talented dancers. The program includes three works, two of them being Shoot the Moon and Singuliére Odyssée which were created by the artistic director Paul Lightfoot and Sol León and the third being Statement by Crystal Pite. As this company is known for its progressive and creative works this is a show you don’t want to miss!
Tickets are still available so head over to https://ums.org/performance/nederlands-dans-theater/ to get the few that are left! Come out and enjoy an incredible performance and escape in to the world of dance.
Adaptations come in all qualities. Some are blamed for adhering too closely to their source material, some for veering too far. Fortunately, A Wrinkle in Time had neither of these problems. Unfortunately, it was also not an entertaining or even comprehensible movie. It attempts rousing and achieves mild curiosity.
The character who must suffer through the brunt of the inspirational speeches is Meg (Storm Reid). Her father, a supposed scientist, disappeared four years ago, leaving Meg adrift in a sea of mean girls. The situation is portrayed so unrealistically though, that it is difficult to summon too much sympathy. No character seems to exhibit recognizable, human behavior. Meg’s classmates are cartoon bullies that have only ever existed in movies. Her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), is a precocious, all-knowing genius. When Meg’s classmate, Calvin (Levi Miller), joins the adventure, his sudden interest is swept away in a single line. This lack of any explanation occurs regularly, but never ceases to be frustrating. It is not just that the movie fails to explain its more obscure science fiction elements. These can be difficult to articulate even for more sophisticated films. Perhaps I do not need to know exactly how one travels through time and space. But the film also fails at the most basic levels: character and plot. The characters could be interesting, but the plot whisks them from point to point without any pause for development. Most of the time, Meg is not given enough information to grant her agency. It is hard to cheer for Mrs. Which (Oprah) when she urges Meg to be a warrior when we barely know what Meg is fighting against or how she can fight. Instead, the antagonist is ambiguously named ‘It’ and given no backstory. If that sounds familiar, it is because I am running out of ways to describe my frustration with this film. For a movie with a budget of 103 million dollars, there simply isn’t much there.
Perhaps more interesting is the conversation around the movie and what it represents. You cannot separate A Wrinkle in Time from the fact that it features a young black woman, directed by a black woman. The film is inherently empowering simply by existing. The context, thus, becomes inextricably tied to the film’s message. Ava DuVernay sets out to create a film as unique, as legitimizing of black womanhood. She doesn’t quite succeed. She is hampered by her own goal and overreaches. But it is history, itself, that forcers DuVernay’s hand. There has never been a movie like A Wrinkle in Time. Blockbuster movies with budgets over 100 million dollars are not handed over to black women. Until now. DuVernay stuffs her movie full of platitudes, but it is her chance to reach out to those young girls in the audience, her chance to influence the narrative. If the movie veers too much toward the falsely inspirational, it is because it tries to distill hundreds of years of self-care and female empowerment into two hours. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another hundred for the next leap forward.
Interested in foreign films or Korean cinema? The Bacchus Lady tells the story of elderly prostitute So-Young, who ends up caring for an abandoned boy named Min-Ho. This film (nominated for several awards) promises to engage in some profound issues, from the reality of growing older, to disabilities, and the welfare system.
The Nam Center for Korean Studies is graciously showing this movie for FREE, but only at the Michigan Theater on Sat., March 31 at 1:00 PM.
It’s been some time since I’ve studied art history, but I remember one of the first things I learned about looking at a composition is the way the eye is directed to move around the piece of art. During nearly every musical number of In the Heights, I found my eyes moving around it in a way that felt deliberate – and I was unstoppably stunned the entire time.
From its very first scene with Graffiti Pete dancing, spray-paint can in hand and somehow defying all sorts of gravity, I don’t think my jaw left the floor. It was an excellent primer for the choreography of the rest of the show. During intermission, I flipped through the program and was equally stunned to learn that this show had two debuting choreographers in its cohort. Needless to say, those involved in the show radiated their talent into one of the best MUSKET shows that I’ve seen. The main cast and ensemble had near-perfect unison in their group movements while keeping their voices strong and smooth. A hallmark of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musicals, I enjoyed the incorporation of rap and hip hop and loved that the actors also seemed to enjoy it.
