A bouncing baby boy named Thomas Brett Herrick was born on December 14th. He weighed five pounds one ounce, was 18 inches long and has bright blue eyes and auburn hair. His proud parents are Katherine and Timothy Herrick of San Diego, California. Tommy’s grandparents are Susan and Neil Sloman, formerly of Our Town, who […]

Milly is a four year old Maltipoo. She is the princess of Liz and Perry Brandt’s household and loves to go to the Three Dog Bakery for a treat and toy! Also featured in the April 20th issue of The Independent  

March 1st was the date for the K-State Alumni Association’s Wabash CannonBall. Chanie and Tom Mitchell were chairmen of the event which was held at the Overland Park Sheraton. Greg Musil served as the emcee. More than $1.6 million has been raised in the seven year history of the event to fund scholarships for area […]

The KU Advancement Board’s Brackfest 2013 was a slam dunk at the College Basketball Experience on March 18th. Guests enjoyed filling out brackets and basketball experts shared their thoughts on the 2013 NCAA Basketball Tournament. Doctors from The University of Kansas Medical Center and The University of Kansas Hospital discussed the latest in sports concussion treatment and […]

When a ballet audience gasps audibly at the sheer “look” of a piece, before the dancers have made a single move, you know you’re in for a ride. When the curtain went up on George Balanchine’s Serenade, the opening piece of the Kansas City Ballet’s final 2011-2012 production, the translucent azure lighting and ballerinas frozen in […]

The year 2012 was a golden one for performing arts in Kansas City, part of an incredible flowering that has been going on for more a decade. This is not so much a “best of” list as it is a collection of performances that struck a nerve with me. The Mousetrap (Kansas City Actors Theatre, August 4st through […]

Gary Neal Johnson is one of Kansas City’s most respected actors, best known as Scrooge in the KC Rep’s A Christmas Carol. But his experience has ranged widely, and he is currently performing his first Willy Loman in the Rep’s Death of a Salesman, directed by artistic director Eric Rosen. We had an intriguing chat with Gary about […]

If you really want to know who Richard Wagner is, The Flying Dutchman is a good place to start. For not only is this the first opera in which the composer began to experiment with the revolutionary musico-dramatic ideas that would later transform opera as we know it, but it is also a German opera of its […]

GETTING WITH THE PICTURE: Lyric production of early Wagner milestone has ups and downs The Flying Dutchman is a tricky opera to get one’s head around, let alone bring to the stage, partly because its mythical story can easily come off as simplistic. A young girl, Senta, grows up infatuated with a fantasy-man whose portrait hangs, […]

There’s one person you won’t see onstage in the Kansas City Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, even though he is perhaps the most important element in putting the whole thing together. James Jordan is a KCB Ballet Master, and he is the martinet in charge of leading the 28-member professional company and the 225 students from the Ballet School […]

REVIEW: The Kansas City Ballet’s durable Nutcracker opens to acclaim The Kansas City Ballet’s The Nutcracker remains fresh partly because of a continual infusion of new talent that permits the production to evolve in subtle ways. For the 2012-2013 season nearly a third of the company dancers are new (eight out of 28), and though the premiere on December […]

Is there any stopping Joyce DiDonato? Every time you turn around, America’s favorite mezzo-soprano has won new awards, fresh accolades and effulgent encomiums. The 43-year-old Prairie Village native and Grammy Award-winner is one of the greatest performing artists ever to come out of Our Town, and she is in the best voice of her life. If […]

The 2011-2012 performing-arts season is one of the most exciting in Kansas City’s history, thanks partly to the inauguration of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. But the new downtown icon is not the only game in town: In fact its presence seems to have spurred other groups to new heights, in the spirit […]

So far the performances we’ve seen in this second Kauffman Center season have made it clear that the wildly successful first season was not a fluke: The sheer grandeur of the place seems to be spurring local performing arts groups to ambitious new heights. I call it the “Kauffman effect,” as performers in a world-class […]

Mark Morris is one of the great innovators of American dance, but his works rarely have what you would call “the shock of the new.” In fact his choreography is so deftly and intuitively attuned to the music that it often has an almost organic feel to it, a naturalness that grows from both musicality and […]

There are some things on this earth that many of us just thought would never happen. Who could have imagined the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or the reunification of Germany, or the Arab Spring, with dictators falling like dominoes? And now there’s a new “first,” courtesy of the Harriman-Jewell Series: the first United States […]

There are good reasons why Emanuel Ax is held in such high esteem in the American classical scene. He has an innate, “natural” musicality that seems to adapt to any period or style, he plays with extreme delicacy but can also tear into a thunderous fortissimo without banging, and he can “sing” you a melody as if […]

There’s something about Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, whose thunderous opening chorus “O Fortuna” is one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music ever, that makes you want to pull out all the stops. And that’s just what the Kansas City Ballet plans to do at their season opener that starts on October 12th at the Kauffman Center. […]

If you want to be a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, you’d better get busy. For not only are the auditions for his 18-member company as rigorous as just about anything in modern dance, some 300 men and women show up to fill one position, but Mark requires much more than just dance […]

It’s hard to say which opera is the most popular in the repertoire, but The Barber of Seville certainly ranks among the top five. This wittiest of comedies formed a fitting conclusion to what may have been the Lyric Opera’s most distinguished season so far – its first in the Kauffman Center – and the four originally […]

After one of the most gruelingly hot summers in Kansas City history, Our Town gets a fabulously hot autumn – culturally speaking, that is – with a sizzling selection of musical artists, dancers, visiting celebrities, vibrant drama, and raucous comedies available for your pleasure. Below are our highly opinionated suggestions of choices for the fall […]