Oscar Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, has a subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.

In a time of strife, trivial comedy is just what people need. Even better is a play that mocks the well-to-do who are never serious (at least in Wilde’s point of view).

The Encore Theatre, usually a musical theater, makes way for an energetic, well-choreographed, and expertly staged presentation of Wilde’s masterpiece.

For some reason, the Titanic seemed to have one of its biggest cultural moments in 1997, 85 years after the maritime disaster occurred.

Not only did the stage show Titanic: The Musical make its Broadway debut on April 23, 1997 (just days after the anniversary of the ship’s demise), and then go on to win five Tony Awards, including best musical; but also, in November 1997, James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic premiered, broke numerous box office records, and bagged 13 Oscars (including best picture and best director).

Of course, when I told people I’d be seeing a production of Titanic: The Musical at the Power Center, presented by the University of Michigan Department of Musical Theatre from April 17-20, I quickly felt compelled to add, “It’s not about Jack and Rose.”

In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys moved out of Detroit’s Black-only neighborhood, Black Bottom, into an all-white Detroit neighborhood. They wanted a better life for themselves and their infant daughter.

Ossian Sweet was afraid that they had made a dangerous decision.

They moved on September 8, 1925. The first night there were racist catcalls but nothing serious. The next evening a mob surrounded the new home as Sweet, his brothers, and others gathered again in the house. Ossian was prepared with guns as the mob attacked the house, but the police ignored pleas from the Sweets. A white man was killed. The police raided the Sweet home and arrested 12 people including Ossian Sweet, Gladys Atkinson Sweet, Ossian’s brothers, and friends.

This led to a historic trial that brought the renowned civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow to Detroit.

Playwright D.L. Patrick takes a different view of these historic events and shifts the attention from Ossian Sweet to his wife, Gladys. Patrick’s title for the play is a good summary of yet another example of a woman not given her due, Eclipsed: The Sun, The Moon, and Gladys Atkinson Sweet.

Theatre Nova is presenting the world premiere of Patrick’s play. It’s an emotional, intimate look at a family that struggles to lead a better life and is trapped by the vile racism that is still a major mark of shame in America’s history.

Families are fragile. Children become adults and go their separate ways. Everybody has their own quirks, complaints, successes, and failures.

Paul Stroili’s play My Mother and the Michigan/Ohio War, at the Purple Rose Theatre through May 25, finds just the right blend of family reconciliation and a rediscovered sense of humor, built around two obsessive wars.

Every year it’s a war.

You know the war: the mighty Wolverines versus that school in Columbus, Ohio.

Every other football game takes a back seat to The Game. This past season, the Buckeyes lost to the Wolverines and the coach had to win the national championship to keep his job. 

Fred Campbell was a big fan of The Game. The home he shared with his wife Izzy was a shrine to the University of Michigan Wolverines. It was his passion.

His other passion was the Toledo War of 1835-1836 to determine who got to claim the Toledo Strip. Ohio was already a state and Michigan would only become a state if a compromise could be reached. Michigan finally capitulated after agreeing to accept the Upper Peninsula and Ohio would keep the Toledo strip. Time would show that Michigan got the better deal.

Two University of Michigan professors are putting a different spin on  L. Frank Baum’s beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Jose Casas, head of the playwriting minor in the Theatre & Drama department, has written Our Oz as “a reimagination of the The Wizard of Oz through a BIPOC and queer lens” Jake Hooker, head of drama at the Residential College, is the director.

Our Oz is being presented April 4-13 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on U-M’s North Campus.

The collaboration between Casas, Hooker, and theater students is a story in progress and described in the show's notes as “Intersectional and interdisciplinary, this project will evolve over the course of the next year, exploring and experimenting with the tropes and images of multiple renditions from the Land of Oz as originally conceived by L. Frank Baum.”

Our Oz is very different from Baum’s or MGM’s version of Oz. The set is a street in a tough neighborhood. The opening music is the loud grind of industrial machinery. An older Dorothy is in distress and somehow magically ends up with her dog, Toto, in a place that is very much like the place she just left.

