By Paul Horsley The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s The Marriage of Figaro, which runs through November 13th, bears the marks of a master director: Its fluid, natural interaction of characters, its moments of sly but seldom overplayed wit, and its sharp focus on essential characters at essential moments all keep the mind and the […]

By Paul Horsley When Robert Levin plays Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Kansas City Symphony in November, you can be sure of one thing: His interpretation will be different not only from any other pianist’s but also from any other performance he himself has presented of the piece. One of the leading exponents of […]

By Paul Horsley Everyone loves the romantic comedy in which Daddy gives up his dalliance with the spicy younger woman when he realizes it’s Mommy he really loves after all (while the kids beam with delight). If this plotline has a source it might well be Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (with its libretto by […]

By Paul Horsley Many musicians would give their E-string for a chance to resurrect Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms for an hour or two, just to ask them some burning questions that have been left to historical speculation. Wolfgang, did Salieri really poison you? Ludwig van, did you honestly intend the ridiculously fast tempos implied […]

By Paul Horsley For four centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have served as an inexhaustible inspiration for literature, operas, films and even Broadway musicals. And as the world commemorates the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death this year, we are more sharply aware than ever of the adaptability of his works. In no realm is the process […]

By Paul Horsley A fresh take on a familiar Broadway musical can be invigorating, but such an endeavor has its perils. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s “reimagined” version of Evita, which opened September 16th, is a scaled-down production that allows the viewer to focus on the songs, the text and the personal drama of the […]

By Paul Horsley Updated versions of well-known operas work best when they remain true to their concept from beginning to end. Director Doug Varone’s version of Hansel and Gretel is set in Depression-Era New York, and that’s fine: The 19th-century rural poverty of Humperdinck’s story translates relatively easily into urban poverty in the 1930s. Instead […]

By Paul Horsley When 17-year-old Blanche DuBois caught her husband in flagrante delicto with an older man, she impulsively lashed out at what she called his “degeneracy” (“You disgust me!”). The beautiful young man, whom Blanche loved desperately, went out into the yard and blew his brains out. Such an early trauma could screw with […]

By Paul Horsley In an increasingly diverse 21st-century America, sectors of society that have remained predominantly white are continually being challenged to examine their methods, purposes and even future viability. Classical music is no exception: If great music is “universal,” then why have its practitioners and audiences remained unrepresentative of the ethnic and cultural makeup […]

By Paul Horsley Clowns are fun and scary at the same time, and in that sense they are a lot like Grimm Fairy Tales. We shove goofily painted clowns in front of our kids all the time, yet many of us fear clowns so deeply that there’s even a clinical term for it: coulrophobia. So […]

By Paul Horsley If you want to start a new chorus in Kansas City, you’re going to need a solid concept, some chutzpah, and boundless optimism. Jackson Thomas brought all of those things when he formed KC VITAs Chamber Choir last year, a chorus of top-flight singers that, after an astonishingly successful debut last year, […]

By Paul Horsley Once we’ve made tough life-choices, we either learn to live with them or experience the toxic effects of regret. Still, it’s only human to wonder sometimes what might have happened if we’d taken that “other path.” One of the most daringly experimental pieces of theater in recent Broadway history, If/Then is a […]

By Paul Horsley There are several reasons why Summerfest concerts have thrived for more than a quarter-century. They offer some of the best chamber music in town, performed by Kansas City Symphony musicians and friends, during a period in which there’s little other classical music going on locally. They play programs that balance light-hearted music […]

By Paul Horsley Great works of theater can succeed in a multitude of formats. As long as the material is strong and you bring great performers and direction, a small show can be staged on a grand scale, or a traditionally lavish production can work on a small- or medium-sized stage. When the New Theatre […]

By Paul Horsley War poetry often contains all the drama, spectacle and tragedy that a composer needs to create a powerful musical setting, and history is rife with such statements—from Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death to Britten’s War Requiem and beyond. Letters from the battlefield, on the other hand, written in dire conditions to […]

By Paul Horsley It all started over lunch, during a festival in Vancouver, B.C., where Mary Pat Henry and Leni Wylliams were discussing their favorite dancers and choreographers. She was a dance teacher from South Carolina and he a rising star in the New York dance scene, but the two discovered they had remarkably complementary […]

By Paul Horsley Kansas City was once a sleepy place from May to September, then several things happened at once. First, some of the established organizations began to spread their seasons well into June, and others sought to start theirs in August. Second, the dozens of new theater groups, choruses, dance ensembles, chamber series and […]

By Paul Horsley The highest compliment you can pay an operatic production is that you went out of the theater thinking not about stagecraft, acting skills, catchy tunes or vocal prowess but about the ideas in the piece, the “meaning” even. The Lyric Opera’s Carmen that opened April 23rd is just such a production: It […]

By Paul Horsley The message of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is that God touches only a few with genius, and rest of us don’t matter. Or is it, really? Those familiar with earlier versions of this Tony Award-winning 1979 play (and its 1982 film version) might remember the theme thus: Antonio Salieri is resentful toward God […]

By Paul Horsley If you think too hard about the underlying messages of Bizet’s Carmen, you might begin to find the opera a bit unsettling. For when the ostensibly virtuous Don José ventures outside of his safe bourgeois existence to fall in with the wild gypsy Carmen, he enjoys a brief moment of love and […]

By Paul Horsley For more than four centuries the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare have been enshrined as the pinnacle of English-language poetry. Why, then, do we need to put them to music? It’s a question that Charles Bruffy, the Grammy Award-winning director of the Kansas City and Phoenix Chorales, has given a bit of […]