I know we were all supposed to be “holding space” for "Defying Gravity" at this time last year, but if I’m being honest, the iconic movie musical moment between two young women that really destroyed me appeared on screens long before Wicked (spoiler alert—if you’ve been living under a rock for quite some time): Anna using the last of her strength to save her sister instead of herself in Disney’s Frozen in 2013.

And thanks to Dexter’s Encore Musical Theatre Company, you (alongside lots of little ones in sparkly blue Elsa dresses) can now see that moment reenacted live via its production of Frozen: The Broadway Musical.

Why did that moment elicit such a strong reaction in me?

Despite all attempts to project Norman Rockwell vibes onto Thanksgiving, the holiday has long been associated with stressful travel, flaring tempers, and tears, thanks to relations with diametrically opposed beliefs gathering in close quarters for a long, leisurely meal.

Throw in a conversation about the brutal, non-mythologized history of the American Thanksgiving holiday, and, well, you’ve likely lit a powder keg. Yet this is essentially what two white, politically progressive characters in Larissa FastHorse’s satire The Thanksgiving Play, now being presented by The Penny Seats Theatre Company, aim for: to devise an original holiday play for elementary school students that tells the truth in a culturally ethical way.

As you might guess, this turns out to be a far harder and messier task than they expect.

The Purple Rose Theatre Company’s new revival production of Jeff Daniels’ comedy Norma & Wanda, first staged in Chelsea 20 years ago, has a notably self-aware coda: an upbeat recorded cast announcement that brings the actors bounding back onto the stage, similar to that of a “recorded in front of a live studio audience” sitcom curtain call.

Frankly, nothing could be more apt for the slapstick-y Norma & Wanda. The play aims to be an over-the-top romp with loads of physical comedy and double entendres. It tells the story of the titular sisters: Norma (Kristin Shields), who’s frantically decorating her home for the holidays while also making peanut butter balls for the Baby Jesus Memorial Christmas Brunch; and Wanda (Jamie Elvey), the crass, unlucky-in-love sister who’s seething about being stood up yet again.

But whether you do more laughing or wincing, well, that will depend on how funny you find a woman repeatedly summoning her cat by yelling, “Where’s my Pussy?” and if the phrase “peanut butter balls” makes you giggle.

It’s October, so many of us are in the mood for a good ghost story, and you needn’t look any further than Penny Seats Theatre Company’s The Woman in Black.

Never heard of it? Neither had I. But it’s based on a 1983 novel by British author Susan Hill, and Stephen Mallatratt adapted it for the stage a few years later.

With a cast of three, who play a multitude of characters, The Woman in Black went on to become the second-longest running non-musical play in London’s West End—second only to Agatha Christie’s stalwart The Mousetrap—and a 2012 feature film adaptation starred Daniel Radcliffe.

“Several Michigan companies have mounted the show, all with vastly different takes on it,” said Penny Seats’ executive director Lauren London. “One of the most fun things about this show is the number of ways it can be interpreted.”

As London describes it, the two main characters are an actor and a man who wishes to convey to his family and friends, with the actor’s help, a traumatic experience he suffered.

If you’re among those feeling depleted by all the desperation, striving, and clickbait online, it’s downright refreshing to speak to Skyline High School math teacher Nick Bertsos about the music he makes with his alt-folk band, Little Traps.

“We’re actually playing at a chili cook-off in Saline in a couple of weeks,” said Bertsos. “That’s our next huge gig. Which I’m excited about, because I like chili.”

Though Little Traps plays most often at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti, the band’s most recent performance was at a barn in Dexter, to celebrate the release of its second full-length album, Regular Love.

“Bruce Springsteen yells about that one beautiful love, and there are always these grandiose notions,” said Bertsos, Little Traps’ frontman and primary songwriter. “And it’s like, what about the regular stuff, like making coffee for my wife in the morning, and she doesn’t have to ask?”

The band started recording songs for Regular Love back in 2019, shortly after the release of its 2018 debut, Can’t Count. But after getting about three tracks down, the pandemic hit, and the project stalled out.

