I visited Mike’s Tavern Friday night for the first – and what may be the last – time. According to a message on the bar’s Web site, which I posted in my weekend music forecast, the club is closing indefinitely come May 31. New owners will remodel the place. I heard rumblings from regulars, however, that the deal may have…
Beth Gottstein leads the competition for New Kansas City Council Member Most Likely to Say Something Strange. At the May 17 business session, consultants presented an analysis of economic development in Kansas City. The analysis included examples of the tools other cities in the U.S. use to foster growth. The consultants discussed their findings for about 30 minutes. Then…
While Harper’s on a break from the scene, it’s up to me to point out the relevant rock going down in KC and Lawrence this weekend. You should have read up on some if it already in the Pitch music pages . For instance, on Saturday, the Replay Lounge and Jackpot Music Hall are “springing into summer” with a big…
This weekend, let’s GO TO THE LIBRARY! On our bikes! Right after tonight’s superamazing HIGH FIVE CONTEST! After the jump, a number of weekend events we found interesting. Categories: News
Mayoral spokesman Joe Miller called recently with corrections to this Plog item from May 11. That article listed the donors to Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s inaugural gala. We got the list from City Hall, but Miller said there were two errors on it. First, the name of the contact at the lawfirm Blackwell Sanders, one of the $10,000 donors, was…
Get ready for this unholy showdown: fag-hating Fred Phelps and King of Pop Michael Jackson. The two are colliding over copyright infringement thanks to the Westboro Baptist Church’s parody of “We Are the World,” which the Phelpses sing as “God Hates the World.” Categories: News
Next month, the 2007 Tony Awards – named for the late actress and director Antoinette Perry (1888-1946) – will be presented at the historic Radio City Music Hall and aired on CBS. The event honors excellence in New York City’s theater community. In July, the 2007 Zoey Awards – named for the very-much-alive veteran Kansas City femme illusionist Zoe Kelly…
To Royals fans, the baseball cliché “Wait ’til next year” can seem more like a threat than a promise. The 2008 off-season, which begins after today’s game against the Cleveland Indians, is different. Unlike past seasons, the Royals lost with a purpose in 2007, bringing hope to long-suffering fans. Zack Greinke battled his personal demons and regained the form…
The Kansas City T-Bones have always relied on a reductive marketing campaign. Instead of watching the Royals play what’s essentially minor-league baseball, the T-Bones implicitly ask, Why not watch the real thing for less money? The T-Bones open their season tonight at 7:05, beginning their 2007 Northern League campaign with a four-game series against the Schaumburg Flyers at Community…
The journey of the Hmong people — from Southern Chinese villages to Laotian refugee camps and then to Western nations — is modeled in a three-part Hmong at Heart exhibit at the Wonderscope Children’s Museum (5705 Flint in Shawnee, 913-268-4176). “It’s very hands-on, tailored for children 10 and under,” says Ann Zimmerman, the museum’s director. “And we’re bringing in…
Army of Shadows: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Arthur & the Invisibles (Genius) Bill/Bill on His Own (Brentwood) Bunny Whipped (Think) Caddyshack: 20th Anniversary (Warner Bros.) Chasing Liberty (Warner Bros.) Curse of the Zodiac (Lionsgate) The Dead Girl (First Look) Denzel Washington: Spotlight Collection (Universal) ER: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe: The Complete Saturday Morning…
If you’re looking for a laugh, find a kid raised on Grand Theft Auto and introduce him to Pac-Man for the first time. As he stares at you blankly, explain the addictive joy of eating dots and the simplistic genius of the neon-blue maze. When he sneers, “That’s it? It’s the same level over and over?” stand your damn…
In this week’s Pitchcast, Nathan Darrow, the metro’s hottest actor, talks about his recent fame, staying in Kansas City and the taboo topic of being a straight man in theater. Get it through iTunes by clicking here, download it on the Web by clicking here here or click the bar below to listen: Categories: News Tags: Apple iTunes, Columns, kansas…
Pan’s Labyrinth (New Line) Guillermo Del Toro has made a career of mixing slam-bang special effects (Hellboy, Blade II) with creepy atmospheres (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone). But with Pan’s Labyrinth, he uses his entire palette for what will likely be remembered as his masterpiece. Mixing Franco’s Spain with fairy tales, Labyrinth is brutal, bloody and magical — a children’s…
Iron Kisses On one level, Iron Kisses is another dash through two of the most common — and self-involved — ideas that you’d see in a young playwrights’ workshop: a coming-out tale, with a detour into how a character got the hell out of a small town. Playwright (and native Kansan) James Still’s innovation is to give us this story…
The Chicano Experience This is the third-annual group exhibition organized by the Mattie Rhodes center celebrating the Chicano (Mexican-American) experience. Israel Garcia’s mixed-media installation includes two large photographs — a white-haired woman working in the kitchen, and a male worker in a cowboy hat and a denim jacket — placed next to an abstract sculpture of a disembodied face, with…
Pandaemonium is the capital of hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s also what most of us consider a state of panic, chaos and agitation. The word excites a call to arms, a cry for action in political, social and cultural disasters. Despite its provocative title, however, Mary Wessel’s Pandemonium at the Jan Weiner Gallery falls heavily on this side…
For his latest play, The Raj of St. Louis, Ry Kincaid has chosen baseball as his subject (something much more divisive, in the theatrical world, than gayness). In particular, he’s after the 1920s Cardinals, examining star hitter and sumbitch Rogers Hornsby (the commanding Chris Nielsen) and manager Branch Rickey (Matt Rapport). The centerpiece of this drama is Rickey’s scheme to…
Decades ago, when The Flintstones promised us a “gay old time,” the word gay meant something more like “a half-hour of fun, rock-related puns” than it did anything about Fred and Barney’s easygoing pantslessness. Since then, the word’s meaning has morphed so many times that, this weekend, when I kept hearing boys bitching about how “gay” Spider-Man was, I suffered…
In the superb chamber piece Away From Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage of a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife, Fiona (an artfully wrinkled and radiant Julie Christie), have weathered a difficult but durable…
In January, I wrote about Jimmy Frantze’s tribulations negotiating a new lease for his seven-year-old Frondizi’s (4558 Main). It all came down to money. The building’s owner, American Century Real Estate, wanted more rent, and Frantze didn’t want to pay it. “The restaurant had just gotten to the point where it was profitable,” Frantze says, “and we just couldn’t work…
When a place goes out of business on West 39th Street’s popular restaurant row, it doesn’t take long for a new one to appear. It’s almost like magic. Before the stove cooled at the former Macaluso’s, chef Scott Warren had taken over the lease from Tommy Macaluso; he’s now preparing to reopen the space as Scotty’s on 39th Street….
Promoter John Davis says that the name for his new DJ residency came to him after he returned from a trip to Miami. “They party every day out there, even on Mondays,” he tells us. On Monday nights at the Hangout in KC, Davis spins R&B and hip-hop with friends such as Da Promoda. Most nights, an MC hypes up…
“People” by Animal Collective: When the Walt Disney Company mandates that its employees drop acid before punching in for work, we’ll know that the mainstream world has caught up to Animal Collective. These Baltimore-bred freak-folkers — known for donning animal costumes and face paint onstage — dose cherubic, childlike wonder and horseplay with a dark, experimentalist exoticism to produce surreal,…
