After years of writing about monsters, Fangs and Twang didn’t expect to find them in human form.

The country-rock trio of Billy LaLonde (drums, vocals), Andy Benes (guitar, vocals), and Joe Bertoletti (bass, vocals) discovered some people started spreading monstrous misinformation at the height of the pandemic.

In response, Benes channeled that disbelief and frustration into the Ypsilanti band’s opening track, “You Monster,” from its fourth album of the same name.

Alongside explosive electric guitar, organ, and fiddle, he sings, “It’s hard to be you and me / When we can’t tell what’s true / It seems to me that we can’t agree / Even that the sky is blue.”

“That song came to me … and it was done in 20 minutes,” Benes said. “All of the lyrics and all of the music just came out, and that was what was on my mind. [It’s about] not having a common set of facts or a common language that we’re speaking anymore as people and how horrible that is.”

The title track also lays the groundwork thematically for the horrors and delights Fangs and Twang uncovers on You Monster.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) draws experimental filmmakers from across the world, but ever since it began in 1963 it's also made room for local creators to show their works.

The 62nd edition of AAFF is running March 26-31, and the fest's website and YouTube page have a ton of info, interviews, and articles about the hundreds of films that will be screened this year alongside dozens of social events, panels, and exhibitions.

But it's a lot. Like, a lot a lot, which means you would have to comb through a ton of material to figure out the creatives with local connections.

So, being the hyperlocal fans that we are, we did that for you and collected the events, screenings, and installations created by Washtenaw County-associated artists, curators, and film lovers who will have a moment to shine at the 2024 Ann Arbor Film Festival.

David MacGregor's plays have been performed in 15 countries, including India, Israel, South Korea, and Tasmania. 

But the Michigan-born artist develops most of his world premieres right here at home.

Among the works the resident playwright for The Purple Rose Theatre Company debuted on the Chelsea stage are his Sherlock Holmes trilogy, Vino Veritas, Gravity, Consider the Oyster, The Late Great Henry Boyle, and his latest play, the hilarious The Antichrist Cometh, which begins previews there on March 22 and opens March 29.

John, an advertising exec, hasn’t seen Duncan, his old college roommate, for years. John and his wife, Lili, have Duncan and his fiancée, Fiona, for dinner. Fiona is devoutly religious and notices things that bring her to a startling conclusion:

John is the Antichrist!  

“The basic idea for this play occurred to me a long time ago," MacGregor says. "I’m not personally religious, but I’ve read the Bible and Koran because they’re such important and influential texts. The Book of Revelations says the Antichrist will arrive on Earth."

MacGregor named his protagonist John, referencing the Book of John and the letters of John, but says, “John is a regular everyday guy who gradually realizes he might be the Antichrist.” 

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

This week features alt-country by Ani Mari, an improvisation by T. Greens, drum 'n' bass by Rainforest, electronica by Elevator Raider, and jams from Chirp.

Mike Green listened to his inner voice but wasn’t sure where it would take him.

The folk singer-songwriter, guitarist, and booking agent ruminated for years about how to share his life experiences.

“I always thought as a younger adult that I wanted to write a book of my personal philosophy, but I never had anything to say,” said Green, who resides in Ann Arbor. “Then when I started writing these songs [during the pandemic] … and all these things I’ve always thought about, they just sort of came out in poetic ways.”

What resulted were 12 insightful tales for his debut album, Listening for the Bell, which explores the ups and downs of following your instincts.

“There’s a bunch of those songs that were written that way, and I just trusted it,” said Green, who started as a touring musician in 1978. “And then what I realized early on—after studying all of this—is that I had been in songwriting school for nearly 40 years.”

That schooling came from representing artists like Utah Phillips, Carrie Newcomer, Jesse Winchester, and John McCutcheon as a booking agent and listening to singer-songwriters like Greg Brown, Kenny White, Chris Smither, and Stephen Fearing.

“Chris Smither, probably more than anybody, is the gold standard to me on how you marry lyrics and words and have them come out … to be that way,” said Green, who started as a booking agent in 1986 and opened his own agency in 2004. “There’s no other way you can say it, and if you don’t say it just the right way, it doesn’t fit.”

As the opera begins, Elizabeth is hung for the murder of her husband, the playwright John Cree. 

Is she guilty of poisoning him?  

John is a serial killer, in the fashion of Jack the Ripper.  

Or is he? 

You’ll have about an hour and a half to solve the puzzles in Elizabeth Cree, which unravel in 29 scenes and over four timelines and include plays and vaudeville within an opera. 

