For Emir Garcia, the opportunity to provide advice and tips for students while performing has been creatively stimulating. Garcia is an actor currently appearing in Lucky Stiff, a co-production between Flint Repertory Theatre and the University of Michigan-Flint’s theatre and dance program that features students alongside theatre professionals in on-stage and backstage roles,
“It’s nice to be able to also kind of teach while you’re working,” Garcia said. “It really helps everything sink in. I get to think back about, ‘Oh, what have I learned (as a professional actor)?’ And then get to pass that knowledge on.”
Garcia is relatively new to the profession himself. The North Carolina-based actor has been acting for about two years. Lucky Stiff is his second show with Flint Rep. He also appeared in last year’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He said he’s enjoyed the experience of working alongside students who are chasing theatre careers, and has also been happy to share whatever information he can that he’s still collecting himself as he builds his own career.
“I’m still very fresh with things I’ve learned or mistakes I’ve made,” Garcia said. “So we’ve talked about some of my mistakes, or some auditioning do’s and don’t’s, and things like that.”
Garcia even took recent advice he’d received about a technique for recording self-tapes for auditions and used it as a teachable moment with interested students.
“So we’re gonna talk and maybe do a little class (to share it),” he said. “It’s been great working with them. You can tell how much drive they have, this is what they’re studying to do. And every single one of them has heart and passion for it. It was clear day one. I was like, ‘Wow, they’re off book. They know all their stuff. They know the choreo, they’re good.’”
For leadership at the Flint Repertory Theatre and UM-Flint, those types of valuable interactions are exactly what they hoped would unfold when they brainstormed a partnership last year.
Sharing Knowledge and Resources
Mutual need was a motivating factor when Nicole Samsel, producing artist director at Flint Repertory Theatre, and Shelby Newport, chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts and coordinator of the theatre and dance program at UM-Flint, first engaged in conversations in 2025.
The Flint Rep needed space – their home theatre needed significant renovations which would make performing in Bower Theatre for its 2025-26 season untenable. And Newport was looking for ways to differentiate the theatre program, give students more opportunities to work alongside and learn about professional careers in the industry, and even get more non-theatre students interested in attending performances as patrons.
Lucky Stiff is the third Flint Rep show that has opened on UM-Flint’s campus. A Streetcar Named Desire was performed last fall and A Facility for the Living had performances last December. For those shows, UM-Flint students had some involvement in work study and other roles. Lucky Stiff differs from the previous shows because it is a true co-production, with students able to audition for on-stage roles, and a mix of staff from Flint Rep and UM-Flint and students filling a variety of backstage and technical positions. Newport said there are 18 total students in on-stage and backstage roles, working right alongside theatre professionals.
Cassandra Justice, who is in the ensemble in Lucky Stiff and is also an understudy for the role of Dominique, recently returned to UM-Flint as a student. She’d initially enrolled in 2009 after high school, but then changed paths to teach ballroom dancing in the Metro Detroit area for about 15 years before returning to finish her degree at UM-Flint about a year ago.
Justice’s experience has been particularly unique because, although she’s a student, she’s closer in age to many of the professionals involved in the production.
“It has been really fun for me,” Justice said. “It feels a little bit like I am working with people that I would have been working with had I not taken my detour into ballroom. Just watching the melding of these two groups of people, it’s been very cool. I was not sure what we were gonna get. You have the students that are just starting out and finding their footing in the acting world. And then you have the professionals who have been doing it for years. I wasn’t sure how that was gonna play out, but it has been like this company was always meant to work together. The bonding happened so instantaneously, we just became one close knit unit.”
The partnership has provided immense value for a student like Justice, who already has some professional experience in the arts but is looking for more ways to connect or collaborate with existing artists and arts organizations. She’s moving her ballroom dance business back to the Flint area since moving back here, but wants to expand and partner in creative ways.
“I want it to be a collaborative thing where it’s not just ballroom, it’s more performing arts or other businesses that maybe need customers to come in,” Justice said. “Mostly, it’s collaboration (that she’s looking for from her education), meeting my two loves, ballroom and theatre together whatever that may look like – being a choreographer, actor, whatever the case may be. I’m just keeping everything open, because that has been how I’ve had the coolest opportunities. I think you kind of have to be that way as a performer. If you’re like, ‘Oh, I have to do this, this, and this,’ there’s not really a lot of wiggle room in that. And you need some wiggle room if you’re going to be in the performing arts.”
Those opportunities for students to not only learn alongside professionals, but also begin envisioning ways they could shape their own careers, are exactly what excited Newport when the partnership with Flint Rep was first developed.
