Where can you go to see a rock concert, opera performance, comedy roast, video game tournament, karaoke and pyrotechnics? A Kansas City movie theater. Actually, quite a few of them. Within the last year, many area theaters have transformed from places that merely feature first-run blockbusters to multipurpose venues that freely explore all manner of creative whims.
Organizers of Ink’s Middle of the Map Fest have announced 60 of the 100-plus bands that will perform April 4-6 at venues in and near Westport. This year’s lineup of established national acts includes Grizzly Bear, Deerhoof, the Joy Formidable, Tennis and Wovenhand. It will also include dozens of emerging national and regional bands.
Judah Friedlander, who for seven years played Frank Rossitano, the sarcastic comedy writer who wore wisecracking hats on NBC’s “30 Rock,” is back on the stand-up comedy circuit, including a gig Saturday night at the Screenland Armour in North Kansas City.
Spinning Tree Theatre’s lively production of “Shipwrecked!” has much to admire, and director Michael Grayman makes the most of playwright Donald Margulies’ concept. The idea is to tell a fabulous story with minimal props and effects and only three actors. It’s an attempt to celebrate yarn-spinning and theatrical invention.
Crowds of Little Monsters lined up outside the Sprint Center on Monday evening for Lady Gaga’s return to Kansas City with the Born This Way Ball tour.
Maybe the producers of “Hair,” which runs through Sunday at the Kauffman Center, sent the young cast to hippie school, or maybe they’re just actors doing their jobs. Either way, they committed themselves with high energy and palpable feeling to a show that can still move an audience, even if it has its ups and downs.
Actor and St. Louis County native John Goodman is helping lead a push for a National Blues Museum in St. Louis.
Thirty months after first playing at the Sprint Center, Lady Gaga isn’t quite the pop-culture phenom and force she was in 2010. Nonetheless, the second time was a charm, too. Monday night, Gaga gave the crowd of about 11,000 a show that was every bit as extravagant, excessive and energetic as the first. It was also 30 minutes longer.
The three-week-old star of Budweiser's Super Bowl ad now has a name: Hope.
Fans flocked to the Sprint Center on Saturday night as Kid Rock’s "Rebel Soul" Tour stopped in Kansas City. Buckcherry and Hellbound Glory opened the concert.
Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel Universal is the world’s largest independent press syndicate, renowned for books, comic strips and opinion columns. Time to add filmmaking to that list.
A star has been ignited, and chances are you’ll notice it, whether you’re looking for it or not. Sunday night at a sold-out Midland theater, Ed Sheeran’s pop and folk tunes whipped the big crowd into a state of obedience and fervor with an uncanny ease.
“I’ll Be Seeing You,” which runs through Feb. 17 at the Quality Hill Playhouse, is a revue of popular songs that touched American record buyers and radio listeners in World War II. At Sunday’s matinee, J. Kent Barnhart, the theater’s executive director, was in rare form as master of ceremonies.
Kid Rock’s drift toward mainstream respectability made a significant surge on the opening night of his “Rebel Soul” tour Saturday at the Sprint Center. An audience of about 13,000 heard Rock ratchet down the volume and increase the subtleties of his extensive repertoire during a 140-minute performance.
Cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan swept into town this week and joined the Kansas City Symphony in a thrilling performance at Helzberg Hall Friday night. For his Kansas City debut, Hakhnazaryan performed the Cello Concerto in A Minor, Op. 129, a creation from a particularly happy and productive period in composer Robert Schumann’s life.
“On Golden Pond” is one of the New Theatre’s most requested titles and it’s easy to see why: It’s serious enough to deal with real issues but never serious enough to depress anybody. The drama is kept light and digestible in this production starring Mike Farrell and Dodie Brown, which is littered with potent laugh lines.
Being nominated for three Grammy Awards has emboldened Hunter Hayes, who played every instrument on his self-titled debut album, something he called an “intimidating experiment” in a Nashville, a town full of legendary hired hands. He also went hard against the current trends in country music in another way, pursuing his interest in pop influences when most of his male counterparts are riffin’ on rock ’n’ roll.
How should we view “Hair” today? “I think it plays now more as a history show,” says James Rado, one of the writers of the 46-year-old musical. “It thrusts you back into a time that was very interesting and revolutionary, full of these people called hippies. It gives you that experience of what that was like.”
For the next few weeks, the ultimate food-fan destination in Kansas City may not be one of the city’s stellar restaurants. It’s the Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art gallery in the Crossroads, where the ecstatically baroque, bigger-than-life photographs of foodstuffs by Vera Mercer challenge anyone to take eating for granted ever again.
It would be comforting to call the horrific violations recounted in “Mea Maxima Culpa” unthinkable. But after decades of revelations about the epidemic of sexual abuse of minors in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the ever-accompanying accounts of enabling church officials, a new documentary from Oscar winner Alex Gibney tracks the problem to its source.
