Wharton Center: ‘World’s best artists’
Some people will do anything to get you off the couch and out of the house. They might even offer you the world.
Knock, knock. We’re here! Musicians from Zimbabwe! The Royal Philharmonic! Jazz at Lincoln Center!
When Eric Olmscheid, executive director of Michigan State University’s Wharton Center, put together the 2025-‘26 fine arts season, he searched the globe, and the community, for ways to deisolate people and fill their souls.
Big-city roars from London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the first full production of a play about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings by local playwright Sandra Seaton, a new series of intimate cabaret performances by Broadway greats and much more is on the slate, announced this morning (April 23).
Balancing arty stuff like the Royal Philharmonic with international troupes, dance, jazz, cabaret and nostalgic baby boomer fare is the fun part of Olmscheid’s job. The hard part for the Wharton Center, or any performing arts organization, is simply getting people out of the house.
The dedicated arts patron of old, the culture lover who put on a coat and hat and went to everything for the sake of self-education, comfortable with liking some things more than others, is a rarer breed these days.
“We all fall victim to that — we get home, we’re comfortable and we don’t want to leave again, or we worked from home that day,” Olmscheid said.
Post-pandemic inertia and streaming services are hard to fight, but Olmscheid has an ace in the hole: There’s still no substitute for coming together to dig the arts live and in person.
“There’s a natural downturn that’s happened,” Olmscheid said, “but on the other hand, people are trying to find ways to connect with one another, and this is a beautiful way of doing that.”
As if the challenge of drawing people off their couches isn’t enough, universities and arts organizations are looking over their right shoulders in 2025 as well as their left.
Does Olmscheid worry that productions like “Sally: A Solo Play,” probing the nexus of slavery and the nation’s founding, or Kurbasy, an unabashed celebration of the distinct and rich Ukrainian culture, might push a hot button somewhere among the nation’s ascendant anti-woke, pro-Russia poobahs?
“It’s a consideration in the whole mix,” Olmscheid said. “It’s something we’re definitely aware of. We remain committed to our standard. If you look at our history, we’ve been working at bringing the world’s best artists for 43 years, and that’s not going to change.”
Olmscheid had to hustle to pin down a date for the Royal Philharmonic, one of the world’s greatest orchestras, as soon as he learned it was touring during the 2025-‘26 season.
“We locked it in last fall, and it helped us shape the entire season,” Olmscheid said.
He jumped at the chance to bring violinist Ray Chen, a charismatic superstar in the classical world, back to Wharton after Chen’s sellout recital in March 2024.
Chen will play Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto with the Royals, and the orchestra will follow up with Sibelius’ epic Second Symphony.
(In a rare convergence, Chen will also play with the Lansing Symphony Orchestra on Nov. 7. For more about him, see the accompanying story on the LSO’s season announcement.)
Another “tentpole” event is a rare Midwest appearance by the Baroque group Les Arts Florissants (Nov. 14), with dynamic young French violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, in a program of Vivaldi music, including “The Four Seasons.” Wharton’s holiday season will kick off with another legendary ensemble, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, bringing “Christmas in Vienna” on Nov. 30.
Olmscheid admitted to “a little healthy sparring” between Wharton and its University of Michigan counterpart, the University Musical Society, to host the nation’s premier jazz band, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (Feb. 10), led by Wynton Marsalis.
“We both have long relationships with the group and with Wynton,” Olmscheid said. But MSU has an extra special relationship. Not only are MSU jazz studies director Rodney Whitaker and several other faculty members alumni of the orchestra, but MSU’s jazz program is practically a farm team for the Lincoln Center group.
The jazz series also features an all-star tribute to Miles Davis (March 26), assembled especially for the trumpeter’s 100th birthday, with bandleader and arranger John Beasley, trumpeter Sean Jones, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist (and MSU grad) Ben Williams and drummer Terreon Gully.
Two major productions anchor Wharton’s global series next season. The Zimbabwean musical group Mokoomba will celebrate the 65th anniversary of MSU’s African Studies Center with a full week of classroom visits and community events, including a performance at Wharton on Oct. 9.
