Ann Arbor Summer Festival: Top of the Park

The Ann Arbor Summer Festival is an exhilarating celebration of performing arts, outdoor entertainment, and community spirit. A boutique music and arts festival, the nearly four-week gathering offers dozens of performances, activities, exhibitions, and screenings representative of the best in music, dance, comedy, film, circus and street arts, and family entertainment.

Founded by Eugene Power, and established as an equal partnership between the City of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival presented its first full season in 1984. Early festival seasons emphasized classical music and theater, but have since become more popular and diverse in nature, encompassing a breadth of performance genres. What began with a vision for a summer cultural event that would connect audiences with world-class artists, bring community together, and showcase the city and state as a major arts destination, now flourishes as one of the leading multi-arts festivals in the country.

Today, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival produces two concurrent programs, one indoor and one outdoor, at various venues and spaces across the University of Michigan campus and in downtown Ann Arbor.

The indoor Mainstage series includes ticketed performances of world-class music, dance, theater, and comedy.

The outdoor program, Top of the Park, is held along a beautiful campus green and offers admission-free concerts, movies under the stars, open-air spectacles, and unique family attractions.

Since 2007, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival offers a progressive mix of regional, national, and international artists of all disciplines. Presenting over 175 scheduled events and attracting a diverse audience of 80,000 people, the festival continues to grow as a major cultural event in the Ann Arbor community, and as an internationally recognized celebration of arts that enriches the cultural, economic, and social vitality of the region.

For decades, the festival has hosted such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Marcel Marceau, Aretha Franklin, and Tony Bennett. Recent Mainstage seasons have featured Garrison Keillor, Willie Nelson, Elvis Costello, Gladys Knight, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Chris Isaak, Cake, Bonnie Raitt, Mavis Staples, Diana Krall, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Andrew Bird, Bernadette Peters, Indigo Girls, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Buddy Guy, Ingrid Michaelson, Trombone Shorty, John Hiatt, Ira Glass, Los Lobos, Pink Martini, Patty Griffin The Moth Mainstage and Pink Martini.

In addition to its mainstream presentations, recent fringe and alternative offerings have included performances by John Waters, Sandra Bernhard, Feist, Devo, Dean & Britta, Neal Medlyn, Taylor Mac, Meow Meow, Mucca Pazza and MarchFourth.

Since 2007, the festival has presented major outdoor spectacle from around the world including Australia’s Strange Fruit, Spian’s WyldBytes, The U.K.’s Architects of Air, France’s Company Transe Express and many more.