For generations, people from all over the country have moved to New York City for a fresh start—the chance to plant themselves in a densely packed, busy place where no one knows their story, and they can start writing a new one, and maybe even realize a dream.

But there’s also an inherent risk: What if no one in this teeming city cares to know your story, old or new, and instead of becoming known in a new place, you simply stay invisible?

Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days—staged by Penny Seats Theatre Company at Cahoots—is a sung-through chamber musical focusing on four New Yorkers: Warren (Henry Ballesteros), an optimistic aspiring artist who is house- and cat-sitting for an artist jailed for vandalism; Deb (Kristin McSweeney Kelly), a cynical graduate student who’s struggling with her thesis about Virginia Woolf; and Jason (Michael Bessom) and Claire (Katrin Murdock), a couple weathering their differences after moving in together.

Actors playing animals in a veterinarian’s waiting room?

I’ll admit that this premise—played out in the Purple Rose Theatre’s new world premiere production of Matt Letscher’s Bert & Trixie Visit the Vet—initially threatened to trigger my eye roll reflex.

But expectations are funny things. Sometimes, when you go into a theater with both skepticism and an open mind, delight and surprise creep in, and you find more resonant substance in the work than you anticipated.

Bert & Trixie opens with the default owner (Meghan VanArsdalen) of two sibling dogs, Bert (Jonathan West) and Trixie (Jamie Elvey)—left behind by their philandering original owner—arriving at a vet’s office, where there’s also a resident caged parrot (Leonard, played by John Seibert); a pot-stirring stray cat (Bitchy, played by Mark Colson); and an alarmingly unfiltered nurse (Maria Ru-djen).

As the animals talk with each other, and a health scare for one looms, they weigh the pros and cons of belonging to someone versus living free and unfettered in the world—which is a question humans, including some high-falutin’ philosophers, have grappled with for centuries. So there’s meat on this seemingly silly play’s bones and, to Letscher, the cast, and director’s credit, it’s also often quite funny.

Ever heard a pre-show “turn off your cell phones” speech delivered by a whistling bird and her human translator before? No?

Well, that’s just the first of many surreal elements in Carla Milarch’s play Jorge Luis Borges Gives a Lecture on Anatomy, now having its world premiere at Theatre Nova, in a production directed by Kat Walsh.

I will confess up front that while I studied literature for years, I never read Borges’ work, so this review comes from a place of ... ignorance? Curiosity? Both?

Yet given the boisterous, life-embracing version of Borges that appears on Theatre Nova’s stage, courtesy of actor Phil Powers, I think it likely that the author himself would approve of me tiptoeing into his literary imagination by way of Milarch’s play.

And make no mistake. Lecture is a trippy vibe of a ride, which shouldn’t surprise those who have read Borges.

When Encore Musical Theatre Company co-founder Dan Cooney, in a pre-show speech, emphatically warned the crowd at West Side Story’s opening night to keep the aisles clear (“They’re 20,” he joked, referring to the cast’s youth), it was for good reason.

Indeed, the production’s performers often bounded onto the stage, swung (or hung, or twirled) from the set’s poles and bars, and prowled the theater’s aisles as if they were the streets of Manhattan.

That’s where this classic American musical theater riff on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet takes place, of course, in the summer of 1957. Instead of feuding families, West Side Story focuses on two territorial teen gangs (the white working-class Jets and the Puerto Rican immigrant Sharks) who regularly fight to “own” the local territory. But when a former Jet named Tony (Conor Jordan) locks eyes with young, Puerto Rican Maria (Daniela Rodriguez Del Bosque) at a dance, the two fall passionately, impetuously in love, despite their differences, and set a series of events into motion that will alter not just the path of their own lives, but those of everyone around them.

Despite its iconic, instantly recognizable music (Leonard Bernstein) and lyrics (Stephen Sondheim), book (Arthur Laurents), and choreography (Jerome Robbins, re-created in Encore’s production by Deanna Aguinaga-Whyte), West Side Story (directed here by Michael Berry) is not a show we have lots of opportunities to see performed live—in part, because this classic American musical demands a lot from the many, many young artists it takes to stage a production.

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.”