Jeff Dunn didn't mean to become a go-to photographer for the Southeast Michigan jazz scene. He was just a guy who started taking his camera to jam sessions around 2014 after being a fan of the "sound of surprise" since the early 1970s.

"The first time I went to [Detroit's] Baker's Keyboard Lounge in 1973, I was hooked," Dunn told Pulp in a 2018 interview. "I've been addicted to live jazz performances ever since."

Now he's the house photographer for the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation, a regular presence at concerts from the Motor City to Tree Town, and the focus of a new exhibit at Argus Museum in Ann Arbor.

Jeff Dunn - Jazz Photography runs June 2-27, offering 38 shots by the St. Clair Shores resident and retired Wayne State computer programmer/web developer.

The exhibit is tucked into a narrow hallway with a slight zig-zag, but there's enough room to step back from each photo and imagine the 71-year-old Dunn's placement for each shot. The description plates for each image feature enthusiastic prose from the photographer about his subjects, revealing Dunn's fan-first appreciation of jazz.

Earlier this year, Andy Jones began the process of launching a new sketch comedy troupe in Ann Arbor. He started writing sketches, reaching out to friends and fellow actors, and hosting rehearsals in his home. All of this led to the founding of The Imposters, who will make their debut June 12-14 at the hear.say brewing in Ann Arbor.

While The Imposters are a new group the names of the six members—Jones, Kara Williams, Elizabeth Wagner, Will Myers, Ken Wood, and David Widmayer—should be well known to those in the Ann Arbor theater community. The troupe has also enlisted some veteran help from stage manager Alexa Duscay.

“A lot of us have done improv comedy before, but none of us really have done sketch before, hence The Imposters,” says Jones. 

“I think everybody in the group has some interest in [sketch]. All of us have been wanting to do something new, challenge ourselves, wanting to write a bit. A way to just kind of have some fun with friends.”

Many of us, when asked to remember our middle school experience, shudder. It’s almost always a challenging era, full of braces, puberty, social dramas, and the diametric pulls of childhood and young adulthood.

But Greenhills School teacher and theater director Caroline Huntoon, who grew up in Ann Arbor, spends a good deal of her time imagining and remembering being that age again, as evidenced by the release of her third (and newest) middle grade novel, Going Overboard.

“It’s this moment when young people are figuring out their independence, while also negotiating, like, ‘I want to be independent, I want to be in charge of my own self, but I don’t always make the best choices,’” Huntoon said.

In addition, when Huntoon was a young reader themself, they were drawn most to middle grade books.

“I loved reading Matilda [by Roald Dahl] and Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine,” said Huntoon. “I feel like those books just opened up a world to me—not ‘the’ world, but ‘a’ world. My mom got sick when I was in fifth grade, so books were a very important … reprieve from that time.”

“Why can no one in this family ever just say what’s on their mind?” asks Joseph Kurkjian, twin brother, son, cousin, and nephew in the new book, Waterline. Though his question may be an overstatement, it illustrates the tension in which his family finds itself.

Waterline is the debut novel of Aram Mrjoian, a University of Michigan lecturer and managing editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. He will be in conversation with Julie Buntin at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 pm.

The book's chapters cycle through the point of view of each member in the Kurkjian family as they cope with their cousin, daughter, and niece Mari’s fatal decision to swim far out into Lake Michigan and not come back. The rotating focus on each character’s perspective provides unique angles on how they respond to what has happened with Mari, as well as what is going on in their own lives.

Part of their stories is the anguish from historical injustices as Gregor, the Kurkjians’ great-grandfather, and Mara, their great-grandmother, resisted and survived the Armenian Genocide. This history troubles their descendants who now live on Grosse Ile. Karo, who is Mari’s father and Gregor’s grandson, talks to Joseph, his nephew, about the past as he sips brandy:

In 1891, German playwright Frank Wedekind shocked theater goers with his sexually explicit play Spring Awakening, urging adults to be more open and understanding to adolescents who are trying to understand changes in their bodies and their desires.

In 2006, a musical adaptation of Spring Awakening, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, became a Broadway hit and winner of multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Score.

Ronald Baumanis is directing Spring Awakening for the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre, June 5-8. He also directed a staging a few years back in Jackson. This is the 56th musical he’s directed and the 17th musical he’s directed for the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre.

“I love this show,” he said. “I saw the Broadway show and the traveling show and everyone who’s ever done it. I just love this show. I love the mix of the music with a more classic story, and I think it resonates with modern audiences based on the problems these young people had in 1891. It’s not quite to that extent because we have more access to information now. But the same thing about teenage angst, trying to find yourself when you’re told one thing by adults and other things that are more accurate.”

Carol Gray proudly describes herself as an Ann Arbor townie who began acting in youth theater with Kate Mendelhoff, a University of Michigan professor of theater who taught acting classes.

“The first musical I ever did was with Kate when I was 8 years old,” Gray said.

Gray was a freshman at U-M in 2000, the year Mendeloff founded Shakespeare in the Arb.

The annual celebration of Shakespeare in the Nichols Arboretum was a happy accident.

“Kate actually founded Shakespeare in the Arb because she couldn’t book time for an indoor space,” Gray said. “She said, ‘Where can I do this play, let’s just try to do this outside.’ She had colleagues who worked at the Arb and she was ‘why not here’ and a tradition was born.”

There has been a performance of Shakespeare in the Arb every summer from 2000 to 2025 except for two years during the pandemic. Mendelhoff died in 2023, but the program continues with Gray and Graham Atkins as co-directors. They have both been with the program since its inception.

