Chart-topping jazz pianist/singer Diana Krall kicked off the Ann Arbor Summer Festival’s main stage season on Tuesday night by making the nearly packed 3,500 seat Hill Auditorium feel as intimate and cozy as The Bird of Paradise.

That long-gone Main St. jazz club, which closed in 2004 after nearly 20 years in business, hosted performances from Krall early in her career (which she mentioned early in the evening); and I’m likely not the only one who had flashbacks of being in that smaller space again as Krall opened Tuesday night’s show with her fun, flirty take on “‘Deed I Do,” and then, shortly after, applied delicate, quiet keystrokes on the Nat King Cole hit “L.O.V.E.” – a song featured on Krall’s latest album, Turn Up the Quiet just released in May.

Some believe that there are two ways of looking at the world: as if everything is a miracle, or as if nothing is. Author Terri Tate prefers the former, and this belief guides her attitude and her memoir.

The Grosse Pointe native and former Ann Arbor resident will be reading from her debut book, A Crooked Smile, on Sunday, June 11, at 1 pm at Nicola’s Books. That Tate is here to share her journey with us is somewhat miraculous.

In 1991, Tate’s doctors diagnosed her with oral cancer and gave her a two percent chance of survival; however, “the book is not fundamentally a cancer memoir,” Tate shares. “It is mostly about the journey involved.”

Prior to becoming a writer, Tate worked as a nurse, a hypnotherapist (the first one in the Ann Arbor phone book!), and public speaker. And then came the oral cancer diagnosis.

Sometimes the best way to describe a band is to let the musicians do it themselves.

"Indie folk/pop duo band! Harmony-based, lyric-driven, simple and true," the married couple Mira Stanley and Chuck E. Costa wrote in an email about their duo, The Sea The Sea. "But the best way for us to describe it is to just say, come to a show! We’d love to sing for you."

You'll have a chance to be sung to by The Sea The Sea on Wednesday, June 7, when the duo returns to The Ark.

The ambiance and intimacy of the upstate New York couple's music evokes old-time folk, the mellow side of modern pop, and the technical precision of something not quite classical but not far from it. When you add in their thoughtful, intricate lyrics and their impeccably blended vocal harmonies, you’ve got music and musicians that are engaging on many levels.

I reached out to The Sea The Sea to ask them about the couple's union, the source of the band's name, and Stanley's time in Ann Arbor as a U-M student.

Sometimes, when you’re down and out, you have to pull yourself up not by your bootstraps, but by a pair of sparkly platform heels.

As least, that’s one way to read Matthew Lopez’s comedy The Legend of Georgia McBride, which opens at Theatre Nova Friday.

The play -- which premiered in New York in September 2015 -- tells the tale of an Elvis impersonator, Casey, who performs regularly at a failing bar in Panama City, Florida. Just as Casey’s wife learns that the couple will soon be parents, Casey finds himself in professional freefall: the bar’s owner has hired drag performers to see if they can help turn the bar’s fortunes around. But when one of the new hires faints before going on stage, Casey finds himself reluctantly filling in, only to discover that he’s not so bad at drag.

The first weekend of Cinetopia is over and I saw eight films in total. Sure, that’s more than the average person sees in a weekend but far fewer than the 400 seen by the programming team to select the 68 that make up the festival. Deciding what to see was difficult, and with so many intriguing options I often just chose on a whim. While I found something to admire in all that I saw, I really want to tell you about two of my favorites.

Any Ann Arbor townie will tell you there’s one place to be at 12 noon on Thursdays in late spring through the end of August: at Liberty Plaza for Sonic Lunch

On June 1, Sonic Lunch kicked-off its 10th year of free, live music events, and it had one of its local stars opening the season: Laith Al-Saadi, an Ann Arbor “hometown blues-rock hero,” in the words of Martin Bandyke from local radio station 107.1.

When I made my way past some roadblock barriers and into Liberty Plaza, I’d shown up just 5 minutes before noon and the place was already packed. I should have predicted as much with the gorgeous weather that day, not a cloud in sight. What I didn’t predict was no open spots or shade in sight, either. This poor ginger didn’t even think to bring her sunblock as she stood in the midday rays for an hour, but the chance to hear Al-Saadi’s performance was worth the sunburn.

A lot of folks blame the influx of tech companies in Ann Arbor as a prime reason for the rising rents that have gradually pushed portions of the creative community out of downtown. The Intermitten conference returns June 8 and 9 to remind us that artistic adventure and modern business success don't need to be mutually exclusive or adversarial (even if there's no immediate solution to the rent situation).

Now in its second year, Intermitten brings together speakers to discuss how "how creativity in both art and technology helps us add value to our home, work, and global communities," as stated on intermitten.org. "We're technology people with creative prowess and artistic people powered by tech, and we unite to discover the many ways in which working together and thinking creatively can help us accomplish our goals."

Trevor Scott Mays, co-founder of Intermitten and director of support operations for Duo Security, walked us through the event's brief history, current focus, and bright future.

Neighborhood Theatre Group (NTG) is an Ypsilanti-based theater company that was founded by Kristin Danko and Aaron Dean, two transplants from the Chicago theater scene. And it’s not an accident that Danko and Dean are also the director and playwright, respectively, for NTG’s newest musical, Dispatches From the Dumb Decade, which runs June 2-4 at Bona Sera Underground.

“The ethos of the entire company is that everybody does a little piece of something,” says Dean. Which also explains why the NTG House Band arranged the music for Dispatches From the Dumb Decade. According to Danko, “Once we realized that we all had talents outside of theater -- we all play instruments, write music, and sing -- we decided to start a band. We’re called the NTG House Band, and it’s a great way for us to reach a more diverse audience, and the music scene here in Ypsi is outstanding.”

Carey F. Whitepigeon's debut novel, Daughter of Dawn and Darkness: Book 1, Spark Aflight, tells the tale of a 17-year-old woman straddling two familial cultures. In this case, her parents not only come from different cultures but from entirely different planets!

"(The protagonist) Vivian grew up amongst her father’s people and knows nothing about her mother’s planet and people," said Whitepigeon, who grew up in Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and three children. "After receiving a letter from her maternal uncle, she becomes obsessed with getting to know more about that side of her family.”

The Ann Arbor-based rootsy string band Wire in the Wood has been playing in various incarnations for around 10 years, building a reputation as a creative and skilled live act. But until this year, the group had never gotten around to releasing an album.

“At this point we probably have like 60 songs,” says frontman and guitarist Billy Kirst. “And maybe three years ago, I said, ‘I’m not booking any more shows until we record an album.’ So we didn’t play for a little over a year … and we recorded the album.”

Recorded at Jim Roll’s Backseat Productions and released earlier this year, the album, All Fall Apart, showcases Kirst’s songwriting and the virtuoso playing of all the band’s members, including Jordan Adema (violin), Ryan Shea (bass), and Michael Spaly (mandolin). The sound Wire in the Wood creates weaves together elements of bluegrass, swing, jam-band improvisation, and beyond.