Lately, Kansas City’s teensiest theater has been its liveliest. The Fishtank — a foil-wrapped hollow at 1715 Wyandotte — has been a showplace in recent months of wild invention, with its plays-performed-through-windows series, its riotous read-aloud-the-Palin-and-Prejean-memoirs series, and citywide show-and-tells. With tonight’s debut of the weekly Kansas City Crossroads Comedy series, the Fishtank Performance Studio welcomes yet another batch of…
Newspaper photographs can evoke reality with a bite in black and white; historic moments can be caught in living color. The Pulitzer Prize for photography traces a timeline of award-winning photos in Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs, at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence (500 West U.S. Highway 24). The exhibit, on display through January 24, spans…
Many documentary filmmakers hope that their movies inspire viewers to open their pocketbooks, or even to change their lives, to further the causes framed onscreen. The same goes for ambitious do-gooders who take the time to speak in public about what they — and you, too — can do about social, economic and environmental plights of the world. Both the…
The word veisalgia derives from the Norwegian word kveis, meaning “uneasiness after debauchery,” and the Greek algia meaning “pain or grief.” What a dumb word! We’ll just say “hangover” and let the monocle-wearing fancy lads at the American Medical Association nurse their dire cases of “veisalgia” with tablets of acetylsalicylic acid. But if you’re suffering from the grief and pain…
Today’s bold return of the Washington Generals to the Sprint Center (1407 Grand) marks the latest matchup of the sturdy, workmanlike basketball team and its somewhat more flamboyant and competent rival, the Harlem Globetrotters. While it’s true that the Generals were never offered an animated Saturday-morning television series in which they all had superpowers, and while it’s true that they…
Humphrey Bogart portrayed Raymond Chandler’s iconic private eye, Philip Marlowe, pretty much by just being Bogart. But who’d ever guess that the best of the other big-screen Marlowes started out as a song-and-dance man in such films as Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933? Dick Powell made a relatively seamless transition to tough-guy roles, most notably as the streetwise…
Christmas is over, but you know that tree isn’t moving until at least Easter (at which point, you can just dangle eggs from it). Face it: Your laziness equates to a residual feeling of festivity. So why not catch one last holiday-themed show this winter? Today marks the start of a six-day run of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas at the…
In these winter months, do you find that Uno is the loneliest number? Does your lack of a Mystery Date cause your mind to Boggle? Has your lonely Life caused you nothing but Trouble? Do you feel others have a Monopoly on fun activities in the metro area? Well, you can stop playing solitaire every week. Your Aggravation is over…
Almost every joint in town that serves food and beverages is open on New Year’s Eve — it’s a little harder, after all the wild, liquor-fueled, night-before hoopla, to find a good place to eat the following day. The best way to alleviate the symptoms of a hangover, they say, is a good greasy breakfast. You know: fried eggs, fried…
Almost every joint in town that serves food and beverages is open on New Year’s Eve — it’s a little harder, after all the wild, liquor-fueled, night-before hoopla, to find a good place to eat the following day. The best way to alleviate the symptoms of a hangover, they say, is a good greasy breakfast. You know: fried eggs, fried…
Here are five local acts — some young, some not, but all prodigiously talented — to watch in 2010. The Rapper: Ron Ron Not just anyone can rocket to local hip-hop ubiquity simply by making a music video. But while other rappers exhausted themselves throughout 2009 playing show after show, Ron Ron taped up a homemade green screen, popped a…
Dear Mexican: Why in the hell does everything have to be in English and Spanish? I ride the bus/train to work (not because I must but because it’s more efficient), and every time someone requests a stop, you hear “Stop Requested,” then this parrar bullshit! Not to mention that the schools are packed with ESL students and teachers. I want…
First, about this week’s cover. Some of you know the story of Norman Rockwell’s “The Kansas City Spirit.” For those who don’t, Kansas City Star reporter Brian Burnes recounts it well in his book High & Rising: The 1951 Kansas City Flood. After the city was swamped by the flood of 1951 and reports of the devastation spread around the…
Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda imbues his seventh feature film with such specificity, tactility and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem. The central source of the Yokoyama family’s internal combustion — and the reason for their gathering —…
The devil, apparently, lives in an out-of-the-way gingerbread Victorian, just past the cemetery, where college sophomore Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is lured for overnight housesitting by an elegant, forbidding couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, both queerly over-intimate). Pumping the audience with inhale-exhale zooms and out-of-the-way close-ups, director Ti West’s ratcheting of suspense in this alone-in-an-empty-house tale is proficient if not…
J. Hoberman, Robert Wilonsky and Scott Foundas put their minds together to come up with their favorite films of the year. Let’s hear it for teamwork. 1. The Hurt Locker: The decade’s strongest Iraq movie is also the year’s finest action flick, not to mention director Kathryn Bigelow’s personal best. Working from Mark Boal’s knowledgeable script, The Hurt Locker is…
Looking back on a decade dominated by the movie franchise — Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Spider-Man, to name just a few — and overrun with prequels and sequels (Saw I, Saw II, Saw III, Saw … ), our three critics have each picked three favorites of the ’00s. Who’s ready for There Will Be Blood…
The hip-hop world better take notice if the cast of Thursday’s Big Sexy New Year’s Eve Vol. 5 party makes any resolutions at midnight. Performers Approach, Steddy P., Royce Diamond, the Soul Servers, Greg Enemy, Atilla, MilkDrop, and DJ G Train are notorious overachievers — the kinds of rappers who churn out multiple projects a year and actually put their…
Ultimate Fakebook’s reunion show at the Uptown Theater last February found the band attempting to re-create the audacious stage show of Kiss, complete with giant, glowing UFB letters and gale-force smoke machines. Fittingly, members Eric Melin (drums) and Nick Colby (bass) wound down 2009 actually opening for Kiss when their current band, the Dead Girls, won a local radio contest….
Campy is the name of the game for Leslie & the LY’s, whose spandex-inspired electro-kitsch evokes ’80s excess in all of its BeDazzled glory. Hailing from Ames, Iowa, front woman Leslie Hall is an Internet celebrity (or Cewebrity, as her latest album puts it), famous for her absurd vocal stylings, bouffant hair and, of course, her signature gold-colored pants. With…
For a moment, she wasn’t sure. Stepping into a Johnson County Houlihan’s for lunch with the Pitch writer who spent 2009 publicly invading her privacy, the woman we’ve come to call Ms. Rockwell crinkled her face with uncertainty. What did this guy look like? Why hadn’t he promised to wear a flower or something? But then she laughed. Of course…
What a difference a year makes. This time last year, a chef named Joe West was serving an ambitious, artistic menu — dishes spattered with flavored foams, fruit paints and carbonated grapes — at 300 Delaware. In the months that followed, West’s restaurant, the Delaware Café, vanished into the same ether that swallowed up other fledgling operations, such as Matchstick…
As you approach the new American Indian Galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, you’ll see from a distance the exhibit’s breathtaking Cheyenne eagle-feather headdress. The cascade of eagle, hawk, owl and raven feathers, adorned with glass beadwork, exudes beauty and power. It’s so iconic and innately American an artifact that you can’t quite believe you’re actually seeing it. It’s…
Editor’s note: Here at Pitch headquarters, we speak the name Marvin Goodman in a reverent hush. We’ve never met the Lenexa resident, but he sent us a real, stamped postcard all the same — probably dropped it into a metal box and everything. He even appears to have composed his thoughts on … a typewriter. What better way to close…