“It’s an interesting and complicated piece,” says Gregory Keller, who directs Unversity of Michigan opera students in this one-act chamber opera, sung in English, that runs March 21-24 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Likening it to a hedge maze, he says, “We’re presenting it as a theatrical puzzle, a house of mirrors that the audience gets lost in and, maybe, found in. Each time you go into the maze, you make another connection.”

It’s so much so that conductor Kirk A. Severtson, who coordinates opera at U-M, says audiences who see it twice will delight in discovering Easter eggs, once they know what happened. “You have to see it more than once to get all the nuances,” he says. 

But those who see it once will have a chance to figure out just what is happening, after observing three gruesome murders almost in front of their eyes: Keller opted to stylize the crimes, presenting them as Victorian shadow plays.  

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

This week features alt-country by Scotty Karate, modern classical by Clangstrum, psychedelic country by John Holk & the Sequins, hip-hop by HUES and Gold Midas, and prog-metal by The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

Sometimes the most challenging part of a creative project is figuring out the best means of communicating a story to an audience. 

In the case of Becoming BFA: The Showcase Showdown, creator Andrew Otchere—who graduated from the University of Michigan last spring with a degree in acting—initially thought he and a handful of student collaborators would be writing a television pilot when they gathered during their junior year.

“Then, as we talked about the concept, one aspect that became most important to me was that I really wanted to create something that would build a stronger community within my class of actors,” said Otchere, who just recently moved to Los Angeles (where he’s auditioning and writing). “I wanted to make sure that everybody was included. … By our senior year, there were about 18 of us … so it became a little too much to just be a pilot episode. There would be too many characters.”

So this would-be pilot episode became a short film that ran nearly 40 minutes. 

But that wasn’t the final word on the project’s format, either. As Otchere submitted BFA to film festivals—it landed a screening at the Laughs After Dark Comedy Festival in Las Vegas—he started getting feedback that pointed him in a different direction entirely.

“One of the best pieces of advice I got was about how we are currently in the height of the digital age, where TikTok and short-form video has taken control,” Otchere said. “And being a story that focuses on the Gen Z perspective, which the target audience is also in … it only made sense to make episodes that are shorter, so we could put it out on TikTok, or create a mini web series of it. So that inspired me to cut [the film] up into nine five-minute episodes. And since it took form as a web series, it just felt like it was received so much better. People were excited for new episodes and gave a lot of feedback.”

The seed for making Becoming BFA—which focuses on students preparing for their Senior Showcase, when they get to perform in front of entertainment industry professionals—took root in Otchere’s freshman year (2019-20), when he and his fellow student actors joked about feeling like they were living in a reality show.

When Bruce Morey was looking for a play to direct for the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre, he wanted a comedy that would engage a large cast and that wouldn’t be too time-consuming for cast members. Instead of one play, Morey found six plays in one package, David Ives’ All in the Timing.

“I wanted to do a comedy that didn’t have any heavy issues about it, just fun,” he said. “All in the Timing is a series of 10-minute plays and I wanted to explore 10-minute plays, which I think is great for community players because you can put a lot of people into these plays if you do it right. They’re shorter, so for people who work full time and have lives outside of theater, this is a great experience for them because they can come in and do a 10-minute play or a 15-minute play and maybe it’s their first experience with it. It’s self-contained and ideal for community players.”

The Ann Arbor Civic Theatre will present Ives’ six-pack of short comedies, March 14-17 at the Arthur Miller Theatre in Ann Arbor.

Director Morey and producer Nicole Arruda are working together on producing and directing.

Rosalind Thorne launches an investigation when Marianna Levitton hires her to find out the cause of her poisoning in the cozy mystery called The Secret of the Lady’s Maid by Darcie Wilde. As the plot unfolds, the attempted murders by arsenic are just the start of problems that expand to include jewel theft and murders. 

This book is the second in the series called “The Useful Woman Mysteries,” which begins with The Secret of the Lost Pearls and features Rosalind, who's the main character in other novels by Wilde.

Wilde is one of several pseudonyms for University of Michigan alum and Ypsilanti-based author Sarah Zettel. Her period novels take place in Regency London, where the haut ton socialize and those in domestic service wait on them. 

Rosalind possesses a keen eye for details that do not line up. Through observing people and delicately asking the right questions, she pieces together the story. As she is talking with Cate, a member of the Levitton family that Rosalind is scrutinizing, Rosalind displays her cleverness and discretion when she asserts: