Can you spell collaboration?

Vincent Cardinal, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Musical Theatre Department and a board member at Dexter’s Encore Theatre, and Dan Cooney, Encore’s artistic director, see advantages for everyone in bringing a U-M production to the city, which they will do with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

“The Encore, with its intimate setting and commitment to producing Broadway-worthy productions, is the ideal venue for this collaboration,” Cardinal said in a press release. “Artistic Director, Dan Cooney, and I have been talking about a collaboration for quite some time now and we are thrilled that it is finally coming to fruition!”

Coming to fruition is what The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is all about. It’s a funny, goofy, but sensitive musical about a spelling bee. But it’s really about adolescence and the agony of growing up told through song, dance, humor, and spelling.

Cardinal is a director who gets the best out of his student casts. The spellers each have their quirks, anxieties, and troubles but for one shining moment, they get a chance to be in the spotlight. Cardinal and his cast balance the awkward humor of being young with spotlight moments that focus on the thoughts and worries of each character. 

The show, with music and lyrics by William Finn and book by Rachel Sheinkin, plays on the usual cliches of nerdy young people who are not in with the cool kids. But the play then gives each speller a chance to confront the terrors of growing up and their aspirations for the future.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features nu-metal from Taproot, grunge by Tension Splash, hip-hop by Kool Ade Kam, indie rock by Child Sleep, and rap by Drew Graham.

There’s plenty of color, creativity, and innovation to absorb visually at several local art exhibits and events this fall. Peruse our comprehensive list for something that catches your eye and expands your mind. 

Penny Stamps Speaker Series: Refik Anadol
October 19, 5:30 pm-7 pm
Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor

This University of Michigan Penny Stamps Speaker Series event raises the following question: If machines can “learn” or “process” individual and collective memories, can they also dream or hallucinate about them? Since 2016, world-renowned new media artist Refik Anadol has been exploring the relationship between the human mind, aesthetics, machine-learning technologies, and architecture to speculate responses.

Coining the terms “AI Data Painting,” “AI Data Sculpture,” and “latent cinema,” Anadol has been reflecting on new multisensory forms of narrating collective memory in physical and virtual spaces and inviting his audience to imagine alternative and dynamic realities.

Bellwether
Through October 19
Eastern Michigan University School of Art & Design, Ypsilanti

Bellwether is a two-person exhibition combining the photo collage work of Shanna Merola with Clara DeGalan’s landscape paintings. While DeGalan focuses on the spiritual and phenomenological aspects of humanity’s relationship to land, Merola’s work examines its socioeconomic impacts and ramifications.

Excerpted from "Things to Do: Fall Festivals Spotlight Arts, Culture, and Music in Washtenaw County" [Pulp, August 31, 2023]

Edgefest
October 18-21
Kerrytown Concert House, Ann Arbor

Edgefest returns to Ann Arbor for its 27th year to celebrate all kinds of exploratory jazz and improvisation. The festival features a roster of local and international artists performing at Kerrytown Concert House as well as the everybody-is-invited-to-play Edgefest Parade in the Farmer's Market area and a massive closing-night concert at Bethlehem UCC featuring Tim Berne’s Oceans And, The Forest Percussion Ensemble, and the Michael Malis Ensemble premiering a new composition written specifically for Edgefest 2023.

Other highlights include Ann Arborites Tim Haldeman and Jesse Kramer paying tribute to the late Barbara Kramer, a longtime supporter of local artists and Jesse’s mother, on October 18; Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Tomeka Reid trio on October 19; the Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet, Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio, and Alexander Hawkins/Joe McPhee/Tomeka Reid trio, and James B. Lewis/Chad Taylor duo on October 20; the Kaleigh Wilder and Ben Hall quartet with Jaribu Shahid and Ken Vandermark as well as the Tomeka Reid-led Hemphill Stringtet on October 21 honoring the music of Julius Hemphill.

Listen to music from some of the artists at this year's Edgefest:

As an accomplished songwriter, Bill Edwards often tells stories from multiple perspectives across an astonishing catalog of songs.

This time, the prolific Ann Arbor singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist opted to share his own stories on his new Americana album, So Far.

“The songs are all, without exception, autobiographical, making this the most personal record I’ve ever released. I’ve reached an age where it seemed like it was time to look both backward and forward,” Edwards said.

“The future is never guaranteed, and I wanted some of these feelings captured. There’s a lot of emotional territory covered on the album, and it all feels true to me.”