Kurbasy, a Ukrainian folk music troupe with modern flourishes, will also dig in for a residency with local students and community groups before performing at Wharton on Oct. 23. Kurbasy emerged from the avant-garde theater Les Kurbas in Lviv, Ukraine. Three female vocalists with tambourines, cymbals, violin and double bass weave an immersive, transcendent tapestry of folklore, theater and music.
In recent years, Wharton has put a hold on producing straight-up drama, but that’s about to change.
In February, the theater will present East Lansing playwright Sandra Seaton’s “Sally: A Solo Play,” about Sally Hemings and her relationship with Thomas Jefferson. The one-person show will run for three nights and feature actress Sabrina Sloan, who toured the U.S. as Angelica Schuyler in “Hamilton.”
“This marks our return to producing theater,” Olmscheid said. “I’ve been talking with Sandra for a couple of years, telling her we’d do it when the timing was right.”
Seaton isn’t just a local treasure. She was honored in 2012 with the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s Mark Twain Award, joining the ranks of previous awardees like Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury and Jim Harrison. Her collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, “From the Diary of Sally Hemings,” has been performed at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, New York City’s Carnegie Hall and beyond.
Year by year, Olmscheid is expanding the purview of Club 750, the Wharton Center’s intimate venue in the glassy Jackson Lounge with table seating and food service. Last season, events were confined to music. This season, comedy dates were added. Next season brings three Broadway-based nights, each night featuring a different singer-piano duo in a freewheeling, New York-style cabaret format.
“Sincerely, Sondheim” (Nov. 5) will feature Nicholas Rodriguez, a cast member of the recent Broadway revival of “Company,” in a heartfelt tribute to the late Broadway giant. Rodriguez will read Sondheim’s letters, tell personal stories and sing. Patti Murin, who originated the role of Anna in Disney’s “Frozen” on Broadway, will reflect on her career on Feb. 5 in “Once Upon a Stage.” Adam Jacobs, Broadway’s original Aladdin, will perform from the songbook of Alan Menken on April 23, mixing Menken’s Disney material with non-Disney stuff from shows like “Little Shop of Horrors.”
In addition to the new Broadway series, Club 750 will continue to feature performers from multiple genres that bend or stretch musical tastes, along with comedy acts.
A unique duo of The Juilliard School graduates, ArcoStrum (April 22), starts with violin and guitar in a classical mode but stretches into traditional Chinese instruments and anything else that strikes its fancy.
“It allows our more traditional audience to see something different,” Olmscheid said. “One of my bigger concerns is that there’s a waning interest in cultural curiosity — not a surefire ‘I’m gonna love it’ but ‘I don’t know what exactly I’m going to experience, but I’ll buy a ticket and find out.’”
Highlights of Wharton’s wide-ranging variety series in 2025-‘26 include Montreal-based Cirque Kalabanté’s “Afrique en Cirque” (Jan. 23), a colorful and musical circus show inspired by life in Guinea, and “The Choir of Man” (Feb. 24), a unique mix of music and theater set in a recreated British pub.
No less than three variety offerings are clearly aimed at the Boomer nostalgia market: a note-for-note recreation of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album (Sept. 27), a Simon & Garfunkel tribute (March 22) and former “Seinfeld” writer Pat Hazell’s one-man show, “The Wonder Bread Years” (May 14).
But it’s not a straight-up boomer fest. Olmscheid is balancing those offerings with “Avatar: The Last Airbender in Concert” on Oct. 7.
“What’s great about ‘Avatar’ is that it brings in a totally different demographic,” Olmscheid said.
“Avatar” will appeal more to Gen Z and millennial fans, but when it comes to nostalgia, musical lines blur a lot more than they used to. Sightings of teenage kids wearing Fleetwood Mac T-shirts are legion.
“It’s multigenerational,” Olmscheid said. “My nieces and nephews love things their grandparents love. I’ll be interested in seeing who shows up for Fleetwood Mac.”
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