Just when Melissa Gilbert thought she was done with Laura Ingalls Wilder, she was sucked back in by Little House on the Prairie: The Musical. The show, at Starlight Theatre (4600 Starlight Road), was adapted from Wilder’s books and stars Gilbert as Ma, the mother of the character she played on the long-running television show. “We were really inspired by…
Like fashion? Like photography? Like food? Then this is your day. WearHaus and Jeff Evrard Photography are throwing a party for the third issue of their magazine, Faction. Head to Farmhouse (300 Delaware, 816-569-6032) from 5 to 10 p.m. for small plates and drinks. Faction’s all-ages fete, from 6 to 9, has special significance: This issue of the magazine is…
LASAGNA, Lawrence Area Straight and Gay and non-conforming Alliance, presents a Pride Prom. Formalwear is optional; fun is mandatory. Attendees must be 19 or younger, with ID. Fri., June 18, 7-10 p.m., 2010 Tags: Night & Day
The Art of Murder by Philip blue owl Hooser is set in 1975, when the art world bids a sad adieu to a famous painter. Rushing to his funeral in Kansas City is a rogue’s gallery of art lovers, art students, art collectors and a con artist. And in the midst of all the mourning, a murder is committed —…
Memo to self: Do not write a goodbye column. In case you doubt the wisdom of this advice to yourself, go down to the basement and dig out the goodbye column you published in The Pitch in August 1998, when you were leaving Kansas City for a job as managing editor at Westword, Denver’s legendary weekly. If you’re brave enough…
In Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozarks fairy tale, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her little brother, “Never ask for what ought to be offered.” Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble crooks and hollers of the southern Missouri woods. But in Winter’s Bone, based on a thin but potent novel…
Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. And Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing — Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin — but is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) stock their West Village “vintage furniture”…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and 11 years after a colossally successful premillennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor largely remain intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility. Inanimate figurines don’t age, but they do get nicked and…
The sixth installment in George A. Romero’s long-running horror serial follows Sarge Crockett (Alan Van Sprang) as he leads his gone-rogue unit of National Guardsmen from the zombie-pestilent mainland to “Plum Island, Delaware.” There, the returned departed are feuded over by two family-armies led by Irish patriarchs. Once ashore the island, seemingly preserved in the 1880s, Romero piles on plotlines…
On Mammoth Life’s western-tinged sophomore release, An American Movement, the Lawrence quintet takes an ambitious step forward with three song cycles about big, important themes and messages. It’s an honest effort that doesn’t quite work. Bandleader Nicholas Goss provides high orchestral color and proves himself a fine composer. The glaring issue is singer Bobby Sauder. His vocals don’t jibe with…
Bobby Sauder, the lead singer of the controlled orchestral group Mammoth Life, approaches the ramshackle psych-pop of Karma Vision with what sounds like wanton abandon. The EP is frantic, off-the-cuff and brimming with a whole bunch of ideas that meld together with surprising consistency. “Funnel Cloud” pairs a spacey, swirling organ with a dopey country groove to spin a weird…
Indie-rock lifer Lou Barlow remains best known as a former member of Dinosaur Jr. and frontman for Sebadoh, but he’s no stranger to solo albums. Recently, Barlow has rerecorded several of his older tunes on = Sentridoh III, an EP that includes a Skip James cover and a newly varnished recording of his Sentridoh anthem “Losercore.” Barlow is touring in…
French Horn Rebellion crafts dance electronica with a disco attitude. The band’s refreshing jams, chock-full of keyboard blips, artificial hand claps and synth squeals, remind listeners that danceability isn’t necessarily about a pulsating bass line. (It’s unclear whether a French horn is routinely used in the duo’s tunes, let alone if such a thing constitutes rebellion; a YouTube search shows…
Lady Liberty should adorn Blitzen Trapper’s album covers, and so should this remixed inscription: Give us your old, tired genres yearning to breathe anew. The Portland sextet has been quilting together hard-to-pigeonhole blends of American music for a decade, but the band hit the critical sweet spot with 2008’s Furr. That Sub Pop debut offered a polished collection of influences,…
After months of pounding city pavement to capture footage of Kansas City’s rap artists, local documentarian Chris Williamson premieres Mics on Fire, a film about Kansas City’s hip-hop scene. Williamson talked with The Pitch about his movie, his appreciation for local rap, and why A&R folks from Atlanta and New York and Los Angeles oughta land in Killa City. The…
Katlyn Conroy almost died in a tornado when she was 14 years old. A family heirloom saved her life. “There was a bureau that we inherited from my great-great-grandmother,” says the Lawrence singer and songwriter. “It took 10 people to lift it. The tornado lifted it into the air, snapped it in two, and one of the halves landed on…
If you can call any of the exhibitions at Grand Arts typical, then last winter’s Ecstatic Resistance might have been it. An earnest mix of photography, performance art, dimensional assemblies, printmaking, film and video, it brought together a disparate group of international creators engaged with the fusion of politics and pleasure. It was exactly the kind of sprawling, kaleidoscopic engagement…
Two women are in a fitting room, one of them all nerves. She eyes the other, starts to speak, thinks better of it. She models a wedding dress but critiques its cut, its length. She gets little response. Finally, the bride-to-be cracks: “I don’t want to look like a hooker when I marry your son!” The other woman looks at…
Dear Mexican: I’m a civil rights lawyer. I sue the San Diego Minutemen. Whenever the Minutemen are accused of being racist, they always say something like, “I’m part Hispanic,” or they’ll note that some of their members are Mexican. This last claim is actually true. Some of the most zealous Minutemen are actually Mexican-Americans. I’m 100 percent Irish. I don’t understand why the Mexican members…
The biggest misperception about Viennese cuisine,” Peter Grunauer says, “is that it’s German. Viennese food is lighter, less greasy.” A glance at the menu that Grunauer has created for his namesake restaurant in the Crossroads might add to the confusion, though. Much of the fare on the menu is as traditional to Deutschland as beer, Beethoven and bratwurst. Grunauer’s best-selling…
If you think Missouri’s water-quality issues are limited to the beaches at the Lake of the Ozarks, you ain’t seen shit. A year ago this month, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources was getting spanked over the revelation that the department had failed to report data on dangerous E. coli levels at the lake. The motivation, media outlets reported, was…
