Long Ago, Not Far Away

How’s this for ambition? In tonight’s premiere of his play 1937: One Hell of a Year, writer-director Bill Clause — a local force at KKFI 90.1, CrossCurrents and the Fringe Festival — isn’t just spinning a large-casted story of Kansas City’s racial, social and labor history, featuring everyone from Pendergast to hobos to African-American union leader A. Phillip Randolph to Ukranian-born tobacconist Isaac Katz, whose Union Station shop begat the Katz drugstore chain. No, Clause is going one step further and making this a musical, one in which old labor and folk tunes illustrate the tensions of the year of Kansas City’s greatest labor unrest. In both the real 1937 and Clause’s lively imagining, Randolph fights to organize black sleeping-car porters and keep them independent. Meanwhile, the UAW strikes at Ford, and workers rise against garment-district sweatshops. Clause even includes Monarchs baseball and the Negro Musicians Foundation, still alive and jamming today as the Mutual Musicians Foundation. The show starts at 8 p.m. at Just Off Broadway Theatre (3051 Central). Call 816-517-4083 for more information.