Martini-swigging, sweet-talking Victor Continental resurfaces in Lawrence for the sketch-comedy-and-cabaret event Victor Continental’s Hard Times. The long-running Victor Continental Show, which debuted in 1998, has become a Lawrence summer staple. This 16th installment invades Liberty Hall (644 Massachusetts, 785-749-1972) tonight and Saturday and features two dozen actors from Lawrence’s Card Table Theatre troupe performing foulmouthed comedy and having a rowdy…
The signifiers of what meteorologists call “sticky armpit season” are deeply embedded in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Summerfest music series, now celebrating its 20th season. The visuals differ a bit from the usual — adorable children jumping into microbe-rich bodies of standing water, seersucker-clad Southern colonels wiping their brows on the porch while killing their pancreases with pitchers of…
From the artist’s statement: I am interested in collective forces, many small, similar, often silent parts working together slowly but surely towards the shaping of something, whether it is the landscape, people, or ideas that are being shaped. Working with the landscape I did a number of large scale (52×36ö) ink drawings of land and cityscapes in and around Kansas…
This weekend is your last chance to see Dreamgirls at Starlight Theatre (4600 Starlight Road, 816-363-7827). A story replete with drama, jealousy and falls from grace, it condenses basically the whole history of 20th-century popular music into a couple of hours. R&B aspirants Effie, Deena and Lorrell are stars on the rise after a smash appearance at the Apollo Theater’s…
Cory Gene Mayes received his BFA from The University of Kansas in 2010. His ambitious large scale work honors the philosopher and the pure scientist who is exploring the world of ideas, not the world of the senses, and draws from a wide range of influences: diagrams, charts, architectural grids, landscapes, the figure, and The New York School. He has…
Dig it, local arts people: KC Fringe Festival is back. Starting today, with events running through August 1, this annual event features more than 80 performing artists and films at 21 venues. Get a glimpse of the festival’s variety at the Plaza Library (4801 Main). Professor Jesse presents a Punch and Judy Puppet Show at 7 p.m., followed at 7:30…
About 5,600 Americans are diagnosed each year with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal degenerative disease. In 1939, Lou Gehrig was one of them. In 2008, Melinda Whedon was another. Whedon was half of the local electronic music outfit Ebon with her husband, Justin Lake Whedon. The couple moved to California after her diagnosis and, later, to Costa Rica. Justin has…
In the ’80s and ’90s, Jean McClain contributed backup vocals to Michael Bolton, Whitney Houston and Cher. Today, the self-proclaimed “International Dance Diva” and mastermind of such club hits as “Freeway of Love,” “Lost Yo Mind” and “Cosmic Love Juice” is now known as Pepper MaShay. She’s making her first appearance in Kansas City in almost 10 years at the…
Bet you didn’t know that July is National Parks and Recreation Month. Of course, the Kansas City, Missouri, Parks and Recreation Department got the memo. Hence, its annual Party in the Park at Swope Park (Meyer Boulevard and Swope Parkway): seven hours of nature walks, hiking, fishing, golf, swimming and cricket. Other things you can do outside today include dancing…
It’s been two weeks since the Spanish won the World Cup, and already it seems that the only people taking corners are at the pool table and the only dives are at the swimming pool. But the international soccer withdrawal ends for Kansas Citians at 5 p.m., when a beautiful game takes place at Arrowhead Stadium (1 Arrowhead Drive). Manchester…
Despite widespread apathy from the sports press, World Team Tennis still survives after 35 years. Although relegated to the agate-type ghetto of most sports pages, the league boasts 10 successful franchises and provides a real buffet for the tennis fan: five matches, including men’s and women’s singles, mixed doubles, and men’s and women’s doubles. Among the superstars in the league’s…
The blues won’t ever die, and sometimes it seems that T-Model Ford won’t, either. He was born during the early ’20s (or so he thinks) and didn’t pick up a guitar until he was in his late 50s. He took to it quickly, but it would be another 15 years before his discovery by Fat Possum Records, alongside Mississippi brethren…
Salt, famously The Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars. This is mostly bullshit, of course — Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to be given a gender reassignment between initial conception and…
Ramona and Beezus is less Disney than Hallmark Channel, a loose adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s first novel in her beloved kid-lit series that’s wholesome to the point of dull. Without much in the way of a governing narrative structure, Elizabeth Allen’s innocuous film charts Ramona Quimby (Joey King) — her age advanced here from 4 to a more precocious 9…
“Seriously, whoever threw that, come up here and I will fucking fight you,” Neko Case threatened at a New Pornographers show in Boston last month. She went off when an audience member hurled one of the band’s CDs onstage, whacking Carl Newman’s guitar: “I am a piece-of-shit white trash and I will fuck you up.” Even if wanting to rile…
Dear Mexican: I heard Mormonism is a quickly spreading religion down in ye olde Mexico. What is it about this religion that a lot of Mexicans find so fascinating? Jack Mormón Dear Gabacho: Historically? Mexico has long had the second-largest community of Mormons in the world after the United States. Official LDS figures estimate that 1.2 million members live in…
It takes a bizarre band to write a songless album centered on a yarn about a witch hunt. The Brooklyn trio Liars released that hazy anti-album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, to disparaging reviews in 2004, in contrast to the band’s warmly received punk-funk debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. (Liars’…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s-feet around its subject’s eyes, then expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her 76th year — a typically hectic period during which Rivers…
In 1978, a bunch of art-school nerds from Akron, Ohio, rose from the goopy primordial stew of punk and made Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. The band was called Devo, and it had an admirable goal: to freak out squares. Though best known for a song about whipping and those weird, upside-down-flower-pot hats, damn if they…
Steddy P’s newest release, a hybrid EP and mixtape produced by DJ Mahf and titled While You Were Sleeping, is a concerted kick in the ass to stir listeners from bitch-ass slumber. The local rapper’s 19 tracks of aural amphetamine also carry a subtitle worth consideration: “Evolution.” Throughout, Steddy P fires a barrage of mature rhymes. He has begun to master…
Before the members of Root and Stem retreat into their wood-paneled den to resume practice, the smoke-break bullshitting whips from topic to topic at typical young-guys-in-a-band pace. “That sounds bad. Are the guys playing with dolls?” Root and Stem singer and guitarist Jim Embry asks cellist Mike Harte, who is directing the orchestra in a local production of the Broadway…
The problem with the Brasserie Restaurant at the Westin Crown Center Hotel — well, the first problem — is that it’s neither a brasserie (not even a pretend brasserie anymore) nor a traditional hotel coffee shop. So what is it, exactly? In a word, it’s an afterthought. The upscale restaurant on the top floor, recently renamed Benton’s Prime Steakhouse (after…
The open-air portion of the Power & Light District erupted into a sea of pumped fists and spilled beer when Landon Donovan booted a ball past Ghana’s goalkeeper during the World Cup. The sweating mass testified to the tournament’s appeal — and to the suddenly more viable future of American soccer. But the crowd at KC Live, estimated at 12,000,…
Things are just getting going when the bomb scare comes, so no one wants to hear from the police chief when he scurries to the stage. But he takes the mic anyway. There’s a suspicious package, he says. The threat looks real. We’re not evacuating, but we suggest you leave in an orderly fashion. A good 1,300 people are packed…
