Behzod Abduraimov almost didn’t become a pianist. At age 6 he failed his very first piano examination, getting stuck in the middle of Schumann’s The Wild Horsemanseveral times before his teacher finally told him to stop. “After that my teacher said I would never be able to play a piece on piano from beginning to end without […]

This year will go down in history as a milestone in Kansas City’s performing arts life, as the opening of the Kauffman Center has spurred all of our local arts groups to new heights. Here are a few of my favorite moments of the year, listed in chronological order. All of these have been reviewed […]

 January 6th-February 9th: Beer for Breakfast (American Heartland Theatre). Four buddies plan a weekend hunting trip, only to have one of the wives show up instead of her husband. What ensues is a sort of battle of the sexes “country-style,” with plenty of wit. January 20th-26th: Yo-Yo Ma, cello (Kansas City Symphony). Dvořák’s Concerto is one of the […]

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES: KC BALLET PRESENTS FINE ‘NUTCRACKER’ IN KAUFFMAN CENTER The production of The Nutcracker that the late Todd Bolender created for the Kansas City Ballet is 30 years old this year, but at the opening performance on the afternoon of December 3rd it had a bright new look. That’s partly because it was […]

The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of Peer Gynt must count as one of the loopier local theatrical experiences in recent memory. A Troll King with three heads, a priest in crimson high heels, a pig puppet on a stick: Director David Schweizer has taken Ibsen’s massive play and condensed it into two hours of zany antics—with lavishly whimsical […]

Ten strongly lit dancers dressed in soft hues stood downstage, perfectly spaced across the stage. One by one they stepped diagonally out of formation, legs scissored, one arm out and one back, until they formed a sort of human zigzag. Gradually each peeled off in a circular pattern and rushed upstage. All in total silence. […]

“If music be the food of love, sing on.” Thus the Bard might have written his famous line from Twelfth Night if he had heard the Kansas City Chorale singing works set to his poetry. This week the Grammy Award-winning Chorale performs a whole program of music set to, or inspired by, the greatest poet in the English language. […]

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious spring, through a series of collaborations the likes of which Kansas City has rarely seen before. “Chromatic Collaboration” fused the Owen/Cox Dance Group with the musicians of NewEar, and “Symphonic Quixotic” saw the Kansas City Symphony joining forces with Quixotic Dance Fusion, both to great impact. […]

The Alexander Nevsky Cantata is a big, raucous masterpiece, one of Prokofiev’s most richly detailed compositions and an orchestral tour de force to boot. The Kansas City Symphony’s performance of it on May 20th did not stint on theatrics, and the orchestra rose to the virtuosic challenge, with Michael Stern’s natural affinity for Russian music on full display. From the rich string […]

Simon Carrington knows what he wants in a choral sound, and in 2008 he and two dozen Kansas City area singers formed a choir that has had a huge success in producing that sound. The British-born conductor and singer, who began as a boy chorister and later was a member of the King’s Singers, says […]

Ah, summer. Kansas City used to be a downright sleepy place during the warm months, culturally speaking—but no longer. In recent years, perennial favorites such as the Starlight Theatre, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival and Summerfest have been joined by all sorts of presentations large and small. To help you keep it all straight, […]

If you want to know the heart and soul of America, listen to its songs. And few genres of song tell our stories more vividly than country music, that unique style born of folk and gospel and blues and rooted in the soil of Middle America. Love, work, family, heartache, infidelity, addiction—like it or not, […]

The key to finding a niche in Kansas City is to identify something that’s lacking in the community and go for it. That’s what a group of local musicians did 21 years ago, when they determined that July was a frightfully dead month for music locally—and that classical fans were left hungry for chamber-music fare. Thus […]

Mark your calendars: In just a few days the Kansas City Ballet enters a new era of its 54-year history, as it moves into its new Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity and, just a month and a half later, begins dancing on the stage of the $413 million Kauffman Center for the Performing […]

SAN FRANCISCO – In this loveliest of West Coast cities, the San Francisco Opera has staged what is arguably the most intriguing production of Wagner’s Ring that one can currently see in America. On four separate nights during a week in June at San Francisco’s War Memorial House, I had the chance to witness Francesca Zambello’s brilliant new version […]

And they’re off! In a fall cultural season to be filled with exciting “firsts,” the Kansas City Ballet leapt from the starting gate on August 26th with the inauguration of its new Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity, located in the restored Power House just west of Union Station. Under a large tent set […]

If you like everything spelled out for you in black and white, Harold Pinter is not your playwright. The late British author deals in alienation, love, power, menace, marital stress, sexual longing, and the sort of quotidian absurdity that lurks around the edges of bourgeois life. But such a description hardly embraces the entirety of […]

The Westons of Oklahoma may not be your typical American family, but their crises are familiar to anyone who has followed American drama of the last century, from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller to Edward Albee. Booze, drugs, divorce, depression, sexual depravity: The protagonists of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County live through it all, and they pull us […]

It was the moment Kansas City had waited for, anxiously and at times with faltering hopes, for 16 years. Suddenly, there it was: This September 16th through the 18th the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened with a celebration that was as spectacular as the building’s architecture, as welcoming as its glittering glass Brandmeyer Hall lobby, […]

When the Kansas City Symphony and music director Michael Stern open their 2011-2012 season September 23rd through the 25th at the Kauffman Center’s Helzberg Hall they will also be inaugurating a series of commissions to be spread throughout the season. Chen Yi’s Fountains of KC is the first of three “water-themed” pieces commissioned by the Symphony – the “KC” referring not only to […]

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is like a slowly tightening clock-spring, building tension with stealth in Act 1 and releasing that tension with a sproing in Act 2, then finally unraveling messily in the last act. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s current production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 play works this unfolding with relentless energy, through smart direction and […]