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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Amidst the bevy of high-profile soloists, the huge chorus and complement of supernumeraries, the children’s choir and the over-the-top scenic and costume designs, one thing was abundantly clear about the October 1st opening of Turandot at the Kauffman Center: With this production the Lyric Opera is entering a new epoch in its history, and future productions will […]

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At first glance Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer might not seem an obvious choice for a novel on which to base a full-length ballet, and I confess that I approached William Whitener’s and Maury Yeston’s Tom Sawyer: A Ballet in Three Acts with some skepticism. But, wow. On October 14th the ambitious piece opened the Kansas City Ballet’s season in its world premiere at […]

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The New York Times’ prickly dance critic Alistair Macaulay seemed to have liked the Kansas City Ballet’s Tom Sawyeralmost as much as I did – though at times for different reasons. See my review here, and his here. Much was hanging on the new full-length ballet because it was the company’s first world premiere in the new Kauffman Center, and (as […]

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The highlight of my musical weekend was the concert on Sunday, March 20th of Quartet Accorda. This was a big event in the Park University calendar, as it represented the first time in nearly a year that these four terrific musicians—violinists Kanako Ito and Ben Sayevich, violist Chung-Hoon Peter Chunand cellist Martin Storey—have been able to unite to make music. Last summer […]

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In what promises to be one of the most significant musical events of the Kansas City season, this week the Boston Early Music Festival brings Handel’s Acis and Galatea to the Friends of Chamber Music’s chamber series. This semi-staged production—at 8 p.m. on April 1st at the Folly Theater—strives for historical authenticity in all aspects. It […]

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Circles can symbolize unity or closure, but they can also convey inertia, stasis, even claustrophobia. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret at Spencer Theatre uses the circle to represent all of those things, by placing the action on a rotating central disc and seating the audience “in the round”—a configuration created by […]

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Performances of Baroque operas are rare enough, but rarer still are productions that take into account all aspects of 18th-century performance practice—not just historically informed singing and period instruments but also costumes, décor, gestures and stage direction that reflect what an audience of the period might have experienced. Normally one can hear such things only […]

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Legendary and iconic dancer Jacques D’Amboise was in Our Town on April 1st to promote his new memoir, I Was a Dancer (Borzoi Books: Alfred A. Knopf, $35). Born Joseph Aheard in Massachusetts, D’Amboise would become one of George Balanchine’s most indispensable muses: Over the course of 33 years at New York City Ballet, Jacques had more works created for him […]

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There are extremes of misery in the world that defy comprehension. In the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, violence and sexual brutality against women and girls have remained at epidemic levels for more a decade. “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs John Holmes told The […]

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The Lyric Opera’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro is well-sung, confidently acted and executed with a deft comic touch. Whether or not you buy into its conceit of setting the opera as a contemporary backstage drama, the production is at least consistent—at times relentlessly so—in its transfer of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s 18th-century master-servant conflict […]

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It takes mettle to write a play about turmoil in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where civil wars have brought years of rampant pillaging, murder and sexual abuse. Ruined is a problematic but gutsy play, and it won Lynn Nottage the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009. (See the advance story on the play below, which we ran […]

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Concluding the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s 2010-2011 season is Henryk Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in an adaptation by David Schweizer, who also directs it. The production is already in previews and opens April 29th at the Copaken Stage downtown. David is a prominent figure in American theater who has directed several off-Broadway productions as well as works at Lincoln […]

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It’s often said that choreography begins with music, but the Kansas City Ballet’s upcoming spring season suggests that the situation is a bit more complex than that. In fact the program presents three works with three very different relationships to music: one that clearly grew out of a preexisting score (William Whitener’s Mercy of the Elements), […]

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Hollywood can make movies about playwrights, poets, painters. It can make you bawl over the death of a dog, feel you’re genuinely on board the Titanic or evoke precisely the melancholy of a small town in the Deep South. But when it comes to making films about classical music, it’s time to drag out every […]

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