Ghosts are haunting the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre this weekend with a gothic opera based on Henry James’ spooky and unsettling novella The Turn of the Screw.

British composer Benjamin Britten’s score is chilling, a perfect screech of modern music to tell the tale of an inexperienced and disturbed governess and two neglected children.

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance Department of Voice & Opera and the Contemporary Directions Ensemble are presenting The Turn of the Screw composed by Britten with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, March 27-30 at the Mendelssohn. Two casts will perform. The cast from Thursday, March 27, will perform on Saturday, March 29. Another cast will perform on Friday, March 28, and Sunday, March 30.

The opera begins with three people exchanging ghost stories on a chilly Christmas Eve in a manor house. The most complex story is about the timid, anxious governess at Bly House who was hired by the uncle of two unruly children who may or may not be seeing ghosts. The governess is helped and advised by the housekeeper who tells her the story of the previous governess Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, the uncle’s manservant. Both are now dead. The children, a boy and a girl, are having a hard time—and maybe they’re in touch with ghosts.

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy at an attorneys firm
I cleaned the window and I swept the floor
As I polished up the handle on the big front door
I polished up the handle so carefully
That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navee
                                                           —W.S. Gilbert

It seems like Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas never grow old.

Whether it’s Sir Joseph Porter bragging that he never went to sea and became the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee in H.M.S. Pinafore or the ambitious Lord High Executioner KoKo making a list of enemies (who never will be missed) in The Mikado, the biting satire still rings as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. Arthur Sullivan’s pliable music still moves gracefully from comic to lushly romantic and W.S. Gilbert’s librettos are as fresh now as they were in the 1870s..

The University of Michigan’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) is presenting H.M.S. Pinafore at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, April 3-6.

The word "cosplay" is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and the activity's participants—cosplayers—wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent specific characters.

For playwright Shavonne Coleman, cosplay is a way to open the doors of creativity to children and put them on the road to being superheroes.

Eastern Michigan University Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Coleman’s Cause Play on April 3-6, with school matinee performances on April 7-8.

Last year a staged reading of Cause Play was presented in May at EMU in collaboration with Ann Arbor Spinning Dot Theatre as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project. That collaboration continues with the premiere of the fully acted production.

Coleman is an alumna of EMU and an associate professor of theater at the University of Michigan's Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Cause Play centers on three middle school students, Zuvi, Zipper and Aaron, who meet at an after-school cosplay club at the Southwest Academy Magnet Middle School in Detroit. They discover their talents in creating costumes and adopting identities with the goal of attending a Comic Con—as well as developing their secret powers along the way. Coleman said there were changes made following the staged reading in response to the audiences who wanted the students to go to the Comic Con.

The Neighborhood Theatre Group’s small, minimalist theater is an intimate space for what it calls an anthology play in four parts.

The seating is limited. The stage area is small. The audience is practically part of the scene.

All these limitations are a plus for a theater that emphasizes a tight story, engaged actors, and a very different theater experience, especially for a production like The Hotel Del Gado.

The anthology drama will conclude its two-weekend schedule March 14-16 at The Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti. 

Its four plays are set in a cheap, rundown hotel room. The time is the 1970s. The Neighborhood Theatre Group (NTG) co-founder and literary manager A.M. Dean created a conceit that many of the NTG plays will be set in a place called the Huron Valley Universe, drawing on the college towns of Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, and East Lansing.

You realize which adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel Sense and Sensibility has left the strongest impression on you when—in the opening moments of a stage performance—you find yourself thinking, “OK, that’s the Emma Thompson sister, and that’s Kate Winslet.”

Yes, the much-celebrated 1995 film, directed by Ang Lee, casts a long shadow, but Sense & Sensibility: The Musical, now having its Michigan premiere at Dexter’s Encore Theatre, nonetheless offers its unique spin on the material.

With a book, music, and lyrics by Paul Gordon (who also previously adapted Jane Eyre into a Tony-nominated stage musical), Sense streamlines Austen’s world of characters down to the bone, a move that—given the economic and relational complexities of the story—occasionally makes plot turns confusing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, dear reader, but first, a synopsis.