Judging by the upbeat toots and chugs heard at Monday afternoon s Michigan Rail Summit in Lansing, there s one toy that inspires Republicans and Democrats, environmentalists and business leaders, Feds and locals and all the other boys and girls to play nicely together: a train.

Saturday s slate is a sly sacred-secular switcheroo. Mozart s fizzy Coronation Mass, with the Michigan State University Choral Union and four guest vocalists, will open the evening with high spirits, and Anton Bruckner s colossal Fourth Symphony will shut it down in solemn awe.

To help circle the wagons, Thatcher has enlisted rope-twirling humorist Will Rogers, played by Chicago theater luminary Kevin McKillip. The one-man show will replace David Mamet s Race as Stormfield s second production of the 2011- 2012 season. In the meantime, Thatcher said, the season will be scheduled from show to show, depending on finances.

This symphony preview is so erudite you have to take an entry quiz. Match the adjectives in Line A with the nouns from Line B:A. Sacred/secular.B. Gothic cathedral/ Mentos and Diet Coke.If you drew diagonal lines instead of vertical ones, you’re either a compulsive contrarian, a subt...

A new cooperative landscape is already taking shape in Michigan. Earlier this month, the Collaborative Development Council, a group of senior development gurus, came to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the Michigan Economic Development Council with a map that breaks the state into 10 development regions.

No ' not “battle.” That noun isn’t Sanford’s style, nor are adjectives like “heroic” or “triumphant.” If you read Sanford’s sardonic City Pulse film reviews, you know his melodrama-whacking machete has been tempered by decades of disease-ofthe-day dreck from Hollywood.

Monts, the field director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Michigan chapter, was peeking down the hatch of a big piece of infrastructure nobody wanted to build, but that has managed to snake across Michigan anyway.

As a customer, as a friend and now as a historian, Seaton has tracked Price’s remarkable life for 40 years.

In March of last year, Lansing Symphony maestro Timothy Muffitt and 29-year-old violinist Giora Schmidt ladled out the purest, hottest alloy of symphony and soloist heard around here in years 'and that’s saying a lot in a drop forge town like Lansing.

The approach of Sept. 11, 2011, has set off a plume of words and images reliving the horrors and heroes of Sept. 11, 2001, but the anniversary has also opened a quiet back door to reflection. David Hollister, mayor of Lansing 10 years ago, has a sobering take on the past decade.