%{}% Boulevard ambassador brewer Jeremy Danner offers me a beer. It’s a cool October morning, and a group gathered in the tasting room of Kansas City’s largest brewery has just filtered out. Danner is behind the bar, offering a small pour of Test Coffee Porter, due for release in January under the name Early Riser Coffee Porter. “Our goal is…
%{}% Just a few months since it opened, Standard Pour, at 1511 Westport Road, is doing a little kitchen rehab. Opening chef Travis Meeks is leaving the venue at the end of this month, to be replaced November 2 by Pete Peterman, former owner of SORedux and Peanches. “Travis had the opportunity to do some consulting work for a new…
%{}% Name: Crystal Wiebe Occupation: Founder of Beer Paws Hometown: Beatrice, Nebraska Current neighborhood: Waldo What I do: I work with craft breweries to turn their byproduct — spent grain — into a delicious, healthy snack for dogs. I also make the Midwest’s only craft beer for dogs. What’s your addiction? Social media. I spent the last four years managing…
Run the Jewels El-P and Killer Mike — two successful rappers who bolster their creativity by performing together as Run the Jewels — bring their incendiary rhymes to the Midland. If you’ve been meaning to get in touch with your inner beast, make sure you’re in the audience. On last year’s acclaimed Run the Jewels 2, the two do a…
%{}% %{}% If Jon Ellison’s rough voice reminds you of certain iconic rockers, that would be because those artists — Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen — made for a secret passion during his teenage years. Very secret because Ellison was raised in a small Oklahoma town in a strict Baptist sect. To Ellison’s parents and the community he grew up in…
%{}% Overland Park has gained a new Friday-night jazz venue, at least through November. The Art Factory, in the Prairiefire development, is an art gallery with a stage and a sound system (and, no small matter, a liquor license). The venue’s fall jazz series enters its second week with the Ron Carlson Quartet. Carlson, also part of the classic-rock band…
%{}% %{}% On “Clean Lines,” a song from the Roseline’s June-released album, Townie, lead singer and guitarist Colin Halliburton describes the moment that he thought he was going to die, sitting in traffic one day, caught between the steely grips of addiction and depression. I’ve swallowed pills for the past six years, I felt so hollow when I mixed them…
More than 100 of Lynn Benson’s paintings and drawings of water are on view at the Kansas City Design Center this month, but that number alone hardly conveys the impact of her Waterworks series. Benson’s mastery of color and line evokes a visceral experience of water — dark indigo washes into lighter shades, moving us from cold deep to shallow…
The slashed ear, the asylum stays, the suicide at age 37 — we know the crazy parts of Vincent van Gogh’s story. But who was the prolific Dutch painter before all of that? Nicholas Wright’s Vincent in Brixton, directed by Karen Paisley at Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, offers part of an answer, with a view of van Gogh at ages 20…
%{}% %{}% If you’re looking for a profoundly unromantic way to spend your Halloween, allow me to suggest the world premiere of Chainsaw: the Musical (book by Forrest Attaway; music by Eric Wesley Redding). The Living Room show is a party-horn blast of horror tropes and tonal contradictions best explained in a series of “yes, but” statements. Yes, it’s outsize…
%{}% %{}% The night I saw Spinning Tree Theatre’s Turn of the Screw, the Royals were in the third inning of the first ALCS game when the curtain went up. At the 80-minute show’s end, the home team was in the sixth — but I hadn’t given the game a thought during the play. I was too wrapped up in…
%{}% %{}% Angela Hagenbach is 9 feet tall. Or so her character claims, in a jazzy crescendo, as she summits a stool, a tiny “Eat Me” cake in hand. She’s onstage in the Plaza Library’s Truman Forum, hitting her marks during the second week of rehearsals for JazzAlice: Adventures in Wonderland. The show is part of the Kansas City and…
%{}% %{}% “Let Me In,” a song off Kansas City rapper Tech N9ne’s 2009 album, Sickology 101, opens with an audio skit. A bouncer with an exaggerated redneck voice is letting patrons into a club. “Party night tonight! Come on in. You’re good, Skinny Jeans, come on in. Tight Shirt, come on in. Ahh, that new rock-and-roll gay look, yeah,…
When Jerry Riffel was on the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council, in the 1980s, the lure of tax breaks wasn’t enough to get meaningful construction started in what is today the Crossroads Arts District. “We used to say that even with full incentives, you couldn’t even get an outhouse built,” he says. Few would dispute that economic-development tools such as…
%{}% In September, we announced the closing of Broadway Kansas City — formerly Broadway Jazz Club — and the tentative plans for the space (local pianist Max Groove was purportedly interested in reinventing the venue as a night club). Originally, owners Jim and Margaret Pollock — along with general manager and booker John Scott (also the owner and operator of the…
%{}% A couple of Mondays ago, Zach Moores, owner of Crows Coffee, at 304 East 51st Street, started the day with a double shot of uh-oh. The street in front of his business, the short stretch of 51st between Brookside Boulevard and Oak, was barricaded and closed to through traffic. His year-old coffeehouse, which has enjoyed high-traffic visibility despite being…
%{}% Sometimes being a regular customer really pays off. by local chefs Aaron Mulder and Jayson Eggers, who both most recently worked at the Westport Ale House. They plan to reopen the pizzeria under a new name, Long-Bell Pizza Co., in mid-November. Mulder and his wife, Samantha, live within walking distance of lawyer-turned-restaurateur Patrick Cuezze’s pizza parlor, and Mulder frequently…
%{}% Last year, Westport’s Green Room Burgers & Beer (4010 Pennsylvania) created the Pitch Burger for the inaugural Burger Week. The sandwich was such a success that the venue has brought it back for a repeat appearance. During yesterday’s opening day of Burger Week 2015, Green Room was packed with people watching the Royals game on TV monitors mounted around the bar….
%{}% Politicians like to invoke the promise of small businesses in the United States, waxing a homespun ideal of the American entrepreneur hanging a shingle on Main Street. But when it comes to allocating resources, it’s usually big companies that win the attention of policymakers. In the case of economic-development incentives, big companies get a disproportionate share of the money…
%{}% Kyle Hopkins can blame it on the beer. Wanting to taste the stuff as an actual vocation, Hopkins left his teaching position at Washington High School in Kansas City, Kansas, last year to join the staff at Boulevard Brewing Company. He’s still teaching, he says, but as a member of the brewery’s Guest Relations Team, where his duties include…
It started with Edinson Volquez throwing six shutout innings en route to a 5-0 win in Game 1, followed by an opportunistic 6-3 win in Game 2 when the Kansas City Royals scored five runs in the seventh inning fueled by a dropped pop fly in between Toronto Blue Jays second baseman Nick Goins and right fielder Jose Bautista. And…
%{}% Are you ready? The next Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer goes live during halftime of tonight’s Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants. With the latest tease also comes the first opportunity to buy tickets to see the biggest movie of the year. And craft-beer geeks, you’ll want to grab a seat at Screenland Armour. …
%{}% Despite last year’s World Series appearance, the Kansas City Royals began the 2015 season with 33/1 odds of winning the World Series. Vegas gave the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox better odds. Now here we are in October, and the Royals are up 2-0 on the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series. In the…
