The Monday Mix is an occasional roundup of compilations, live recordings, videos, podcasts, and more by Washtenaw County-associated artists, DJs, radio stations, and record labels.

This edition features an interview with Kerrytown Concert House's Artistic & Executive Director Monica Swartout-Bebow on Michigan Creates; a chat with Ann Arbor cellist Thor Sigurdson on Music Un-Tuxed; two short promo videos for Ann Arbor Art Center's 2024 public art projects; Blue LLama concert live streams; and the numerous arts documentaries created for the Ann Arbor 200 birthday celebration.

It’s been a nerve-wracking year.

The country is divided. Americans say they’re pessimistic about the future, even those who voted for a change in the White House.

Could a little girl be just what we need to make us more optimistic about our future and see that we always have tomorrow?

The Encore Theatre seems to think so and is offering the perfect Christmas musical that just might provide a little lift in our spirits, Annie.  Director Daniel Cooney draws together an excellent cast, combining seasoned stage veterans to young performers giving seasoned performances.

If you're an Ann Arbor District Library cardholder, you receive a weekly email newsletter listing news, upcoming events, and a slew of recommendations from the catalog. Those recs are also available at aadl.org/reviews, and we're always happy to make suggestions for books, audiobooks, streamable content in the catalog, DVDs, board games, tools, etc. if you visit us at the branches.

But our 2024 Staff Picks allow the AADL crew to go beyond the library catalog—and the calendar year.

We don't limit our year in review to things that came out in 2024 or that can be checked out from AADL; the staff comments on whatever favorite media and events they experienced this year, no matter when or where they originated. Maybe a favorite album of 2024 came out in 1973, or the best book someone read this year is so old that it's out of copyright. It's all good, and it all counts.

Here are the categories of AADL's 2024 Staff Picks:

Jim Ottaviani has spent much of his career putting words into the mouths of physics geniuses. Sure, he also used the scientists' own words when penning scripts for graphic novels about Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman since Ottaviani's books are always deeply researched.

But for Last Summer, a new play by Ottaviani, he had to imagine the words exchanged during a summer 1939 private gathering at U-M physics professor Samuel Goudsmit's home following a physics symposium in Ann Arbor.

The Summer Symposia had been happening in Ann Arbor since the late 1920s, bringing together the greatest physicists to share ideas. Nobel laureates and nuclear pioneers Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg were at Goudsmit's place that summer 1939 evening, with the former trying to convince the latter not to go back to his native Germany and help the Nazis with their nuclear program. It didn't work: Fermi went on to work for the Allies and Heisenberg returned to his homeland.

Their discussion is the basis for the 20-minute Last Summer, which will be staged by the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (A2CT) on December 7 and 11 at the Downtown location of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL).

Sequels aren’t exactly rare or novel. As a creative enterprise, they’re safer than a wholly original property because they thread a narrative needle, providing readers/viewers with something both familiar and unknown—a new story featuring characters and a world we already “get,” no exposition necessary.

More recently, of course, we’ve witnessed the rise of the prequel (Wicked, anyone? The Joker? Cruella?), which offers the same artistic advantages but projects backward in time rather than forward.

With all this in mind, allow me pause to sing the praises of prolific, Michigan-native playwright Joseph Zettelmaier (now based in Florida) for breathing new air into an old form with his latest play, The Men of Sherwood, now having its world premiere via Penny Seats Theatre Company through December 8.

While most sequels lean in hard on a story’s central character, depending on their allure to draw fans back, Zettelmaier instead kills off a beloved, charismatic hero and asks: What happens to a story’s minor characters, the followers, when the nucleus that long held them together perishes? Can a body, without its beating heart, function? (And even if it can, should it?)

"Ripped from the headlines!" is a dramatic tagline frequently used for gritty police procedurals. But it can, perhaps increasingly, also be applied to broad slapstick comedies.

Inspired by real events in a small town Up North, Jeff Daniels' Office Christmas Party Grinch in Fight with Rudolph Police Called (styled without punctuation) imagines the chain of events leading to the title bout between Whoville's most notorious thief and the most famous reindeer of all. Directed by Daniels and starring Ryan Carlson, Paul Strolli, Henri Franklin, Juji Berry, and Ruth Crawford, it is playing at The Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea through December 22.  

