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Excitement is brewing this week in Ann Arbor and seems about ready to burst. Einstein on the Beach is officially beginning again, for the first time in twenty years, and after much anticipation….tomorrow. All of our preview performances this weekend are sold out, and we’ve been told that people are coming from 30 different states to see what we have created. The thought is thrilling, humbling, and sobering all at once.

Mel Brooks’s “Producers” they’re not. “No way we’ll become get rich on this,” Linda Brumbach said yesterday at UM’s B-School in a 90-minute public conversation about the ins and outs of producing Einstein on the Beach. Brumbach is the head of Pomegranate Arts, the tiny production company that’s taken on the near-impossible task of bringing Einstein to the stage here in A2 and in 10 other venues around the world. The tour ends in Hong Kong in March 2013, and Brumbach says she’ll consider it an artistic success if “Bob, Phil, and Lucinda get the piece they want.” That’s Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Lucinda Childs, the artists who gave birth to the monumental opera in 1976 and have seen only two revivals since then.

Last night’s Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series featured a conversation with Einstein on the Beach co-creators Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Anne Bogart, acclaimed theater director, moderated the conversation. Leslie Stainton (almost) live-blogs the event.

For a concept that underpins much of life as we know it—including, science historian Peter Galison reminded listeners yesterday, GPS and satellite technology—Einstein’s theory of relativity is hard to grasp, at least for this non-physicist. At yesterday’s Institute for the Humanities lecture in Rackham Amphitheatre, Galison laid out both background and context for Einstein’s radical rethinking of time as a relative rather than an absolute phenomenon.

A round-up of Einstein on the Beach coverage.

UMS Programming Director Michael Kondziolka and UMS Technical Director Jeff Beyersdorf discuss the technical challenges of producing an epic-scale work like Einstein on the Beach.

Leslie Stainton covers the first night of UMS Night School, where she learned the meaning of “maverick.” VIDEO interview with UMS Head Usher Dennis Carter as he prepares to usher at the Einstein on the Beach preview performances.

On Saturday, January 21, Einstein on the Beach composer Philip Glass will join a panel of special guests to ponder the cultural significance of Albert Einstein at Saturday Morning Physics. Guests and physicists Sean Carroll and Michael Turner on what it means to be a “renegade” in the sciences, the influence of Albert Einstein, and his cultural impact.

Inside the Power Center 14 days before the opening of Einstein on the Beach, it’s not immediately clear that this is, “hands down, the biggest show ever” to hit this auditorium, as UMS programming manager Mark Jacobson told me shortly before we entered the theater. But after an hour or so of listening to production manager Will Knapp talk about the challenges of mounting the giant opera here in Ann Arbor, I began to see what Jacobson meant.