Before you’d normally crawl out of bed, Gorilla Theatre Productions will take to the south steps of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (4525 Oak) to put on the oldest surviving Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ The Persians. First performed only eight years after the Greek victory over the Persian Empire — when it picked up first prize in the 472 B.C. City…
Free family entertainment abounds this month when the Hyde Park Children’s Film Festival returns to midtown. Every Friday evening through July 30 are supervised activities for kids, a concert by a popular local music act, and a movie that the entire family will enjoy, plus free prizes and refreshments. What’s required of you? Kids in the car, gas in the…
Audrey Niffenegger weaves the mundane, the striking and the whimsical into plots that fuse romance with magic. Departing from the Odyssey-like story arc of her smash debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, the author’s latest, Her Fearful Symmetry, is haunted by ethereal twin sisters, disembodied souls and the oppressive beauty of London’s Highgate Cemetery. Niffenegger’s novels aren’t all shimmer and glow,…
With the possible exceptions of Genco olive oil and Enzo Ferrari’s high-performance automobiles, Italy’s greatest export is Sophia Loren. And while we wish she exhibited less frumpy taste in eyewear, there is no doubt that Signora Ponti has held up more splendidly than most of her sex-symbol contemporaries. (That was a 75-year-old grandmother rocking the slinky, black evening gown alongside…
Face it, Gramps — just like your nursing home, the world of sports is inclusive and diverse. World Cup Soccer encroaches on American baseball season, and rugby sevens is an Olympic sport. Because you’re so old, you can probably remember 1924, the last year that rugby was included in the Olympics. It’ll finally happen again in 2016. For now, put…
Brooklyn-based, Kansas City-raised painter Ky Anderson exhibits new work at the Dolphin (1600 Liberty, 816-842-4415) with an opening reception from 5 to 10 p.m. Her minimal abstractions often place controlled line work over transluscent washes of background color. With the obvious brush strokes and the guileless appearance of paint drips and small imperfections, her paintings convey an honesty and a…
The French national holiday of Bastille Day commemorates the takeover of the Bastille prison, which took place on July 14, 1789, marking the beginning of the French Revolution. Beloved local French restaurant Le Fou Frog is celebrating Bastille Day on three separate nights. Each evening includes entertainment and a special menu prepared by Chef Mano. Fri., July 9, 5 p.m.-midnight;…
Rocker and author Pat Benatar signs copies of her book Between a Heart and a Rock Place. Sun., July 11, 12:30-1:30 p.m., 2010 Tags: Night & Day, Pat Benatar
Jazz pianist Mark Lowrey is leading a cast of local musicians through an interpretive musical tribute to Radiohead. The Pitch caught up with Lowrey last week to discuss the project. The Pitch: Where did the idea for a Radiohead tribute come from? Mark Lowrey: Years ago, Shay Estes and I worked the song “Talk Show Host” into a kind of…
Minus the Bear got famous the easy way: with ridiculous song titles. (Anything called “Monkey!!! Knife!!! Fight!!!” demands to be heard.) But those who tuned in found that the Seattle band wasn’t just a goofy novelty act. Its latest single, “My Time” (from new record OMNI), comes dangerously close to being a mindless sex jam, which makes sense on an…
Lightning Bolt zaps 1.21 gigawatts of face-melting noise straight into your temporal lobes. The Rhode Island duo are known to eschew the stage in favor of playing on the floor, surrounded by the audience. (In interviews, the band refers to this practice as “the eye of the storm.”) With an oddly configured bass, an array of effects pedals and a…
Turbo Fruits make something that you hear about too infrequently in the airy, upper echelons of the blogosphere: rock and roll. The Nashville group, made up of Matt Hearn, Dave McCowen and former Be Your Own Pet member Jonas Stein, propels itself with spirited drum attacks and flailing guitar jams. The raucous, bedheaded rockers sneered through an opening set at…
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s intricately antic Micmacs hurls gears, gizmos and other trash-heap objets d’art at the audience. It’s aggressively and whimsically retro, like a heaping second helping of his early-’90s black comedy Delicatessen. Instead of the enchanted fairyland of his smash hit Amélie, Jeunet burrows into the Parisian scrap-yard lair of the Micmacs, a band of outcasts with no superpowers but…
Bob Asher, bombastic frontman for celebrated local music experiment Hearts of Darkness, has incessantly plugged the 18-piece and its previous incarnations, claiming that the band’s live show “makes good girls dance dirty and bad boys get down.” The group’s studio debut means to do the same, with six original songs that expertly fold funk, hip-hop and jazz into complex dance-party…
Above all else, Trust: A Trip to the Center of My Head is a relationship album. (In fact, the cover of Everyday/Everynight’s second album is washed in the blue-and-yellow palette of the film 500 Days of Summer.) The local band’s potential glimmered on its symphonic debut, Moon Phases, and here has fermented into something more arresting. One of Trust’s best…
As the lights were dimming before the screening of Despicable Me, the 6-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny — not like Toy Story 3,” which was, to him, “sad” and “scary.” So, then, to the movie featuring fart guns, shrink rays and squid shooters! Despicable Me is a silly antidote to…
“Blue Beard,” a slow-burning track on Infinite Arms, the latest LP of soaring Americana from Band of Horses, sounds eerily similar to the melody of Starland Vocal Band’s AM classic, “Afternoon Delight.” If that’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever heard, then you’ll want to move along because there are no cool points to be earned with Band of Horses…
Soft Reeds Are Bastards is a daring, arresting rock record, and it should be — it took Ben Grimes 12 frustrating years to make it. Grimes, Soft Reeds’ founder, has deep roots in Kansas City’s music scene. His first band took off when he was 21, after cousin Ryan Shank asked him to play music while he was in film…
I confess: I was a lousy vegetarian. I clearly didn’t take it seriously enough because when I drank too much, I forgot my best intentions and dashed to White Castle faster than I could say double cheeseburger. Even when I was working at a very good macrobiotic restaurant, I’d fall off the meatless wagon every so often and gleefully eat…
That Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature works — despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is a word that makes one sad”) and a notion of feminism that carbon-dates to around the time that Kate Chopin published The Awakening — is a testament to the film’s loony sincerity and seductive voluptuousness, anchored by the magnificence of Tilda Swinton. One of the…
Dear Mexican: I’m a (poor) white girl myself, but I have to ask: What’s the deal with all the rich white girls playing such a big role in Fiesta? Why is it always rich white girls who get crowned? Don’t you think the majority of them should be Mexican girls since it’s Fiesta? Why has this gone on so long?…
Title: Penny Pitch Date: July 1980 Publisher: PennyLane Records, 4128 Broadway Discovered at: Distributed free at record store three decades back. Representative quote: “Debbie LaReau of Kansas City was judged first out of a field of one vying for a 102 second sweep through the store. Her entry was a discrete ‘KY 102’ tanned on her thighs.” This freebie 12-page…
Before Chuck Haddix was a weekend fixture as the host of KCUR 89.3’s long-running Fish Fry, he managed PennyLane Records in the twilight of music retail’s golden age. Working for PennyLane owner Hal Brody, the future broadcaster, historian and author was also a Pitch founder. The Pitch: What did you do at PennyLane? Haddix: I started managing the store when…
This is no country for old record men. Doctors warned LeRoi Johnson a decade ago that he’d be dead by now. Today the ex-PennyLane buyer, Streetside Records district manager and Pitch record reviewer is 56 years old and eight years out of those businesses. But during the 1980s and into the next decade, Johnson was a brand apart from the…