Office Christmas Party Grinch in Fight with Rudolph Police Called, which writer, director, and Purple Rose founder Jeff Daniels describes as "the longest title of anything I've ever written," takes place in the aftermath of the titular skirmish. Wally Wilkins Jr., the third-generation head of Middletown Fudge Company, berates employees Jerry Cornicelli, a.k.a The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and Lamar Johnson, wearing a homemade Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer costume, about the mayhem that ensued after a disagreement about the tempo of "Silent Night." Wilkins' daughter Bernice is thrilled that their company is part of a viral moment, but Wilkins himself fears the negative attention may sink his already struggling business. The gang is offered a holiday miracle, of sorts, from a sleazy media company offering big money for a Grinch/Rudolph rematch—now the challenge for Wilkins is convincing the would-be pugilists to get back in the ring for the "Fight Before Christmas."

I don’t have a ton of specific fears, but if pressed to name a few, I’d go with snakes, climate change, overdrafting, mass shootings, and the epically baffling big novels of James Joyce.

So kudos to the University Musical Society (UMS) for helping me confront that last fear this past Sunday, via the Elevator Repair Service’s stage adaptation of Ulysses, which was at the Power Center in Ann Arbor on October 19-20.

The much-studied, fever-dream doorstop of a novel—clocking in at nearly 800 pages—unfolds almost entirely within the confines of June 16th, 1904 (reportedly the date of Joyce’s first sexual encounter with future wife, Nora). Since the book debuted in 1922, Joyce’s life and work have been celebrated annually on June 16th, a day called Bloomsday, named for the character at the center of Ulysses, ad man Leopold Bloom.

When a stage musical’s inspired by a campy, 1990s tabloid story about a half-human, half-bat boy who’s discovered in a West Virginia cave—I mean, you just go in expecting a weird show, right?

But nothing can truly prepare you for the level of weird achieved by Bat Boy, staged October 10-20 by U-M’s musical theatre department at the Encore Theatre in Dexter.

With music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe, and a book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, Bat Boy follows the titular character as he’s housed, and socialized by, a local veterinarian’s family. Buttoned-up wife and mother Meredith Parker (Aquila Sol) is the first to emotionally connect with Bat Boy (Aaron Syi), naming him Edgar and teaching him to speak. Teen daughter Shelley Parker (Stephanie Reuning-Scherer) is initially disgusted by Edgar but comes to love him, too, while her father, Dr. Parker (Jamie Martin Mann), jealously watches his emotionally distant wife lavish maternal love upon Edgar. 

The show, particularly the first act, has been somewhat streamlined (a good thing) since I first saw it many years ago, but its high body count, black tragicomedy core—think Heathers crossed with a bewildering nature documentary—remains intact. 

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?

The Fall spooky season is always a great time to revisit the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and this October the Penny Seats Theatre Company brings to life a stage adaptation of one of the author's most haunting tales.

Based loosely on The Fall of the House of Usher, Michigan playwright John Sousanis's Usher finds the last two heirs of a once-great family reunited with an old friend within their crumbling mansion. Penny Seats' production is directed by company Artistic Director Julia Garlotte, and stars Brittany Batell as Madeline Usher, David Collins as Roderick Usher, and Jonathan Davidson as the unnamed Visitor.

This year marks Garlotte's first season as artistic director of Penny Seats, though she has previously worked with the company as an actor and sound designer. Staging Usher, as with the other Penny Seats performances for 2024, was selected by previous artistic director Joseph Zettelmaier, though Garlotte was in conversation with him throughout the decision-making process. "We both decided that it would be a cool addition to the season," Garlotte says. Zettelmaier had seen Usher during its original run in 2007, and Michigan playwright John Sousanis rewrote the script for Penny Seats. 

"We had some stuff we wanted fleshed out and questions answered," Garlotte says, "and he was willing to take another stab at it. So we have a really great script."

As to what appeals to her about Usher, Garlotte says she is "always a sucker for drama and tragedy, which is a strange thing to say when sometimes the state of the world calls for something a little more light-hearted."