Zumba is the name for an aerobics class that combines many styles of dance moves, including modern, Latin, West African and hip-hop. Though no actual dance experience is required, some local studios offer a Very Serious Zumba Experience. Their members wear official Zumba gear and glare at newcomers who miss a step. And the music — oh, the music. In…
Though the group disbanded before it really made a blip on the national radar, Kansas City’s the Stella Link can claim a proud legacy as being the KC band most often recalled with an elongated duuuuuuude. Much of this is due to the jaw-dropping performances of drummer Chris Metcalf (now the stickman for the Life and Times), but let’s not…
Every so often, somebody comes along to challenge F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that there are no second acts in American lives. One of the latest to do so is Darius Rucker, erstwhile frontman of the once-beloved, frequently maligned Hootie and the Blowfish — while not officially disbanded, it announced last year that it will no longer make albums or tour….
As with going to see Bob Saget, you never know what side of the Wilders you’re going to get. It could be the family-friendly Winfield version of the Wilders — jokingly referred to by the band as “the Milders” — playing gospel songs on a Sunday morning and teetotaling their way to a decent paycheck. Or it could be the…
The Dutchess and the Duke are Kimberly Morrison and Jesse Lortz, two Seattle singer-guitarists and good friends (no, they’re not a couple, despite numerous articles that claim otherwise) who make stripped-down, fuzzy, retro folk-rock with psychedelic touches and nods to an array of classic acts, including early Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, the Animals, Love and even Johnny Cash, with…
The serious pop and casual-jazz listener may wonder where Shay Estes & Trio ALL — an acronym of the last names of drummer Zack Albetta, pianist Mark Lowrey and bassist Ben Leifer — are going on Despite Your Destination. It’s the arrangements; they take risks with well-known songs. But the risks are rewarding. Besides the usual standards (“Cry Me a…
Emporia’s Radio City would claim it plays rock and roll. No “indie” this or “alt” that, just plain rock music. And that proves both charming and a hindrance. The band’s debut EP, Tonight’s Not The Night, is promising yet relies too heavily on modern-rock songwriting tropes. With mostly repetitive, radio-friendly structures, the four songs tread over commonplace breakdowns, working in…
Albums promoted from jail are still rare, despite the on-again, off-again affairs that many popular hip-hop artists share with our nation’s penal institutions. Perhaps Kansas City rapper Skiem Hiem is copping a page from the playbook of Shyne, who famously released his acclaimed second album, Godfather Buried Alive, from a cell in California’s Clinton Correctional Facility. Before he got picked…
In a squat, red-painted storefront near 17th Street and Summit, just up the street from a home for elderly Hispanics and across from the swank Blue Bird Bistro, the sickest hip-hop records in Kansas City are made. Jaz Brewer answers the door of 64111 Studio in his socks. A gold chain around his neck dresses up his guy-at-home appearance. He’s…
The West Bottoms stretch of Genessee isn’t exactly kicking these days, so one has to suspend disbelief to remember that a hundred years ago, this neighborhood was one of the city’s noisiest and bawdiest, with pool halls, hotels, brothels, cheap cafes and taverns aimed at the cowboys and cattlemen. When the Kansas City Stock Yards finally closed in 1991, a…
There’s a moment in the documentary The Horse Boy when the father of the subject, an autistic child named Rowan, explains his son’s intrinsic understanding of nature by showing how Rowan has organized his animal toys by species. The dad marvels that Rowan has grouped biologically close rhinos and pigs in the same box while ignoring the ostrich figurine that’s…
Don’t be misled by the cheesy, generic poster for Kirk Jones’ retelling of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene, in which the grinning Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Kate Beckinsale pose with Robert De Niro for their characters’ family photo in front of a Christmas tree. It’s a marketing department’s feeble feint: The four actors appear on-screen together for only a…
Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, backroom glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that, among other collateral damages, created a Rhode Island-sized “death zone” of toxic pollution in…
Jim Sheridan’s remake of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2005 original on the familial and psychic trauma caused by Operation Enduring Freedom feels like Operation Endurance. Marine captain and stalwart head-of-household Sam (Tobey Maguire), married to his high-school sweetheart, Grace (Natalie Portman), and the proud pop of two adorable daughters, returns to Afghanistan for a fourth tour of duty just a…
As a Broadway-style holiday spectacular, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s world-premiere production of A Christmas Story, The Musical! is a wild success, a show boiling over with invention and joy. Joseph Robinette (book) and Scott Davenport Richards (music and lyrics) have crossbred state-of-the-art musical-theater dazzle with Jean Shepherd’s warm tale of a boy yearning for a Red Ryder BB gun….
Student government is an oxymoron. Students don’t govern. A student body’s elected leaders get an activities budget, and they decide how to spend it. The rest is just theater. Or practice. But while its outcomes are largely irrelevant, student government matters, if only because it’s a proving ground for future political elites. Richard Nixon was the student body president at…
Aberrant Abstraction, the odd title of an exhibition in the first-floor galleries of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, suggests the possibility of redrawing or expanding the boundaries of abstract art. It’s a strange ambition because “abstraction,” as a category, is already broadly encompassing. How can you reinterpret a classification that so easily assimilates any nonrepresentational work? And what exactly…
Feature: “Kansas City’s Nuclear Fallout,” November 19 Toxic Shock I worked at the Bendix plant as a machinist from 1981 until I was laid off in 1986 and again from 1988 until I was laid off again. While we were in training in 1981, a bunch of beryllium copper somehow got into the stock that we were using to make…
Dear Mexican: I used to frequent a cantina in Chicago where half of the bar was Polack, the other half beaner. The Polacks would speak in their native tongue and either start or finish all of their sentences with the word kurwa. I understand this to mean “whore” in their language. In the other half of the bar, the beaners…
In college, there was always that brief time between Thanksgiving and the end of the semester when everyone on campus seemed to be pulsing with the pent-up stress of past and future family obligations, coupled with the pressure of finals. It was the time of all-night study sessions and bleary-eyed paper writing, roommate fights and dorm crying jags, angry calls…
If you’re anything like us, you’re disappointed to learn that billionaire George Lucas didn’t spring for any bulbous Cantina Band masks for the members of the orchestra and choir playing tonight’s Star Wars In Concert performance at the Sprint Center (1407 Grand). However, unlike the Star Wars tribute “Pops” concerts mounted by local symphonies, this performance of composer John Williams’…
Flowers are all well and good, but American sailors on shore leave have always known that doors to the hearts of single European women during periods of wartime rationing are opened with the unbeatable combination of chocolate and nylons. Sheer, flexible leggings are a staple of women’s fashion, and Seduzione Leggs (1911 McGee, 816-221-0153) bills itself as the nation’s only…
Courting your annual bout of seasonal affective disorder, the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra plays Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” tonight at 7:30 at Unity Temple on the Plaza (707 West 47th Street). Hum the Italian composer’s familiar hymns to pastoral spring and lush summer as you button up your overcoat, then go home reeling from the flurry of cold strings that…
Denver and Kansas City used to be the best rivalry in the AFC West. But today’s noon game at Arrowhead (1 Arrowhead Drive) provides a study in contrast between a pleasant surprise from Colorado and one of the worst teams in the league. Each coach is in his first year of changing his team’s defensive scheme. Josh McDaniels, however, commands…
