Most mothers dread the day that their sons or daughters start to drive, but Black moms are especially fearful when their teenagers, and sons in particular, get behind the wheel for the first time. That fear helped spark the inception of a new chamber opera by two internationally known Kansas City natives, Soprano and […]

Before there was theater there was storytelling. And if we ever end up living in a dystopian world with a broken “grid,” we might find ourselves returning to that oral tradition, trading stories among the ruins. Fortunately, we still have theater, and in late April our city welcomed the announcement of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s […]

These days the primary qualification for achieving the American dream seems to be adaptability. Jessica Wakefield and Kevin Hao began preparing for their “first careers” as orchestral violinists in the way that most exceptional musicians do: she at the Juilliard School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music, he at the University of Washington […]

Many of us still think of it as the new kid on the block. But for anyone tracing the development of the performing arts in the Kansas City region, watching the growth of the performance series at Johnson County Community College has been a bit like seeing an awkward adolescent become a strong, capable member […]

Early humans may not have actually learned to make music from the beasts of the air, land, or sea, but they were clearly aware of the sounds around them. We can probably assume that they shared our own fascination with the “songs” of birds, whales, and wolves: even as we recognize that, to whatever extent […]

After local arts organizations got over the shock of not being able to perform in their normal manner, they began setting up cameras everywhere: streaming performances live, filming them to share on the web, or creating both live and “archived” versions at the same time. Today, more than a year into this “age of innovation” […]

One of these days, Yetunde Felix-Ukwu will again have a mountain of artistic, production, and curatorial duties to deal with at Kansas City Repertory Theatre. At the moment, though, the company’s artistic associate is fulfilling an equally critical function: She is using the company’s digital platform to show Kansas City the extent to which the […]

Performing artists are such punctilious critics of their own work that they generally know what went well and what didn’t. Even before anyone else weighs in, they have at least a “feel” for how it came off. But eventually they’re curious to know what it looked like from the “other side of the footlights,” and […]

Kansas City arts organizations defied odds in 2020 and pulled off some of the most remarkable performances in recent memory. They ranged from a handful of live-with-audience performances (some pre-pandemic, some during) to a bevy of virtual shows and one “special event.” Classical KC; 91.9 Goes Live; After 20 years without a dedicated FM station, classical […]