This Saturday, April 5th at 4:00pm, the University of Michigan Women’s Glee Club will be performing at Hill Auditorium. This talented group of women has a plethora of songs lined up, so it would be in your best interest to join them on Saturday afternoon for some beautiful music!
Tickets for this concert are $5 for students, or FREE when you use a Passport to the Arts.
Who: Michigan Opera Theater
What: William Bolcom’s Opera A View from the Bridge
Where: Detroit Opera House, 1526 Broadway St, Detroit, MI 48226
When: April 5, 9, 11, 12 at 7:30 April 13 at 2:30
Tickets: $25 for University of Michigan students. Tickets must be purchased online at http://www.michiganopera.org using promo code GoBlue.
Over the next two weeks Michigan Opera Theater will be presenting local composer William Bolcom’s opera A View from the Bridge. Based upon Arthur Miller’s play of the same name, the opera follows the tragedy which follows when Eddie Carbone cannot come to terms with his niece falling in love with an immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn. The role of Marco will be played by UM student Jonathan Lasch.
Sung in English with supertitles. 2.5 hour run time.
Who: JOHNNYSWIM
When: Saturday, April 5th @ 8pm
Where: The Ark
Tickets: $20 General Admission
The married musical duo JOHNNYSWIM are bringing their mix of folk, soul, and pop to Ann Arbor on April 5th as they perform at The Ark in promotion of their new album, Diamonds, out April 29th. Featured on 2014’s VH1 You Oughta Know, twosome Amanda Sudano-Ramirez and Abner Ramirez combine impeccable lyrics with powerful vocals and a captivating stage chemistry that you won’t want to miss.
For a little taste of their versatile sound, check out the music video for their 2013 single Heart Beats, their toe tapper Home, and Abner’s killer falsetto in a live performance of Pay Dearly, featured on the upcoming record.
I saw the opening screening of the Ann Arbor Film Festival this Tuesday. Ranging from 1-27 minutes in length, every single film presented was a unique experience unlike anything the standard moviegoing experience offers. I highly encourage my fellow student body and Ann Arbor residents to participate in this film festival in future years. Ranging from narrative to experimental, the opening screening was an excellent primer on the unique film culture the festival offers.
One of the most visceral and difficult pieces presented was Cut, a 13-minute collaboration between two German filmmakers. Cut is an experimental narrative which contains frequent visual motifs of red and white across a disparate group of images–some traditionally beautiful, such as a woman adorning herself with lipstick, while other shots were disturbing–shots of people recovering from surgery, bug bites, and other graphic imagery. Cut made me cringe from start to finish, even for shots that I would normally consider aesthetically pleasing. This is not a filmic experience I would voluntarily engage with in my leisure time. Cut was thrust upon me by the festival amongst a bundle of other films. Nevertheless, the harrowing experience was highly rewarding, forcing me to reconsider not only the mechanics of visual storytelling, but also to question what I consider to be beautiful. The juxtaposition of graphic, disturbing imagery sharing similar color tones to traditionally beautiful photography demonstrated how arbitrary and contrived cultural beauty imperatives are.
Another picture which caught my attention was the Division, barely a minute long and the shortest piece amongst the anthology. This stop-motion piece shows the filmmaker tearing a single piece of paper into increasingly smaller divisions. What begins as a mundane action turns into a compelling thought experiment: how small must a physical object become before it loses its “thingness”? Division is both visually stimulating and intellectually provocative, engaging the audience with intriguing visuals, bombarding them with a sequence of complicated imagery.
Based on audience reaction, the most popular piece in the opening screening may have been A Million Miles Away, an experimental take on a traditional story. A Million Miles Away is a journey into the emotional minefield that is the high school experience. Told through the perspectives of high school students of disparate social standing and a strange substitute teacher, this entirely female ensemble performance renders the psychological territory of the high school world in a way that I have not seen any mainstream high school movie do. A Million Miles Away publishes several characters’ text messages on-screen, simultaneously satirizing the low-attention-span nature of communication and glorifying the unifying capabilities of mnemonic communication shorthand. The emotional resonance of the film lies in its fearless intent to capture a more personal inquiry into the psychological reality of the high school experience, not only from the perspective of various students, but also from the perspective of the substitute teacher–the furthest outside the high school.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a highly non-traditional film-going experience. I would be the first person to admit this isn’t the place I’d go to for decompression, designate as a hangout for my friends after a day of work, or bring a first date to. This is an experience which challenges what the traditional moviegoing experience should be.
