The tagline for Hairspray could read something like, “Your favorite movie, now a musical, now a movie, now a . . . symphony concert?” That’s right, John Waters’s beloved 1988 film about racial segregation in 1960’s Baltimore is being adapted once again—this time by the BSO—and staged January 25-27 at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The kicker? Waters himself will take the stage as a narrator. “The BSO came to me with the idea, and I liked it because it was something different,” Waters says.

What do you think of Thrill Jockey signing all these Baltimore bands, including Arbouretum, over the past few years?
It's fine with me. We've always had good bands here, but I think it took the situation reaching a certain critical mass in order to interest Thrill Jockey. They’ve been branching out more and more from the kinds of bands they started with in the 90's. From a vantage point a little closer to the inside, it feels quite natural.

Kristen Hileman walks through The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Contemporary Wing, looking for signs of progress. The wing closed for extensive renovations almost two years ago, and, on this September afternoon, its 16 galleries are mostly empty. Wooden packing crates outnumber masterworks; a black pulley sits in the central gallery, where two Franz West sculptures rest on quilted packing blankets; and a stack of colorful panels by the collaborative duo Guyton/Walker lean against a wall in an adjacent gallery. “It’s coming along,” says Hileman, the BMA’s contemporary art curator.

Edgar Allan Poe has been interpreted many ways—by John Astin, John Cusack, even on The Simpsons. But, starting October 17, Center Stage will show us a different Poe in The Completely Fictional—Utterly True—Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe. “The show opens and he’s been ushered to this hospital in Baltimore in a drunken, delirious state,” says actor Bruce Nelson, pictured. “And there’s flashbacks, but the audience never knows if they’re seeing a real flashback or if these are ramblings of a diseased mind.” While the play sounds dark, he insists it’s also full of vaudeville-style wit.