The idea of a pig is quite different from the real thing. People get called “pigs” for being dirty and gluttonous, whereas pigs in barnyards are pink and shockingly clean. In Theatre for Young America’s The Life and Times of the Three Little Pigs, author and director Gene Mackey’s characters fill out both sides of the porcine picture. Narrated…
Virtually all musicians are artistic sponges to one degree or another. Ideal is the artist who soaks up everything but sounds wholly distinctive: Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are obvious examples. At the other extreme are the musicians who, however engaging their music might be, seem merely to reproduce what they’ve absorbed: Ryan Adams, say, or Lenny Kravitz. On her…
In one corner slumps Face to Face, a perennially punchless contender for the mall-punk title. The trio’s lone original composition, “Fight or Flight,” throws a few timid hooks at its listeners, jabs them with irritating “whoa-oh” backing vocals and threadbare slogans, staggers gracelessly, then collapses in a flabby heap. Next, it rids the Dropkick Murphys’ “Road of the Righteous” of…
Alan Jackson’s Drive recently spent three weeks as America’s best-selling album, a reign sandwiched between the top-spot tenures of Creed’s Weathered and J. Lo’s new remix collection. Jackson’s double-platinum release, among the most consistent albums of the singer’s career, certainly deserves the attention. On Drive, the shuffles scoot, the ballads simmer and hum with understated ache, and the plainspoken lyrics…
The Chemical Brothers have produced the ideal record for anyone feeling nostalgic for 1997. For the first couple of tracks, at least, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons recall the urgent, pumping dance-as-trench-warfare future shock of their double-barreled bestsellers Exit Planet Dust and Dig Your Own Hole. Then the pair retreats to the juice bar at the gym, making good only…
Jim Cosgrove has had regular gigs in the past. In 1996, he strummed acoustic folk ditties weekly at Kennedy’s and at the 75th Street Brewery, encouraging crowd participation by inviting curious onlookers to grab percussion instruments out of a gold briefcase. Nonetheless, Cosgrove’s arrangement with his new homebase, the Rio Theater, fills him with the sort of unconfined exuberance…
In today’s instant-gratification-driven musical climate, in which persistent hooks and immediate melodies provide the quickest route to all-important airways access, Dream Theater remains an enigma, a band that practically challenges listeners to get through one of its records. It’s no surprise that U.S. fans have kept their distance, with only a handful willing to hang with songs that just get…
Like all great writers, Jeffrey Hyman used special stationery. “He was always writing lyrics on little scraps of paper — on shopping bags, on cardboard from shirts,” recalls his mother, Charlotte Lesher. “They would be really crazy lyrics.” Beat on the brat, he wrote, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat. “As brothers, we had…
Ray Lawrence’s Lantana is a high-toned Australian soap opera, which is to say that its philandering police detective and its grief-stricken psychoanalyst are a bit quirkier than their all-too-familiar American television counterparts. Its unhappy wives, gloomy husbands and alienated teenagers are more carefully constructed than similar characters in less ambitious movies. This is sophisticated, sometimes very wry stuff, but…
War of the words: Joe Miller’s article about Floyd Hermann, the conscientious objector, left me with the feeling that this man is a thief (“The Peacemakers,” February 28). He’s demanded the rights and privileges of a citizen in our society while refusing to contribute to the cost of achieving and maintaining those same benefits. Every relationship one has with family,…
When Robert Riggs submitted a résumé for the job of human resources director at the Kansas City School District, he figured he had a good chance. Since taking a district job in 1991, he’d moved up to second in command of HR. His education seemed ideal: an MBA with majors in organizational behavior and in personnel and labor relations. But…
On Monday, March 4, when Highwoods Properties announced that it was scrapping its plan to tear down the Plaza’s Park Lane apartments, it looked like a victory against business as usual in Kansas City. Nearly everyone was sickened by the idea of leveling the quaint old building, especially since recent Plaza construction has allowed such highly unique additions as a…
On February 15, KKFI 90.1 listeners tuned in at 9 a.m. to hear Democracy Now, a national newscast devoted to stories ignored by mainstream media. But instead of hearing the Pacifica Network program, listeners were treated to the somber voices of 90.1 board president Chuck Tackett and board members George Biswell and Jim Olenick. The three men spent the entire…
Victory came to Jennifer Larson in the library at the Wendell Phillips Elementary Magnet School. First her husband, Ed, called, then a reporter. Then another reporter. And on Monday, March 4, almost exactly two months after the biggest battle of her life began, a fight that she literally took to city hall, Larson sat at her desk and felt victory….
The late Joe Gilbert’s name still stands out in red lights on the front of J. Gilbert’s Wood-Fired Steaks (see review) on Metcalf, but his restaurant legacy has been fractured beyond recognition. There’s no restaurant at the old Municipal Airport anymore, where Gilbert had his first great success in the 1940s. And who remembers the Inn at the Landing, which…
