Here’s your last call for votes in this year’s Pitch Best of Kansas City readers’ choice awards. Voting ends at midnight. So if you haven’t cast your ballot yet, here’s your last shot to be heard (click here to vote). The winners will be announced in our glossy (yep, we’re going all out) issue on October 9. Categories: News Tags: best…
Two years after a popular Waldo watering hole, Kennedy’s Bar & Grill at 500 West 75th Street, was transformed into a gastropub called Remedy Food + Drink, the venue is poised to undergo yet another transformation. The restaurant and bar currently known as Remedy Food + Drink closes on Sunday, September 28. Three days later, the property will be taken…
When Terrance Wise is not working his fast-food job at the Burger King where Troost Avenue meets Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard — he’s a “team member,” which means he takes orders and serves food and paints the building’s exterior when told — he’s often talking about the plight of those who work fast-food jobs. Wise has emerged as one of…
I’ve never been so conflicted about such a strong show. By any individual metric, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s season opener, Our Town, is a success. The acting is affecting, the staging intimate, the pacing taut but unhurried. Obie Award winner David Cromer, who has staged his vision of Our Town across the country, directs this production with freshness and…
Ida McBeth The word diva gets thrown around a lot when talking about a strong-willed female performer — with connotations that conjure images of Celine Dion in Vegas or a Mariah Carey movie. But local jazz legend Ida McBeth is the embodiment of the spectacle-free diva. For more than 30 years, she ruled as Kansas City’s foremost jazz singer. And…
To understand the evolution of the Bluestem restaurant over the past decade, you must consider the evolution of the restaurant’s owners, husband-and-wife chefs Colby and Megan Garrelts. Colby was 28 and Megan 23 when they opened their white-tablecloth venue — the first such fine-dining spot in Westport since Metropolis’ closing two years before — in a long, narrow space just…
Things may be rotten in the state of Denmark, but there’s nothing stale or spoiled at Kansas City Actors Theatre, whose 10th season finds this consummate company freshly alive and vital in its dual productions of Hamlet and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Both productions and both casts’ performances make for some of the best theater recently staged. You don’t…
In its two decades as a band, Spoon has developed a sound immediately recognizable as its own, an evolution you can hear from 1996’s Telephono through this past August’s They Want My Soul. The clever, hook-driven songwriting, frontman Britt Daniel’s distinctive voice: These and other familiar Spoon elements align neatly on They Want My Soul, which doesn’t break with formula…
These days, the brothers Radke — 21-year-old guitarist Dee, 19-year-old bassist Isaiah and 17-year-old drummer Solomon — are rarely at home. Their lives now take place less in the St. Joseph home in which they were raised and more on an endless stretch of road to gigs. They play all over the United States. And they tour Europe, where their…
When the disciples of Kansas City organist Everette DeVan reunite, the music clicks in a way you too rarely hear. Armed with a tenor sax that oozes the bluesy swing he learned from DeVan, Matt Carrillo returns this week from New York. (He started joining DeVan’s jam sessions while still in his teens.) Eboni Fondren’s singing continues to grow and mature but…
Boulevard has been in a collaborative spirit this year, and that continues with the release of Collaboration No. 4, a spiced saison developed by the Kansas City brewery and its sister, Brewery Ommegang. Collaboration No. 4 hits in Kansas City starting September 22 on draught and September 23 in 750 milliliter bottles. The rest of the country will get it later…
Denver’s River North Brewery is now available in the Kansas City area and in Lawrence. River North owners Matt and Jessica Hess, with partner Patrick Annesty, are in KC this week for the rollout, its first to areas outside Colorado. It’s a bit of a homecoming for the husband-and-wife team. Matt grew up in McPherson, Kansas, and attended the University of…
It’s a strange election cycle in Kansas politics, one in which some polls show a Democrat leading a name-brand Republican for the governor’s office and an independent Senate candidate possibly taking out an entrenched incumbent. Public Policy Polling has a slew of Kansas electoral polling out Tuesday that shows Olathe independent Greg Orman leading D.C. Beltway lifer Pat Roberts by…
Yacht with White Fang RecordBar, Kansas City, Mo. Monday, September 15, 2014 Here’s one way to score a closing slot — just don’t show up for your band’s opening gig. With White Fang yet to arrive at the building and the night not getting any younger, Yacht went on around 10:45. (We were told van trouble was the culprit.) The stage…
%{}% Die Antwoord is kind of terrifying, with its ear-bashing beats and brusque, crass raps. The South African group’s latest, Donker Mag, is a grueling, beastly collection of noisy tracks — calling them “songs” seems inaccurate — that belong at some hellish rave. Frontman Ninja and frontwoman Yo-Landi are completely aware of this, and they revel in the mad enthusiasm…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Tim Coppinger, Ted Rowland and the dozens of shell companies they allegedly used to defraud online payday-loan applicants out of millions and millions of dollars. The FTC filed the suit on September 5, but it was kept under seal until last Friday to allow investigators to halt the businesses and…
Todd Johns, the competitive barbecue pitmaster and the owner of the one-year-old Plowboys Barbecue restaurant in Blue Springs (3111 Missouri 7, to be exact), will open a second location, in downtown Kansas City later this year in the Town Pavilion, at 1111 Main. “Our focus there,” Johns says, “will be lunch business. The Town Pavilion has 2,300 people each weekday…
International best-selling author Stephen King – basically the father of modern American horror and fantasy, for anyone who hasn’t heard of the novelist – is touring this fall and winter in support of a new book, Revival. He stops at Unity Temple on the Plaza on Thursday, November 13, to discuss the book and his career with Rainy Day Books…
Get ready for some big changes at the venue known as Bridger’s Bottle Shop at 510 Westport Road. The five-month-old beer emporium has become, since it opened, better known for the restaurant inside the venue — Alex Pope’s popular Preservation Market — than for the beer selection. Pope and his crew, including head chef Devin Campbell, are taking a more…
S. Carey may be the drummer for Bon Iver, but he’s also a highly capable artist in his own right. For proof, look no further than his latest full-length, Range of Light. It’s a quiet stunner, full of songs that capture the essence of the places where they were conceived: Texas prairies, Minnesota lakes, Arizona deserts. In these cases, Carey proves a…
Tuesday night’s Flaming Lips show should be interesting, and not because frontman Wayne Coyne may wear some ridiculous feather-boa-and-pimp-coat ensemble and try to pretend that LSD hasn’t made him certifiably insane while he rolls through the crowd in a human-sized hamster ball. This is the first Kansas City show for the band since drummer (and local native) Kliph Scurlock was…
Between November 2012 and September 2013, online payday-loan companies controlled by Timothy Coppinger and Frampton “Ted” Rowland issued $28 million in payday loans to consumers and received $46.5 million in return. The Kansas City businessmen did not achieve those staggering profit margins honestly, according to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed September 8 (and unsealed last Friday) against Coppinger, Rowland…
