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.”

Barbara Neri has worked to get her movie, Unlocking Desire, made for several years while dealing with the pandemic, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and her own busy schedule.

And she's still working on it.

"I've more than one thing going on, so it’s not the only iron in the fire,” said Neri, an Ann Arbor creative who has worked in dance, theater, performance art, and education in addition to being a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. “I try not to think of the amount of time too much, because I think things will happen when they’re going to happen. … But it’s a wild ride. … Some projects take 10 years, so you just have to stay in the moment as much as possible. That’s really what I try to do, and enjoy the journey, enjoy each step.”

Unlocking Desire, which won the Marfa Film Festival's best screenplay award in 2017, tells the story of an institutionalized woman who believes she’s Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine from A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche grows convinced that another inmate, Raoul, is Allan Grey, the young man she married as a teenager, and whom she later found in bed with another man.

In Williams’ play, Blanche’s reflexive disgust in the moment leads to Allan’s suicide, but in Unlocking Desire, Raoul is a gay man whose failed suicide attempt causes his wife to institutionalize him.

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.”

Not a lot of marriages reach the 50-year mark, and even fewer bands do.

But Ann Arbor-based folk group Mustard’s Retreat has always blazed its own path, weathering changes and challenges across an astonishing five decades.

To celebrate this milestone anniversary, the group has scheduled a handful of concerts— including one at The Ark on March 28—featuring all three original members, who started playing together at the Heidelberg’s Rathskeller in 1975.

David Tamulevich remembers auditioning there as a solo act when he’d only done some open mics previously and was working as a cook at the Brown Jug. Libby Glover, who would later become part of the original trio, was tending bar there when her boss asked what she thought of Tamulevich.

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.

Even as I accepted the assignment to attend and write about asses.masses—a daylong collaborative video game art installation brought to Ann Arbor on February 15-16 by UMS—I wondered why I’d made this choice.

It would take me away from my family for nearly an entire Saturday (the program ran from 1-9:30 pm); I’d have to drive from Farmington to Stamps Auditorium on a snowy, freezing February day, all too aware that I’d also be hosting guests in my home the next morning; I had no idea what kind of food would be provided at the event; and while I’m an absolute puzzle fiend, I’m decidedly not a gamer. (The whole idea of Twitch, where viewers can watch others play video games, is something I still struggle to wrap my head around.)

If I’ve learned anything in recent years, though, it’s that I should always follow my curiosity, and I’d repeatedly wondered what this collective all-day video game experience would look and feel like.

My short answer, after attending asses.masses? Community-building. But let’s start with the basics.

Created by Canadian duo Patrick Blendarn and Milton Lim, the game’s narrative involves a herd of donkeys who have been replaced, as workers, by machines, so many of them decide to confront their human overlords and push back against their (existential) obsolescence.

When you’re a theater critic, you sometimes drive home from a show and think, “Huh. Not exactly sure what I’ll say about this one.”

Nate — A One Man Show, presented by the University Musical Society at the Arthur Miller Theatre, is one of those shows.

Because by its very nature, Nate will be a little different at every performance with its extensive audience participation and thus, some improv. The brainchild of creator/performer Natalie Palamides, the hour-long production focuses on a man who blasts toxic masculinity out into the world while nursing a broken heart.

The show fittingly starts with what feels like a punch to the face: the blisteringly loud opening chords of George Thoroughgood’s “Bad to the Bone” playing as helmeted, shades-wearing Nate rides around the stage on a mini-motorcycle. Absurdly silly, messy, performative demonstrations of masculinity (the consumption of a raw egg, meat, and whey powder) followed, in case there remained any lingering questions regarding the kind of guy we were dealing with.

Writers know that sometimes, no matter what your intentions are when you sit down to work, the process may lead you in another direction completely.

Breeda Kelly Miller, who will appear at Ann Arbor’s Schuler Books on January 30, had planned to tell her Irish immigrant mother’s story, Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home, in book form first, then perhaps adapt it into a play.

“I started writing, and the play just started taking over,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘What? Fine. I’ll just write the play first. There are no rules. I’ll just break this rule that doesn’t exist.’”

The result was a one-woman play starring Miller that premiered in Ann Arbor in October 2021 and has since played on stages around Michigan, as well as locales nationwide and in Ireland.

The play aired on Detroit PBS this past December, significantly expanding Miller’s audience, but also pressing her to strike while the iron was hot and get the book done.