The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret takes place in Berlin's Kit Kat Klub. As an MC runs the show, an American writer, Clifford Bradshaw, and an English cabaret performer, Sally Bowles, become romantically involved.

But Cabaret is decidedly not a rom-com: The musical transpires in 1929-30, as the Nazis rise to power.

The University of Michigan will present Cabaret from October 3-12 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre.

“What drew me to Cabaret had very little to do with Sally Bowles,” wrote Harold Prince, who directed the first production on Broadway in 1966. “What attracted the authors and me was the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, the march on Selma, the murder of the three young men, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.”

Joe Masteroff’s book for Cabaret was based on a play, John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera, which in turn was based on a 1939 movie, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

A musical about the rise of Nazism in Germany might seem an unlikely candidate for success. Yet it won eight Tony Awards and has been restaged many times, sometimes without a political overlay, sometimes reflecting whatever the problems society was experiencing at the time.

This production, under the direction of André Garner with music direction by Catherine A. Walker, speaks to our country today.

On Sunday, July 6, two doctoral candidates and one newly minted Ph.D. from U-M’s School of Information (SI) will appear at hear.say brewing + theater, a westside Ann Arbor venue that's become a haven for improv.  

When Hana Chung, Hibby Thach, and Dr. Sylvia Darling take the stage, they won't be creating the improv—a trained troupe will be on hand, and the School of Information folks will appear as subject experts. That’s because college professors and grad students provide prompts for the improv players in a new kind of show they've dubbed Extra Credit.

On the first Sunday of each month, experts give 10-minute lectures, which are often humorous takes on serious subjects. These become the springboards for improvised sketches, and Q&As follow. While the improvs are funny, the Q&As deal with the substance of the research.

Gabriela Marcu, an SI professor, discovered an improv show at the Philadelphia Science Festival that began with talks by researchers. “I had always dreamed of making my own version,” she says.

Every so often, I find myself daydreaming: As the members of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) watch their stock portfolios plummet because of Trump’s tariffs, or as they observe the president ignore decisions by other justices, including those he appointed, they have second thoughts about giving Trump unprecedented power—and they find a way to save us.   

I was disabused of this fantasy when I read Leah Litman’s marvelous new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. The University of Michigan law professor, who clerked at the high court, will discuss her book with Barbara McQuade on May 14 at Literati Bookstore.

I loved the book—well, as much as I can love something that convinces me that radical right justices are ruling from their feelings instead of the law. Litman’s style is accessible, and her book is full of pop culture references: American Psycho, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Taylor Swift. The story she tells is bleak, but there’s comic relief, mostly in the form of snarky comments of the sort some of us are driven to these days.

Corruption collides with confusion and bureaucracy with buffoonery in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance’s production of The Government Inspector, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher in 2009 from Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play.

While the original play was set in Russia circa 1836, Malcolm Tulip's version could be anywhere, anytime that corruption is common—but certainly not here or now.

“We’ve taken things from different periods,” says Tulip, who directs U-M musical theater students in the production, which runs February 20-23 at the Arthur Miller Theatre.

The play is set in a small village where everyone in a position of power is corrupt. “Six gymnasiums have been built to get names on buildings they don’t need,” Tulip says.

When the crooked leadership learns an undercover inspector is coming to root out corruption, they panic. They bribe. They flatter. They flirt. The inspector moves into the mayor’s house and receives large “loans” from the local officials. “They fall over backward to make sure he’ll say good things about them,” says Tulip. “On another level, the mistreated peasants come across as the resistance.”

Every winter, sophomores, juniors, and seniors studying design and production at the University of Michigan’s Department of Theatre & Drama at the School of Music, Theatre and Dance showcase their work. The BFA Theatre & Drama Design & Production Portfolio Exhibition is a free event at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus that runs January 28 to February 7.

“The goal of the portfolio review,” says Christianne Myers, who teaches costume design and is head of design and production, “is to get students thinking about how they talk about their work and to contextualize their growth.” They also think about what they might want to study next, to fill in gaps or expand on an interest. “It’s helpful to hear their thoughts in the context of the work they’ve done so far.”

To this end, faculty members meet with students before the review is open to others, ask questions, and look over the work they did during their time at the university; this includes summer projects at other venues between school years but not work they might have done before enrolling. 

Students talk about their process and their goals to the whole faculty, even those who haven’t had them in class. Chip Miller, the associate artistic director of Portland Center Stage, will come from Oregon to serve as a guest respondent so students can get an outsider’s take on their presentations.  

“In the end, it’s an occasion, a chance for students to celebrate their work." 

Silver Linings: Celebrating the  Spelman Art Collection at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is an eclectic collection of 40 works of sculptures, lithographs, photographs, paintings, and a gelatin silver print. The media includes acrylic, ink, pastels, graphite, crayon, oils, metals, wood, glass, and even 24-carat gold. 

Styles and subjects vary, too. 

What unifies this exhibition is that all of the work represents Black artists and expresses feelings or thoughts about Black culture or life. 

