This contemporary comedy won the Theatre Critics’ Association award for best new play. Jane Martin’s understanding of the complexity of being in love, her fair portrayal of both sides of the partnership and her stunning, roll-off-the-tongue dialogue make this modern, all but fairy-tale romance an undeniably entertaining and brutally honest portrait of the couple in love. Fri., Oct. 22, 7:30…
Kansas City apparently has had plenty of paranormal goings-on through the years. The John Wornall house, Fat Matt’s Vortex in Strawberry Hill, and the legendary Fitzpatrick Building on Broadway are just a few places said to be haunted. Enter Rob Garcia, founding member of ELITE Paranormal of Kansas City. “I’ve always been interested in the paranormal and folklore,” he says….
If you think KC sports teams struggle, consider the Jacksonville Jaguars. The team, which comes to Arrowhead Stadium (1 Arrowhead Drive) for a noon battle against the Chiefs, is a cipher. The Jaguars have reached the Super Bowl once yet have remained among the NFL’s most forgettable, nondescript teams, lacking a single iconic moment on which to hang a reputation….
The Edge of Hell (1300 West 12th Street, 816-842-4279) is Kansas City’s oldest haunted house, meaning that its haunts are more experienced at scaring the shit out of anyone who dares to cross the building’s threshold after paying the spooky admission price of $27 to $37. Plus: suspension bridges and slides! With five chilling floors and a cast of 45…
Headmasters Salon of Lawrence is hosting the 2nd Annual Death Becomes Hair: Masquerade Ball and Fashion Show. This high profile event combines the professional execution of a runway fashion show and the audience interaction of a philanthropy gala ball. Local independent clothing and jewelry merchants will exhibit their wares on stage whilst costumed guests of the community enjoy conversation, cocktails…
Winner of nine Tony awards, Fiddler on the Roof follows Tevye and his five exceptional daughters in the Russian village of Anatevka. The rousing score features classic songs including Tradition; Matchmaker, Matchmaker; If I Were A Rich Man; and Sunrise, Sunset. Thu., Oct. 21, 7:30 p.m., 2010 Tags: Fiddler on the Roof (Musical), Night & Day, Tony Awards
Three names made Spring Awakening: Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and Tony — as in 11 Tony Award nominations, eight of them wins. The intense Broadway blockbuster musical, which blasted Michele and Groff to showbiz glory (back when Glee was just a gleam in Ryan Murphy’s eye), centers on sex, sex and more sex, in all its incarnations and darkest complications…
Listen just once to Free Energy’s radio single, “Bang Pop.” That’s all it takes for the refrain to lodge itself in your brain for six hours or so. The band’s glam boogie is full of the bad-beer fizz of which teenage dreams should be made. The cover of Free Energy’s debut release, Stuck on Nothing, shows a gigantic high-top Converse,…
In the late 1950s, a young TV performer named Jim Henson cut up his mother’s old lime-green coat and fashioned it into a reptilian something or other that he called Kermit. From Kermit sprang multitudes of Muppets, which didn’t merely entertain — they taught millions of us to count and read. Then in 1982, after giving us decades’ worth of…
The KC Rep’s motto this season is “I am fearless,” and the company is living up to that in its choice of material. The first show, Saved!, explored religion The second, Harriet Jacobs, confronts our national history of slavery with the incredible story of a young slave who hid from her abusive master in a tiny attic for seven years….