“I started out as an actress and then sort of morphed into playing a bunch of different roles since 2000,” Gray said.

This year's Shakespeare production is The Merry Wives of Windsor. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth I was amused by the character of Falstaff, the roustabout knight who leads Prince Hal astray until Hal matures, turns Falstaff out, and goes on to become King Henry V. The Queen thought it would be fun to see Falstaff in a comedy. And when a Queen demands, a playwright obliges.

When Karl Sikkenga was teaching middle school students, he began writing pared-down scripts of Shakespeare’s plays. He developed a plan to make it easier for his students to understand Shakespeare’s plays by streamlining the Bard without changing the language or meaning of the plays.

“When I had the idea of doing it in community theater rather than in school, I thought if I’m going to do this, I might as well see if it will work or not,” he said.

In 2019, Sikkenga launched Brevity Shakespeare in Ypsilanti with a production of Hamlet in 2019, just as the pandemic hit. When the theater started up again in 2023 with As You Like It, Sikkenga had a clear vision of a new approach to Shakespeare and community theater.

“The idea behind Brevity is threefold,” he said. ”One is we are deep lovers of Shakespeare, but for me, frequently when I’m watching Shakespeare, I don’t have any idea what people are talking about. The language is the most gorgeous and at times the most obscure. When I was doing Shakespeare with secondary students, I started distilling the play, retaining the language, retaining the plot, and telling the stories in ways that we make sure everyone there understands what’s going on at all times.”

Trimming scripts also meant weeding out nonessential characters.

When the Russo-Ukrainian War intensified with the invasion and occupation of Ukraine starting in 2022, the conflict not only permeated the news but also people’s lives. The stories of the Ukrainians affected by the war are what historian Danielle Leavitt tells in her new book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine.

By the Second Spring begins with a preface in which Leavitt describes how she found the stories and corresponded with the storytellers. She shares that through an online platform provided by her parents’ project, the Leavitt Institute for International Development, Ukrainians wrote online diary entries. Leavitt got in contact with some of the diarists, who then began communicating about their lives directly with her.

As Leavitt writes about her subjects and the book, “They would recount, in intimate detail, their first reactions to the invasion, why opposition to Russia was so fierce, and why and how such a sudden and shocking spirit of mass volunteerism arose. I concern myself less with the movement of military forces and more with exploring the daily realities of war in a relatively developed country.”

Leavitt’s time growing up partly in Ukraine and studying Ukrainian history informs her book, too. To give context as the events of the year unfold around her subjects, Leavitt intersperses the history that led to this moment in time.

After the preface is the “Dramatis Personae” listing the seven names and descriptions of the subjects who are featured by Leavitt: Anna. Maria. Polina. Tania. Vitaly. Volodymyr. Yulia.  

Each Ukrainian in By the Second Spring makes their choices of how to respond to the war. Some maintain a semblance of life before the invasion:

Comedies come in cycles. There was a time in the late 1990s and continuing through the early 2010s when movie theaters regularly welcomed rated-R-for-raunchy flicks with over-the-top humor. 

But as social mores changed, and movie theaters struggled to get people into their buildings, many of those movies went straight to streaming.

Wolverine Productions' Benjamin Vomastek misses when salty comedies with no-holds-barred japes populated the cineplex, and the University of Michigan grad is doing his part to bring them back.

Vomastek's film debut, 2024's Rosetta Stoned, filmed in Ann Arbor on a $30,000 budget, features a pothead who convinces a socially awkward classmate to exchange homework answers for weed. 

The new Hometown Summer, also filmed in Tree Town, premieres at the Michigan Theater on Thursday, May 22, at 7:30 pm. The cast and crew will appear after for a Q&A session.

In Hometown Summer, three young pals spend the warm months in Ann Arbor, and all kinds of mayhem happen when they get mixed up in a crazy business plan and indulge in all sorts of vices.

Vomastek makes no secret that his films are indebted to outrageous comedies of the past, such as Superbad and There's Something About Mary, so I asked him to discuss some movies that were direct influences on Hometown Summer.

"Each of these films carries a theme of human authenticity and realism that has inspired me as a filmmaker," Vomastek said.

Joe Reilly has been a big hit with the Ann Arbor-area kids for nearly two decades. They know him from his many performances at local schools, libraries, and music workshops, and they love him for his songs celebrating awesome animals, the wonders of nature, and the importance of our connection to the earth and each other.

On Saturday, May 17, he’s throwing a free family concert at The Ark that will pair his big-hearted, interactive show with a celebration of Indigenous culture. Joe Reilly and his band, the Community Gardeners, will perform alongside the All Nations Dancers, a group of Anishinaabe pow-wow dancers from Mount Pleasant.

The University of Michigan grad's music is gentle and generous in spirit, drawn from traditional folk and blues to encourage sing-alongs, and spiked with the lyrical flow of hip-hop to keep it real. His easy rapport with his tiny audience members leads them to learn while they play, like a Buddhist Mister Rogers whose essence is his greatest lesson.

Sponsored by Ann Arbor Public Schools, The Ark event launches at 11:30 am with a catered lunch provided by local Indigenous vendor Anishinaabe Meejim, followed an hour later by music and dance. Per The Ark, pre-registration is “strongly encouraged.”

I asked Reilly a few questions about "There’s a Place for You in the Circle" featuring Joe Reilly and The Community Gardeners with the All Nations Dancers.