Spring is in the air! And as luck has it, we have flowers – both real and in art and design – among the cultural highlights on offer this month.

Sing for your next performance
If you are slightly embarrassed to be a karaoke fan, don’t be because here’s your chance to let rip for a good cause. The Orange Theatre is organising a Lover & Heartbreak Fundraiser to mount their production of The Next Five Years, of which more next month, provided you put your money where your singing mouth is, at the Hard Rock Café in Amsterdam. March 5. Website 

Read a dangerous book
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing but a lot of knowledge can be pretty hairy as well, a new exhibition at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem shows. People in power have never liked scientists proposing new-fangled ideas that interfere with their place in the universe, be they bishops or Donald Trump.

Dangerous Books is about the books that have made the church, the state, and sometimes both at the same time, tremble. From Copernicus to Einstein, are scientists at an even greater risk of censorship now? the museum asks. From March 6. Website

Get the goods on NL at IamExpat
Find out all you need to know about life in the Netherlands at the IamExpat Fair in Amsterdam, where experts will be on hand to tell you everything, from filing tax forms to buying a house and starting to get to grips with the language. March 7. Website

Come to 010
Don’t miss Museumnacht010 when museums in Rotterdam open their doors until the early hours, including the brand new Fenix migration museum. Take your pick from a multitude of events and locations. March 7. Website

Tiptoe through the tulips
The world-renowned Keukenhof flower park in Lisse is opening its doors again this month with spring flowers blooming all around. Come for a leisurely walk or dance your way through the park to the cheery Dutch tunes of a dweilorkest, or oompah band. From March 19. Website

Don’t look down your nose at Cyrano
The Utrecht English Theatre presents Cyrano de Bergerac, the enduring romantic play that teaches us not to judge a book by its cover. Cyrano, selfless until the end, helps his friend Christian to woo and win Roxane, the woman he loves, by lending him his words. As she belatedly finds out, the nos(e) had it all along. March 21 and 22 in Utrecht and March 28 and 29 in Amsterdam. Website

Experience flower power
Flowers political, environmental, ornamental, technological, botanical and flowers scientific, artistic, economic, and symbolic: the whole bouquet is blooming at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam this spring. The museum has brought together 200 objects from art, design, fashion and science, showing man’s relationship with flowers and the meaning society has invested in them. Flowers Forever is on from March 27. Website

Have a jig and a jug on St Patrick’s Day
The Hague will turn green this month as Saint Patrick’s Day revellers take to the streets to celebrate all things Irish. There’s music of course, with a line-up including Acting the Maggot and the Burning Pubcrawlers, the parade on March 15, and the Ireland film festival on  March 12, 14 and 15 at the Pathé Buitenhof. Website

Just call it mellow yellow
The sunlight in Arles is “pale sulfur yellow, pale lemon yellow, gold…How lovely yellow is! ” Vincent van Gogh gushed in one of his letters to his brother Theo. His Sunflowers may have become less vibrant with the years, but they still shine.

The Van Gogh Museum has brought together other artists who used yellow in their work grouping their use of the colour under three themes, including warmth and light, modernity, and divinity. Yellow – Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour is on until May 17. Website

Go grey
Grey! The Art of Aging at the Museum Van Bommel Van Dam in Venlo explores the way international contemporary artists look at the aging process. In a society obsessed with youth, older people don’t get much of a lookin. This exhibition puts portrays the (in)dignity of old age, from creeping ageism and invisibility to jolly sexual encounters. Until June 14. Website

Celebrate the life and work of Erwin Olaf a little longer
The retrospective of the work of Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf (1958-2023) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is being extended by popular request. A lifelong activist, Olaf championed gay and trans rights, chronicled nightlife and celebrated the human body.

The exhibition includes his less well-known earlier work as well as Muses, a series about human frailty that is on show for the first time, and For Life, his final video work which remained unfinished. Erwin Olaf: Freedom is on until April 6. Website