Novelists Debra Spark and Susan Messer are the featured authors for the University of Michigan Press Author Series from 5-6:30 p.m. Friday on the second floor of the Shapiro Undergraduate Library Screening Room, 919 S. University Drive, Ann Arbor.

Worried about the arts in Michigan?

Tickets are on sale for Royal Oak's annual Shakespeare in The Park to be held July 22 through Aug. 8 in Starr Jaycee Park.

Kids will cotton to "Cape Farewell: Art & Climate Change" the minute they're startled by the immense crashing that erupts every 20 minutes. "Cape Farewell" is part of the ongoing "Artology" collaboration between the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cranbrook Institute of Science, where the show is hung.

Just as equivocation shapes the tragic events in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," accommodation becomes the undoing of an honorable man in C.P. Taylor's crushing moral tragedy "Good" -- one of the finest ensemble efforts I've seen by Wayne State University's Hilberry Theatre.

There may be more sympathetic characters in "Little Shop of Horrors," but I'm rooting for the bloodthirsty houseplant. He's been through a lot.

Our picks and other happenings, organized by life music, stage, film and more.

If the basic human need for nurturing and affection trumps all, even in geniuses, then David MacGregor's intriguing new play, "Gravity," about the brilliant and complicated physicist, astronomer, alchemist and mathematician Isaac Newton, might be viewed as a special kind of love story.

Ann Arbor -- Get a smart cast together with a free-spirited director, and you can end up with a theater experience that outshines the play.

In 1955, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank headed west from New York to look for America. The pictures he shot during a sweltering July in Detroit star in "Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955," which runs through July 3 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.