On So Far, Edwards features 14 tracks that collectively reflect on a life filled with optimism, love, gratitude, loss, wisdom, and nostalgia. The album’s honest sentiment, introspective lyrics, and earnest instrumentation invite listeners to contemplate their own lives alongside Edwards.

“I wrote probably 50 songs that may have been candidates for this record over the past year or so,” he said. “I’m always writing, and these tunes got swapped in and out as new material came to be.”

I recently spoke with Edwards about opening for Rodney Crowell, writing tracks for So Far, recording his new album, hosting an October 18 album release show at The Ark, and working on new material.

Jungah Han doesn’t try to copy a successful look from a previous production of a play, musical, or opera she is designing. She doesn’t look at photos or read about what other designers have done, and she tells her University of Michigan students to begin without preconceptions, too.

At times—more often when she’s designing in the United States than abroad—she’s been asked to reproduce what’s been done in other productions.

She’s not interested in those jobs.  

Han, who joined the faculty at the U-M School of Music, Theatre, and Dance last fall, is a theater artist. She brings her own response to a play, in collaboration with the director’s vision and those of others on the design team.  

Yet, Han didn’t even know what theater was when she enrolled in Kangwon National University in her native South Korea. There, she studied business. “Part of business is marketing and advertising. I was interested in the design part,” recalls Han, who moved to Honolulu to study desktop publishing at Hawaii Pacific University. 

Then, a tidal change.

Jeff Daniels’ funny, silly, and embraceable comedy Diva Royale is—as the program announces—back by public demand at his Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea.

Three stay-at-home Michigan moms form a close bond with their devotion to Canadian diva Celine Dion and their discontent with home life. Dion is their anchor. They have all the albums, they know all the words to all the songs, they know the heartaches she’s endured and they also love (love, love, love) the movie Titanic, where Dion’s soaring voice gives lift to the love affair of poor Jack and well-to-do Rose.

When they discover that their goddess will be performing in the Big Apple, they are ready to set out on the adventure of a lifetime. As they tell us these events happened in 2019 BC—before covid.

The play is told in a fast-paced, frenetic style that keeps the jokes, the antics, and occasionally, the stinging truth at a high pitch. If one joke fails to amuse you, the next one will have you howling, as the audience was throughout the play at the press opening.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features evocative electronics by Justin Walter, modular synth miniatures by fling ii, indie rock by counter magic and The City Lines, and blackened death metal by Nightkin.

In 1955, playwright Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker became a Broadway hit that ran for 486 performances, toured successfully, became a movie, and was embraced by regional and community theaters across the country. Today, Wilder’s play is rarely performed because of Hello Dolly!

“It’s an American classic and it doesn’t get done because Hello, Dolly! gets done,” said Wendy Wright, the director of the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s production of The Matchmaker, which will run October 19-22 at the Arthur Miller Theatre.

Hello, Dolly! is, of course, the hit musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s play with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. The song "Hello, Dolly!" was a mega-hit for Louis Armstrong before the musical was up and running, and the musical gave Carol Channing her greatest role. It, too, became a movie with Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau.

The Matchmaker has an interesting history. It began as a one-act play in England in 1835 and was expanded into a full-length play by an Austrian playwright in 1842. In 1938, Wilder, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist, created an American version of the story that he called The Merchant of Yonkers. It flopped. But Wilder regrouped, put the focus on Dolly, and created The Matchmaker. He won the Pulitzer for the plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and the novella, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

University of Michigan alums Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca host the podcast “Sounds Fake But Okay” and recently came out with their new nonfiction book, Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else. The book delves into what it means to be asexual and aromatic. Along the way, they define many terms, both in the glossary at the start of the book and in subsequent chapters. They offer their own personal examples and quotations about identities from other people who responded to a survey. 

Like many things, asexuality and aromanticism are on a spectrum, referred to in the book as aspectrum or aspec. Costello and Kaszyca describe their understanding of this range of perspectives and identities as having “purple-colored glasses”:

Once a person first puts on those purple-colored glasses and sees the potential a new mindset unleashes, it’s understandable that they may not want to take them off. It’s understandable that one may choose to embrace the unknown and the uncategorizable in contexts beyond relationships with one another and apply what the aspec lens teaches us to their relationship with themselves.

The authors emphasize the many variations along the aspectrum, given that “the aspectrum is a seemingly infinite trove of words and concepts and love whose combined meaning cannot possibly be fully mastered by a single mortal being.” Aspectrum is not one-size-fits-all but rather a plethora of individualities to which a person may relate.