18 Thursday The current screen update of Othello, starring Julia Stiles, arrived in theaters just six years after the version with Laurence Fishburne. Just Off Broadway Theater picks up the Othello trend with this weekend’s performance of the Shakespeare drama about an interracial marriage destroyed by outsiders’ spiteful gossip. Shakespeare still earns a laugh with the phrase “the beast…
An old Italian proverb says that one barrel of wine can work more miracles than a church full of saints. Doug Frost has certainly seen his share of wine-induced miracles — and embarrassments — over the past twenty years. Frost was a struggling young actor in Kansas City when he took a job as a waiter at a local…
Two years after Princess Bitch Productions staged a night of five short plays under the title Quintet, Bill Nelson and Robin Delaloye’s company has been renamed and is back in business. As Burning Moon Productions, the pair will stage Tales From Gaydom, another quintet of shows, this time all with gay themes. “People are definitely more aware of gay…
Plot aside — way aside, because it’s almost a nonissue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis’ bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in search of retirement and a life of endless sunsets…
“April the Rock Star” walks down the sidewalk outside the Uptown Theater. She was inside dancing with a thousand people, but left to take her bag to her car. She doesn’t know that she’ll need to buy another ticket if she wants to get back in. Within the Uptown’s gorgeous confines, a New York DJ named Joey Beltram takes over…
Ed Peden sits at his kitchen table, a table buried beneath the rolling Kansas prairie a few miles west of Topeka, a table that, like Peden’s queen-size bed, his sofa and his side-by-side toilets, is surrounded by at least eighteen inches of reinforced concrete. But Peden is not ready for war. U.S. planes are aloft over Afghanistan as Peden talks…
Blue Springs city leaders dream of a giant Home Depot store gracing the entrance to the city off I-70 that would serve as what a Kansas City Star reporter poetically calls a “classy western gateway.” Former mayor John Michael laughs at the absurdity of it. “You tell me any Home Depot classes up an area, I’m sorry, but that big,…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars, all of whom gathered to pat themselves on the…
Rally the troops: Exercising his duties as commander in chief of the Kansas City-based Veterans of Foreign Wars, James N. Goldsmith recently wrote, “Dissenters who are protesting the government’s plan to launch military operations against bin Laden … disgrace the memory” of people killed on September 11. Hooey, say members of the Justice/Not Revenge Network. “We are Americans and we…
Battle Cry Patriot shames: Regarding C.J. Janovy’s “Red, White and Blues” (September 27): What swill! What mindless inflammatory rubbish! “Futile” blood banks. Flying a flag indicating support of every breath every politician takes — “unequivocally endorses all of the United States ….” People “blindly wearing” patriotic T-shirts. Some high school student believing that s/he should be able to dictate whether…
Joseph Hess pretty much gave up on bass and crappie decades ago, but he may never give up on the Royals. The 25-year Kauffman Stadium fixture has just completed another season in the front row of the right-field general admission seats. You’ve probably seen the 81-year-old fan: He’s the one with a long, thick white beard and matching locks curling…
GH: Joe Hess had more to say than I could fit in my column. Here are some additional nuggets. “If they put a winning team on the field, you’ll have people coming out. Look, they put two million people in the stands here before.” “This Berroa comes up from Wichita, and in his first game he gets handcuffed by a…
There is no explanation for why the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, crammed full of bluegrass standards and chain-gang echoes and lullaby melodies, has sold nearly two million copies and sat near the top of the country charts for months. The disc has received no airplay — except maybe on public radio late at…
Love may be a many-splendored thing, but not always in the restaurant business. It took thirteen months for newlyweds Emmanuel and Megan Langlade to open Aixois (see review), from their initial proposal to the night they served their first dinner. But it might take more time for long-married chefs Michael Smith and Debbie Gold — formerly of the American Restaurant…
New York magazine’s restaurant critic, Gael Greene, once observed: “Great food is like great sex — the more you have, the more you want.” Unfortunately, only a handful of Kansas City restaurants have real sex appeal. Sex appeal in a restaurant isn’t just intimate ambience, seductive music or a menu filled with luscious, potent aphrodisiacs; it’s a combination of…
11 Thursday It’s opening night for the Kansas City Ballet’s fall season. Dancers perform varied selections, including the Ruth Page classic Frankie and Johnny (the rambunctious story of how Frankie seeks revenge after Johnny does her wrong), George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, the sensual pas de deux from La Sylphide (a full-length ballet about a bridegroom bewitched by a sylph) and…
Michal Rovner, an Israeli-born, New York-based artist, takes photographs of familiar objects — mostly birds and people. But viewers hardly recognize the subjects once they’re hanging on museum walls. Rovner never seems satisfied with presenting reality as she finds it; she makes reproductions of reproductions of the original images — altering colors and blurring landscapes over generations of revision…
In 1999, stand-up comedian Margaret Cho videotaped one of her live shows, making it into a movie that played in art houses and gay and lesbian film festivals across the country. I’m the One That I Want is a moving narrative about Cho’s trials in Hollywood, where she was told to lose weight to play herself on television, and…
History supposedly repeats itself — a shuddering thought given some current events. But as for “herstory,” the polemical concept that brings The Coterie Theatre’s Breath of an American Spirit: Sacagawea to a skidding halt, once is probably enough. Christina Anderson’s screechy play begins in a library, where high schoolers Renee (Kathryn Taylor) and Ricardo (Chris Kellenberger) are working independently…
When musicians involved in the ’80s Monsters of Rock metal revolution scowl disdainfully at leaders of the nü school such as Limp Bizkit and Crazy Town, it’s not just jealousy-fueled contempt for the groups that have run away with their record sales and angry-young-man fanbase. Beer-spewing, groupie-shagging antics aside, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth intelligently addressed serious issues in their songs,…
Sean Croghan has fronted a punk outfit (Crackerband) and a power-pop unit (Jr. High), neither of which produced music that shares much in common with From Burnt Orange to Midnight Blue. Croghan’s solo songs, simply played by him and a group of friends (including the Minders’ Martyn Leaper and Rebecca Cole), are mostly slow and stately, with lyrical barbs (the…
After the Tournament of Rock went terribly sour, area bands and music fans are understandably gun-shy about any event that stages competitions among groups. But there’s nothing to fear from El Torreon’s Cage Match, which pits punk and hardcore acts against each other in playful, if brutally noisy, mock combat. Tanka Ray, Sister Mary Rotten Crotch (pictured) and Rock Over…
An integral member of several area bands, Mark Southerland often spends his weekends gigging, whether he’s touring overseas with the free-bop ensemble Malachy Papers or scratching tape locally with the eight-track revivalists T.J. Dovebelly. But recently, Southerland put down his saxophone to handle heavier equipment. “I spent most of my day power-buffing the floor,” Southerland says, describing one not-so-easy…
When Beachwood Sparks stepped into the spotlight a couple years ago, it was an easy group to tag: four guys sailing along on a hickory wind and infusing the old Gram Parsons sound with a healthy dose of psychedelia. This was twang touched by acid blotter, country music viewed through a kaleidoscope. Its debut album — a pleasant, if subdued,…