Halloween is about sweet treats, spooky thrills and scantily clad women wearing lingerie and some form of animal ears as a costume. The professional performers who make up Burlesque Downtown Underground bring all this (sans the kitty-cat ears) to Crosstown Station (1522 McGee) with their Halloween show, BDU’s Voodoo. The three-act performance ranges from classic Halloween and burlesque motifs to…
Those looking to boost their karma and experience live local music make up the target audience for the second annual Rock Out Reach Out concert, sponsored by William Jewell College’s Center for Justice and Sustainability. Attendees receive a token at the door, along with the satisfaction that comes from supporting worthy organizations. Rock Out Reach Out asks attendees to select…
On the recently debuted, Los Angeles-based incarnation of crime procedural Law & Order, actor Peter Coyote upholds the Order half of the series title. As District Attorney Jerry Hardin, Coyote represents the need to safeguard society and punish wrongdoers. But every so often, society’s ideas about right and wrong need adjusting. In real life, Coyote gets this. He embraced the…
Conor McPherson’s Seafarer — a dark comedy involving family dysfunction, copious amounts of alcohol, a high-stakes poker game and a sinister stranger (and set on Christmas Eve) — is très Irish: black, mythic, mordant. The tortured young McPherson has been lauded as “quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation” by Ben Brantley of The New York Times, and critics…
Lawrence-area artists open their doors and play host to all comers during the 16th annual Lawrence ArtWalk. The city’s vibrant arts scene is on display during this two-day extravaganza, which allows viewers access to more than 50 artists’ homes, private studios and collective art spaces to take peeks at the creative process and to purchase finished pieces. Participants in the…
The finale of this fall’s Electromediascope at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art completes a strong homecoming cycle. The latest series, titled Wave Energies FeedBack: 30 Years of Electronic Media at Kansas City Art Institute, closes tonight with video works by Heather Brown, Audra Brandt, Cortney Andrews, Don Bernier, Derric Eady and Timothy Hutchings. Among the pieces set to screen is…
The Chambers of Edgar Allan Poe (1100 Santa Fe, 816-474-3845) is the thinking man’s house of horrors. The terrifying yet very erudite facility translates the writing of American author Edgar Allan Poe into the idiom of “chambers,” which are like rooms, only way scarier. Built around such popular pathological terrors as claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), taphophobia (fear of being…
Macabre Cinema (1222 West 12th Street, 816-471-2250) places two demands on its visitors: knowledge of horror-film lore and how to pronounce the word macabre (helpful homophone: McCobb). Guests step through a vintage theater’s flickering screen into scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, Frankenstein and other popular horror films in an open layout reminiscent of the Beast and…
From the team that brought Maul of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead to the Kansas City stage comes Sorority House of the Dead, another undead youth production. To quote playwright Mitch Brian’s comments in the press release, “This year’s play plunges us into the gaudy, glamorous and grotesque 1980s while resurrecting the perennially popular (and truly undead)…
Given the recent list of national crises — oil spills, foreclosures, Lindsay Lohan — it may be easy to forget that our country is at war. There have been so many U.S. conflicts on foreign soil in the past 20 years — Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq — that war feels frighteningly status quo, as constant as celebrity gossip. It’s…
Wielding a cutting torch and an arc welder, M.T. Liggett, of Mullinville, Kansas, breaks down old farm equipment and builds metal sculptures — whimsical animals such as grinning ducks, dogs and pigs. But mostly, the 79-year-old is known for his political provocations, incorporating Nazi imagery into a piece about Hillary Clinton, adorning a Greenpeace sculpture with a hammer and sickle,…
“There are no second acts in American lives,” declared F. Scott Fitzgerald, who didn’t stick around for confirmation because he drank himself to death at 44. How might Fitzgerald have rated Jerry Seinfeld? After riding into the sunset in 1998, his saddle bags bulging with syndication dollars, the comedian married, had a few kids, and took his damn sweet time…
Janelle Monae’s cyber-girl stare, perfect pompadour and stark black-and-white outfits — tuxedos, typically — have landed her spreads in Vogue, InStyle and Essence. Onstage, though, the rising star is giddily human. She captivated the crowd at her Late Show With David Letterman appearance with a one-legged mashed-potato dance and a knowing glint in her eye. (Her soulful, swooping vocals on…
Kept afloat by an excellent cast, Woody Allen’s fourth movie about callow Londoners recklessly pursuing emotional wreckage begins with wisdom from the Bard, but thereafter it’s the same old Bergman-lite. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is as careless with plot and structure as any recent Allen movie — the price, perhaps, of sustaining hectic productivity into old age…
