Fifteen years before his death, legendary dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey created the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble from the most promising scholarship students in his namesake school. Today, as Ailey II, that dance company tours the country, introducing new works by emerging choreographers. The Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey will host several public performances by the Ailey II company,…
Mark Southerland’s latest opus, Moon Bears and Sister Wives, is what happens when theater hooks up with experimental music: They figure out they’re blood relatives but decide to have a kid anyway. Then that kid ends up being a hyperactive, imaginative weirdo who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. Tonight at 8, for $10, the first part of the show, called “Dream…
The Kansas City Repertory Theatre just gave us director Moisés Kaufman’s lavish, triumphant Into the Woods. Next month, the Rep is hatching that new musical version of A Christmas Story, a Broadway-bound world premiere almost certain to be as grand, lavish, etc., as the Christmas Carol it replaces. In between, here’s the life-sized Palomino. Crafted and performed by writer, actor,…
When Erika Lehrer’s basement flooded last June, her husband, stationed in Iraq, couldn’t help bail her out. Volunteers with the Delta Battery Armory in Independence came to her rescue. Now the armory is looking for a bailout of its own, with a biker’s poker run and cookout today. The $20 registration fee benefits the families and soldiers of the 1/129th…
Greg Camp’s liver just “gave out on him” earlier this year, according to longtime friend and bandmate Gary Signor. “He lived the rock-and-roll lifestyle,” Signor says of the late local musician. “He was almost 60, and he played right up until a day before he passed away.” Signor and Camp played together, along with Jimmy Harlow, in the band Camp…
Best done during daylight hours, bar hopping on Broadway between Armour Boulevard and 39th Street can be a crapshoot. But the scene is looking up. After an eight-month vacancy, 3611 Broadway is occupied by Varieties, a gay-friendly spot that serves cocktails and smiles from 10 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday. The scrubbed-up, brightened-up bar (formerly known as the…
Preceded by a screen persona ripe for parody (most famously, Billy Crystal’s take on his turn as Dathan in The Ten Commandments: “Where’s yer messiah nowww, Moses?”), Edward G. Robinson is seldom given his due as the great character actor he was. Among those who have noticed, though, is the Kansas City, Missouri, Central Library (14 West 10th Street), where…
If the universe’s 13-billion-year timeline were condensed to a single day, and human civilization were relegated to the final 13 minutes, one of those minutes would be given to the brief but vastly influential reign — over all life and matter — of the Pogues. And within that minute, a good four seconds would be us belting the chorus to…
Dinosaur Jr.’s video for “Over It,” from the group’s latest release, Farm, is just about perfect: Three old rock geezers biking and skateboarding around town and grinding rails. Most of the tricks are done by stand-ins, of course, but it’s an apt metaphor for the role the group has embraced as elder statesmen of indie rock. If kids start worshipping…
Sure, Stephen King lauded their previous studio album, Zoysia, but the Bottle Rockets’ new lineup (Johnny Horton on guitar and Keith Voegele on bass) was just getting warmed up. Reunited with fan-favorite producer Eric Ambel (who has worked with the likes of Steve Earle and Nils Lofgren and is responsible for the Rockets’ breakout records The Brooklyn Side and 24…
On the right night, the Abracadabras had the air of a band that was going places. Small obstacles like living in Blue Springs and having their trailer jacked didn’t seem to deter the fab five, who always had another great song in the well from a lineage spanning early Britpop to big-stage alt-rock. The group prided itself on its leave-it-all-onstage…
With its plush, interactive Web site and constant tweets, KC-gone-national act Vedera is, by all appearances, a busy band these days. A brief history: The emotional indie-rock group sprang up as Veda around 2004, changed its name in 2005 and signed with Epic in June 2007. The major label finally released Vedera’s second full-length, Stages, this month — on the…
They say Los Angeles changes people, that it makes them soft. If that’s true, someone should tell Hollywood expats Super Black Market to get their punk asses back home to Warrensburg immediately. Will Sell Anything, the band’s 2007 debut full-length, was 34 minutes of raw, unadulterated nut bust, made all the more appealing by the fact that something so nuclear…
In the earlier half of this decade, Lawrence’s the Billions got hot crafting indie-pop songs about general twentysomething drama that sounded best cranked up loud. On his fourth solo outing (and second for the Record Machine label), former Billions frontman Sam Billen continues to develop the intimate and personal style that he first showed on his debut, Miracles, five years…
Tire Shops and Night Clubs, Irv Da Phenom’s follow-up to American Idol Reject, is the singer’s most ambitious effort to date. The album boasts 19 tracks, most of which are sultry toe curlers dedicated to the ladies. The album does, at times, suffer from its extended length. But at the same time, it’s precisely the album’s length that shows off…
Chris Crisci is creating something from nothing. When it’s finished, it will be beautiful and substantive and polished and perfectly angled in all the right places. And it’s not a new album. “I’m actually building a guitar right now,” he says. “I’m trying to build what would technically be like a Jaguar or a Jazzmaster or something in that vein,…
You’re not always entirely sure what is happening in Tony Jaa’s new movie, but there certainly is a lot of it. In this sequel in name only, the martial-arts maven plays Tien, a scion avenging his family in a 15th-century Thailand marked by arcane hybrid fighting styles and a numbing sepia murkiness. Flying-fist connoisseurs may appreciate his journey from training…
More Than a Game follows Akron’s Fab Four (later Five) kids on the basketball court, from their “Shooting Stars” traveling youth team to high school and a run of championships. The reason this documentary tells their story — instead of the team that miraculously upsets the nationally recognized starters in junior-year playoffs — is because one of the Fab was…
Oregon restaurant manager Charlize Theron, prone to submissive promiscuity and self-inflicted violence, sits naked in bed next to her lover. A decade or so earlier, an abandoned trailer in the middle of the New Mexico desert blazes the title into being. In the fractured, self-impressed screenplays of Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams), events unfold out of time and space, effects…
Plenty of things attracted me to Hot Basil, restaurateur Lee Chai’s cozy little Thai dining room hidden away in a remote corner of the Rosana Square Shopping Center. Most of all, the name: It’s short, clever and sexy, and without the typical florid touch that turns any Asian restaurant into a garden, a palace, a pavilion or a lotus blossom….
It’s a cold Saturday afternoon in the West Bottoms, and a parking lot is cluttered with folding tables and chairs and coolers and Weber grills and stacks of firewood. Campfire-smelling smoke is blowing everywhere. But it’s not the American Royal Barbecue. Nor is it a cookout to feed the homeless, even though some of the bundled-up people look like they…
As the owner of Denim & Diamonds, the popular country-and-western bar at 1725 Swift Avenue in North Kansas City, Dennis Hess was known for his hospitality. When he made the rounds and greeted his customers each night, he could make a patron feel like the most important person in the room. But when Sgt. Chad Phillips of the Platte County…
Dear Mexican: Teachers have been exhorted to expand efforts to close the achievement gap between majority and minority students (read: Anglos and Mexicans). I teach all of my students in the best ways that I can determine for each individual student, within the constraints of a classroom of 20 or more. In my 18 years, I have observed, on many…
Out of college, living with her moody friend BB, working full time at a hotel, worrying over her weight, wishing that she’d had a date to squire her to Neil Diamond, our Ms. Rockwell has, by the fall of 1982, come to feel dissatisfied. (Read our two earlier stories about this anonymous diarist here and here.) Most days, she jogs…