“Over the last two days, just even when you might watch two actors talk on a break or something, when it’s a student and a professional, you can kind of see that there’s a connection being made there in a really cool way,” Newport said. “I think every student working on this is getting credit for it. So it is sort of like this living classroom laboratory. They learn scene work and they learn costume construction in the classes, but now they’re doing it with their hands. The activation of this is how we’re making it happen, and I’m seeing my professors making it happen, and I’m seeing these professionals who are making a living, doing this all the time and part of the time and coming from LA and coming from other places, I think that hopefully it makes it feel really real (to the students). That’s what we want out of experiential learning – we want you to experience the thing. It’s just so alive backstage and in the theatre right now.”
Samsel said that it has been rewarding to watch how quickly the students got up to speed in their various roles in the production, and how seamlessly the students and professionals meshed together cohesively – an especially impressive accomplishment considering the size of the Lucky Stiff cast and the elaborate spectacle of the production.
“In a lot of ways, the partnership has exceeded my expectations,” Samsel said. “Especially getting to watch the journey of the students and not just the students on stage. We have, I think 11 students who are on our backstage crew. I think it’s very easy to imagine that combining an educational and professional experience that there would be this really stark cultural difference. But actually, there hasn’t been, there’s been this really beautiful maturity and partnership and collaboration, which is the best thing that I could hope for.”
Samsel also pointed out that working actors and theatre professionals can point out a wide array of things that students wouldn’t necessarily think about, but are still vital aspects of working consistently in the industry.
“I walk backstage and I see a professional actor with a group of student actors around explaining, ‘So these are the apps that you can use to help you memorize lines,’ or just kind of all of these tips,” Samsel said. “You can tell that they enjoy passing along some of that hard-earned knowledge. When you go through a theatre program, there’s so many things that go into being a professional artist that are not your craft. You need to know how to do your taxes. You need to know how to navigate where to get audition postings. There are all of these different things that aren’t necessarily acting. That kind of outside knowledge I think is really beneficial for the students.”
An Exciting and Energetic Show
Lucky Stiff is a musical comedy that follows the journey of Harry Witherspoon (played by Connor Alston), who stands to inherit $6 million – all he needs to do to get it is take his recently murdered uncle on a vacation to Monte Carlo while passing him off as still alive the entire time. But there are rivals for the inheritance. If he fails, the inheritance would go to the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn, with a passionate representative of the organization (played by Mara Jill Herman) trying to make sure Harry doesn’t fulfill his mission, and a slightly unhinged gun-carrying ex of the deceased (played by Aviva Pressman) also showing up to reclaim money she thinks should belong to her.
The murder mystery farce is by the Tony Award-winning writing team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It is directed by Stephanie Dean. The show’s dynamic set, music, choreography, and humor create an exciting experience for audiences.
“I think this is probably one of the wackiest, abstract shows that I’ve done,” Garcia said. “I think they (audiences) are not gonna have a clue what to expect coming in. I think that the shock factor of what’s going on – What are they about to do? They’re about to go skydiving? Now they’re in a nightmare? There’s a smoking nun? – I think they’re gonna be really shocked to say the least, in a good way.”
Lucky Stiff opened over the weekend, and has shows during the next two weeks. Tickets are available online for the following dates:
- Thursday, March 26, 2026 10 a.m.
- Friday, March 27, 2026 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, March 28, 2026 7:30 p.m.
- Sunday, March 29, 2026 2 p.m.
- Thursday, April 2, 2026 7:30 p.m.
- Friday, April 3, 2026 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, April 4, 2026 2 p.m.
“I get excited to hear gasps and cheers and where the applause is,” Newport said. “There’s so many showy elements of this production that I’m just excited for people to see people kind of light up with the fun and zaniness of this show. I think it’ll just warm us all up.”
Everyone involved with the production is hoping that the farcical nature of the show, and just the fun that the cast has together, creates a great experience for audiences.
“I think we all need that right now,” Justice said. “I’m really excited for them (audiences) to see how wacky and pushing the boundaries theatre can get. There’s so many really cool technical elements to this, the choreography is genius, the costumes are incredible. I think it’ll be really cool for them to kind of experience the same, I know it sounds corny, but the magic that we get to have, being a part of this process. Audiences need that now more than ever. Everybody’s super busy and we don’t take a lot of time to just sit and watch something. Live theatre has a really good way of being impactful. This will allow people to just have something really beautiful and really funny to watch.”
Flint Repertory Theatre has one more production in their season at their temporary space at UM-Flint. They’ll perform Green Day’s American Idiot, a “punk rock musical,” beginning in late May. But even if Flint Rep moves back into their own space, Samsel and Newport hope that the partnership has opened up long-term ways for UM-Flint and all of the Flint Cultural Center organizations to find creative ways to work together and build their relationships.
“ I’m hoping that as we move back across the highway, that we are able to kind of bring some of the folks who have discovered us (through UM-Flint),” Samsel said. “I also hope that it is a two-way street. I’m really looking at, once we have our venue open again, the ways in which what we have can enrich what UM-Flint’s theatre program has and vice versa.”
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