“The exhibition came to be through decades and decades and decades of Spelman College’s commitment to collecting art by Black artists,” says Liz Andrews, Ph.D., director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.  Andrews says the immediate reasons for putting together a touring exhibit, the museum’s first, are less significant than Spelman’s groundbreaking efforts over the years in prioritizing art by and about women of the African diaspora. 

Musical theater has always been inclusive. Sometimes it broadcasts the message, the way Oscar Hammerstein II did in South Pacific: ”You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” Mostly, it simply has been a welcoming home for artists, characters, and spectators of different races, religions, sexual orientations, and gender identities.

Now along comes a musical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the University of Michigan, which runs for four performances October 10-13 at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Inclusion is a key theme here, and unlike most musicals that we can label—classic American musicals, rock musicals, opera-style musicals, for instance—it includes just about every kind of music and dance style, too.  

The musical begins as the Shakespeare play does. Viola is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria and disguises herself as a Cesario, a man, so she can gain employment with Duke Orsino. She falls in love with Orsino, who yearns for Olivia, who in turn loves “Cesario.” 

Director Jessica Bogart says this Twelfth Night is not set in one specific era or locale but “in an imagined city we call ‘the magical now' ... an abstract location that allows characters to discover their true selves and true strengths. The source material itself has this gorgeous exploration of gender and identity.”   

How closely does it follow that source material?

Some knew Jay Stielstra as an activist who ran for Ann Arbor City Council in 1964 and served as a board member of the Washtenaw County chapter of the ACLU.

Others knew Stielstra as an athlete who attended the University of Michigan on an athletic scholarship. He played football, basketball, and track and became a Big Ten champion in the long jump.

He also was a public school teacher who introduced Black history into the curriculum at Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School and coached the football team.

Stielstra also connected with others through his creative pursuits, including novels like Meet Me at the River, musicals like North Country Opera, poetry collections like In Drought Time: Scenes From Rural and Small Town Life, and a revered catalog of music.

As a singer-songwriter, he brought all his passions together. He wrote songs about the devastation of war, social justice, the passage of time, drinking in taverns, the beauty of Northern Michigan’s woods and waters, finding and losing love, and getting old.

For over 50 years, Stielstra—who died March 1 at age 90—performed these songs on stages large and small.

“He walked through so many different communities in the course of his life,” said Barbara Schmid, Stielstra’s widow.

To celebrate Stielstra’s legacy, Schmid and Ann Arbor singer-songwriter Judy Banker are hosting a tribute and benefit show September 28 at The Ark—a place that nourished Stielstra and was one that he loved. 

Celebrating the Music of Jay Stielstra will feature a lineup of Michigan musicians performing his songs in acoustic styles from blues to bluegrass. It also doubles as a fundraiser for the Ann Arbor folk and roots music club.

When Ann Arbor audiences think about Carla Milarch—co-founder of Theatre Nova and former artistic/executive director of the Performance Network Theatre (PNT)—they may recall a performance she gave, a production she directed, a theater she ran, or more recently, a play she wrote.

Chances are, they will not imagine her changing a litter box—for rabbits.

Milarch and her husband, actor/director Phil Powers, share a home on Ann Arbor’s West side with their son, William Tyrone Powers, a senior at Skyline High, and four rabbits. The family had tried adopting kittens, but William broke out in hives, and they had to give them up. They tested him for dog allergies. No dice.

Now there are rabbits—four of them.

”Rabbits are misunderstood pets,” says Milarch, who at first kept them in cages. Now they are free to roam the house. She finds them similar to other pets: like cats, they sometimes want to be left alone (and can be litter-trained); like dogs, they sometimes demand attention. Sometimes high maintenance, one rabbit with poor balance required a ramp to get onto the bed and watch TV with her. Milarch built one. 

As it happens, Milarch was trying to create an environmentally friendly landscape for her home and was studying permaculture, a mix of urban planning, gardening, and homesteading, when the pet crisis occurred. Rabbits made a lot of sense. “We grow things in a regenerative way, using compost. I like being outside a lot. It must be in my blood,” she reflects. “I grew up on a farm.”

Not that she wanted to spend her life on the farm. 

In May of 2023, a group of researchers, engineers, and corporate executives at the Center for AI Safety warned of the existential danger of artificial intelligence (AI): “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” they wrote. 

Later that year, the Screen Actors Guild negotiated a new contract. In addition to wage issues, the actors were concerned that background roles would be created through AI and fewer actors would be employed. Most of the union’s demands were met, but the producers won the battle over keeping AI as an option.

Carla Milarch, whose play Doctor Moloch opens July 12 at Theatre Nova, absorbed all of this.  She also read articles by those who thought AI would enrich our lives and by people who believe there are pros and cons. [Read Pulp's profile of Milarch here.]

She couldn’t get the question out of her mind: Is AI a friend or foe? She thought about it while gardening. She thought about it while doing dishes. And a play began to take shape. “I have an idea bubbling, and characters, and then it takes on a life of its own,” she says of her writing process. 

That’s how her title character—a doctor created by artificial intelligence—was born.