Talk to any Fringe Festival fan and you’re likely to hear a casino metaphor before long. Kansas City’s annual 11-day festival of theater, dance, film and visual art requires a gambler’s spirit. Audience members bet blind on brand-new works. They roll the dice every time they buy a ticket for one of hundreds of festival performances. But the people with…
Monday, July 17Santa Fe Brewing Company comes to Blvd Tavern (320 Southwest Boulevard) tonight at 7 for a beer dinner. The five-course meal begins with house-made chili dogs served with the Freestyle Pilsner, followed by seared diver scallops with bacon and pea shoots in a carrot beurre blanc, paired with the Single Barrel Sour. The third course features a pan-roasted…
Guitar god and ’70s rock icon Peter Frampton has been making music for decades, so there’s no end to the stories the man could tell about his time. Frampton Comes Alive could fill a book all by itself. So why not ask him about his contribution to … the movies?With summer-blockbuster season in full swing, I decided to concentrate my…
Shirley Manson has logged two decades as the singer for Garbage, but that’s only further rarefied her status. Women musicians, she’ll tell you, have long tended to end up on the shelf after age 35 — a habit of the marketplace that hasn’t much changed in the time Manson has been a star. That’s part of what makes Garbage’s co-headlining…
After his arresting examination of how others identify sexually, Gender Treason, Ryan Wilks shifts the focus of his paintings to his own life with a series titled Queerotica. Appropriately for an exhibition that includes anonymous figures joined in threesomes and orgies, indulging acrobatic positions and suggestive poses, it’s a one-night stand. See the watercolors downtown Saturday night; details on the event,…
Voting opened today for The Pitch’s 2017 edition of our annual Best of Kansas City issue. Our yearly roundup of all things favorite and best arrives in October — and it won’t be complete without the results of this year’s readers’ poll.You have a month to vote, but you get to cast just one ballot. Go here. Make it count….
It’s been a hot week. It’s been a wet week. It’s been a summer week in America. So tonight — less than a month before its sequel debuts on Netflix — let’s all watch Wet Hot American Summer together on the roof of the Kansas City Public Library. Come sundown, the Central Library (14 West 10th Street) screens the 2001…
FRIDAY, JULY 14American HateWith Tiffani, Mentira and Anti-Seed8 p.m. at the Snake Tank, 602 East 31st Street ($5)American Hate — a punk band from Oklahoma known for a brutish take on the Midwestern hardcore of the 1980s — has shown its appreciation for other styles of rock in the past. A 2015 EP included covers of the Rolling Stones and Neil…
Dear Dan: I’m a gay medical student with a medical fetish, and I can’t even open up to my therapist about this. I think the fetish started when I was young; I was once in the hospital and given a suppository for a fever. Then one time I was given a Fleet enema. I don’t think the “butt stuff” turned…
By most measurements, Rosedale Park is one of the happiest places in the city. On weekends and summer evenings, families gather at its picnic shelter for barbecues and birthday parties. Children climb on the jungle gym, teenagers skateboard, and couples play tennis. Neighbors walk their dogs behind the softball field, where adult teams send the ball high into the floodlights…
I know: You’re tired of hearing about the Corvino Supper Club and Tasting Room. Since the restaurant’s May opening, foodies and industry insiders have waxed rhapsodic, Yelpers have yelped, and publications (including this one) have genuflected before this latest downtown admixture of fussed-over food and sexy décor.It’s enough to make a critic suspicious. It’s enough, in fact, to almost disappoint…
Touring in support of its 2015 album, The Book of Souls, Iron Maiden took the stage in a sweltering Sprint Center last night. It was absurdly hot and humid on the streets of downtown Kansas City, and inside, the air conditioning could do only so much. By the time UFO’s “Doctor Doctor” came over the PA, the audience was a…
The air outside is too hot and heavy to allow much enjoyment, so it’s with great relief that local musicians have seen fit to bestow a huge number of new videos on us, best enjoyed indoors. I’m talking indie rock from Giants Chair and Westerners, massive amounts of hip-hop — including two new videos from RileyPnP — as well as…
Gee Watts picks me up in his silver sedan, but the vehicle carrying us is the talkative, articulate rapper’s swift train of thought. We get on Interstate 35 heading north, and Watts warms up with several topics he finds important in life. He’s tilted back in his seat, steering mainly with his knees, chain-smoking a pack of Camel Crushes. Authenticity,…
Tiara Taylor ducks out from behind the counter at Smaxx and slides into a booth. It’s just before 5 p.m. on a Thursday — not typically a busy food hour. But restaurants are scarce in the 18th & Vine District, and Smaxx has been doing brisk business since Taylor and her husband, Brandon Dixon, opened, six months ago. Paint-stained laborers jaw…
Thursday, July 13Michael and Nancy Smith are celebrating 10 years in business at Michael Smith (1900 Main) in the Crossroads with a dinner that pulls out all the stops: caviar, king crab, quail, foie gras and beef (and more), plus wine pairings with a 2007 vintage. Read about the meal and other changes coming to the restaurant in this here….
This October, Regina Spektor is returning to KC for her first appearance here in five years. She’ll be at the Uptown for a solo show on Sunday, October 29. This is also how she performed back in 2012, and her extraordinary vocal talents and quirks are best seen this way. Tickets are available in a fan-club presale starting tomorrow morning…
Twitter handle: @rabbitsandgoats Hometown: Kansas City, Missouri. I went to Raytown High School.Current neighborhood: Columbus ParkWhat I do (in 140 characters or less): I try to help governments better listen to the people they serve, improve their processes, innovate where they can and tell their story.What’s your addiction? Buying midcentury furniture and lighting fixtures that I think are supercool but…
The way in which Congress has been hammering and sawing away at health care — how it’s managed and provided in this country — has heightened our collective awareness that most of us have some kind of pre-existing condition. Enter the ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition that Risa Puleo — inaugural curator-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha,…
Dear Dan: I’m a 29-year-old straight woman facing a dilemma. I dated this guy about a year ago, and in many ways he was exactly the guy I was looking for. The main hitch was sexual. Our sex was good, but he had a fetish where he wanted me to sleep with other guys. Basically, he gets off on a girl…
In the decade since chef Michael Smith opened his namesake restaurant, the surrounding Crossroads has changed dramatically. The Sprint Center and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts were built, luxury towers began to climb the skyline, and the streetcar arrived. In terms of dining, the American restaurant closed, the Hereford House burned, and Novel and the Rieger opened. It’s…
Last week came news that Mike’s Tavern has closed and will reopen in August as an upscale Irish restaurant called Brady’s Public House.Fresh on the heels of that, the proprietors of O’Dowd’s Little Dublin announced yesterday that their 20-year-old Irish joint on the Country Club Plaza will close this Sunday. They’ll spend the next two months remodeling the place and…
There are drawbacks to success. It’s like the Royals: When they’re bad, tickets are cheap. It’s nice! But watching nine innings of ground-outs against the Indians isn’t many people’s idea of a fun night out. When the Royals are good, tickets are expensive. But you got LoCain and Salvy out there doin’ their thing. Most people prefer the latter. So…
The first time I met Cristina Muñiz, she was gallery-sitting at la Esquina, and her own art was nowhere in sight. A requirement for Charlotte Street Foundation studio residents is to spend time staffing the organization’s gallery shows, and that’s what she was doing that day. But our conversation eventually landed on her practice, which falls into the category of…