The Great God Pan is a fine display of the quality and professionalism that the RC Players can demonstrate. I had the benefit of being able to watch the director go over notes on Thursday before the rehearsal and see the care and craft that goes into a performance like this. I saw the kind of unpretentious attention to detail and critical analysis that leads — in any discipline: writing, theater, math, history, construction — to real quality in the final product. It’s easy to forget the importance of certain roles, such as lighting or stage management, which, when done well, as they were, go unnoticed. I’m glad I was there, and it was also very interesting to see notes being read about a performance that I hadn’t seen and didn’t know anything about, and then to see the show and connect the notes and suggestions to the play itself.
The play opens with an old primary school friend (who happens to be gay) of our protagonist talking with him for the first time since their childhood. They are presumed to be in their mid-ish-thirties now. He tells him that he was abused by his father when he was younger, and is mounting a lawsuit against him. He wants to know if our protagonist remembered his — the friend’s — father doing anything to him at the time.
It’s heavy subject matter, but the play deals with it tastefully. It does so by rarely dealing with it directly. We see him with his family and long-time girlfriend, with the idea of past abuse hanging over everything, adding depth and subtlety to each interaction. At no point is shock used to cheap effect. At no point is it preachy or proselytizing. No description of the event to audience gasps. No easy invocation of a head-shaking audience solidarity over the evils of molestation. Crying onstage is difficult to pull off, and it can easily break the spell, but in the one scene when the protagonist does, it felt — to me — earned.
The performances were all great, and a few stood out in particular. The actor playing the mother gave an incredibly believable performance while not sacrificing a sharp comic timing, and the character of the psychiatric client portrayed anxiety in a way that felt true.
In case I’ve given the wrong impression, the play was not about abuse. Nor is it about sexuality. More than anything else, it’s a meditation on memory and identity. The main character vehemently denies that anything that happened to him so long ago can’t possible affect who he is now. Home-video-style recordings used to represent memory are integrated into the show. The protagonist visits and old babysitter who has begun to forget. A side story involving a client of the girlfriend, who is a psychiatrist, was disconnected, but the strength of the performance and how interesting it was carried it.
I fully recommend seeing it, and luckily, if you live in Ann Arbor or you’ll be here over summer, there’s still a chance to if you haven’t yet. The Redbud Theater in Ann Arbor will be putting on a performance on May 29th, 30th, and 31st. The RC Players will be putting on a show called Picasso on April 10th, 11th, and 12th, which I can only expect will be very good.
I’d like to take a moment to freak out about the brilliant lighting scheme of “The Magic Flute”. This opera is, I think, about finding a compromise between dark and light, between pure disorder and pure order, but doing so through the eyes of a child. This might not make any sense to you, but I thought that the lighting portrayed that beautifully. There was a particular circle that was useful in telling me the time of day and how I should feel about it by the color that was lighting it up.
Anyway, now for a quick summary:
“The Magic Flute” begins in the bedroom of a young girl. Her parents are fighting, it’s thunderstorming in the night, and her wardrobe doors are forced open by a young prince running away from a dragon. The Queen of the Night sends this Prince Tamino on a quest to save her daughter from her kidnapper, Sarastro (who didn’t actually kidnap her because Pamina is the daughter of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro). Pamina and Tamino fall in love while Tamino’s friend, Papageno, can’t learn to keep quiet, but in the end they manage to stop to the war between Sarastro (who appears to be a kind of lord of light) and the Queen of the Night.
That was very quick and will probably have Emanuel Schikaneder rolling in his grave, but I wanted to get that out of the way to talk about the cast. Jacob Wright and Jonathan Harris, who played Tamino and Sarastro, respectively, have outstanding voices that I remembered from “The Barber of Seville” last semester. Katy Clark’s soprano was thrilling as Queen of the Night, and Natasha Drake performed a beautiful Pamina. All of the leads were phenomenal, and I am amazed to think that there is another set of entirely different Michigan students who are equally as talented.
Although at times this show was a little slow and heavy, it was also fanciful and sentimental, and I especially enjoyed the ending. After all of their hardships, so many circumstances vying to tear them apart, Pamina and Tamino find a way to be together in the light of day, away from the chaotic Queen of the Night. As an audience we find ourselves again in the long-forgotten little girl’s bedroom where her parents are bringing her a tray for breakfast. Day has dawned over night just as it always will, but I do wish we could have seen the dragon again.