The cast, primarily actors of color, seemed made for the roles — especially Usnavi. While this was my first introduction to the musical itself, I felt that his casting could not have been more perfect as the bodega owner close-knit with those around him. Additionally, his character was such a centrally driving factor of the show’s main themes: community and the familial support that comes of it, and sense of identity in terms of the idea of “home” as an immigrant. The show also explored themes of being a first-generation college student, gentrification, cultural identity, and past versus future with the turbulent present that lies in between.
Cast and director Bruna d’Avila answering audience questions following the Saturday performance.
Following the show — which made me laugh, cry, and be completely astounded — I stuck around for the talkback with the cast and director Bruna d’Avila. As a senior and having seen 6/8 of the MUSKET shows put on during my undergrad career, I hadn’t experienced an addition like this and was excited to hear their insights. Several other impressed viewers (from high schoolers in a theatre group to adults who have emigrated from Latin American countries) sat around me and praised the crew for doing incredible work to highlight a story to which they expressed their personal relations to and respective admiration for the show. Stories such as these are beyond what I personally have experienced, though I felt grateful that a show such as this one exists for those whose stories it mirrors as well as a method for others to better understand these complicated notions of home and new life in America.
When asked about her favorite musical number of In the Heights, d’Avila excitedly spoke about “Carnaval del Barrio” and the importance of waving your flag proudly. This was a number with which I was also enamored both because of the cast displaying flags of specific Latin American countries and because it was one of those numbers full of complexity. Several lines of verse from its main characters worked into and beside one another as the song concluded, and I found my attention moving from one to the next in a circular pattern before realizing just how inimitable this scene was as a climactic moment.
The ending scene of musical number “Carnaval del Barrio”
There was not one part of this show that I disliked — every cast member appeared devoted to their roles and it showed. Each named character had their own arcs, even the piragua vendor/comic relief, Piragüero. Similar to the works of authorial genius Victor Hugo, the characters were interconnected with one another in a way that made the show feel well-rounded, as opposed to restricting certain characters to certain storylines. Everybody knew each other, which made the sense of community and family (which are not mutually exclusive) especially strong.
MUSKET has kept my attention all four years that I have been here, and I have made it a point to see as many of their shows as possible. Each of those shows have left me feeling impressed and grateful that such a talented group of people can become a familial community over a short span of time for a weekend of performance that blows us all away. If you also love musical theatre and are interested in getting involved with the team, the MUSKET family is always welcoming of new members.
The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) will hold the opening for its 23d Annual Exhibition tonight. The exhibit is the result of a year of collaboration between University of Michigan faculty, staff and students and incarcerated inmates across the state.
Founded in 1990, PCAP is a Residential College Program that has expanded to facilitate collaboration between inmates and artists through courses, publications, arts programming, workshops and more.
Kerry Myers, a free lance-journalist and photographer as well as a former inmate and acclaimed former editor of the prison news magazine at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, will be the event’s Keynote speaker next Thursday.
The full exhibition will be open March 21 through April 4.
Gallery times:
Sunday-Monday, 12pm-6pm
Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-7pm
Closed Sunday, April 1.
PCAP Exhibition Opening:
Date: Wednesday March 21
Time: 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: Duderstadt Center Gallery
Keynote Speaker:
Date: Thursday March 29
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Duderstadt Center Gallery
Image: Lee Latham, Boxing Floyd Mayweather and Family, Color Pencil, 2017
Last night, the University of Michigan School of Music’s production of Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) opened in the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Michigan’s music students always bring their best to the opera stage and pit, and I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of this semester’s collaborations. Luckily there are still three more chances for you to see this beloved, classic opera this weekend!
