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 […]

By Paul Horsley What makes a performing-arts series great? For starters, you need the confidence of concert-goers, who have learned over the years you’ll do everything in your power to bring the world’s best (both among established artists and rising talent). In addition, you need the faith of the artists themselves, who know from experience […]

By Paul Horsley The Lyric Opera’s production of Donizetti’s frothy The Elixir of Love, which runs through March 20th at the Kauffman Center, has several things going for it. First, it offers richly detailed set designs by Allen Moyer, including a downstage curtain-drop painted in playful hues: a rural landscape in the style of Grant […]

By Paul Horsley When David Ludwig began falling in love with the violin virtuoso Bella Hristova, he knew two things right away. One, that he wanted to write a concerto for her some day. And two, that it would begin with a loud crash. Not to suggest that the relationship was filled with turmoil, David […]

By Paul Horsley Imagine the tale: A city slicker blows into a small town hoping to sell dubious goods to gullible farmers. Some are fooled, but not the bookish heroine, who is the cleverest and, it turns out, the most interesting woman in town. Sound familiar? If the plot of The Elixir of Love resembles […]

By Paul Horsley It’s true that dancing the lead in Swan Lake is the dream of many young ballerinas, but not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. Quite simply, the dual role of Odette/Odile contains such an array of artistic, technical and psychological complexities that for more than a century it has remained an […]

By Paul Horsley One of the reasons that millions of readers over the years have been drawn to Anne Frank’s indelible diary is that it permits us a personal and profoundly human way of thinking about the unthinkable. Discussing the Holocaust is always a challenge but Anne’s diary, first published in 1947 and more recently […]

By Paul Horsley Alex Saxon may be a star of TV and films these days, but he gives a lot of credit to the firm theatrical foundation he received growing up in the Kansas City area. From the age of eight the Liberty native, currently starring in MTV’s hit show “Finding Carter,” acted, sang and […]

By Paul Horsley When manmade laws seem to contradict fundamental human law, how is a civil society to decide between right and wrong? The Coterie Theatre’s upcoming production of And Justice for Some: The Freedom Trial of Anthony Burns asks big questions: Though not exactly ripped from today’s headlines, it has lessons for all of […]

By Paul Horsley When you create a new Nutcracker, you’re inventing from your own personal ballet experience but you’re also drawing on several centuries of dance history. “Nutcracker has always been a part of my life, from the time I was a child to this very minute,” said Devon Carney during a recent break from […]

By Paul Horsley Keeping a favorite holiday show fresh, year in and year out, requires care and vigilance. Each November J. Kent Barnhart begins the meticulous planning of Quality Hill Playhouse’s “Christmas in Song” by going through hundreds of songs (from his database of thousands) and narrowing the more than 500 Christmas-themed songs to about […]

By Paul Horsley What will we do in the evenings when the lights go out? How will we entertain ourselves when the nuclear cataclysm brings down the grid and there’s no electricity: no television, no internet, no cinema? These are questions playwright Anne Washburn asks in her brilliantly provocative Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, which […]