Feature: VILNA: A FORGOTTEN RESISTANCE at White TheatreApril 17, 2023“Vilna: A Resistance Story” is a new musical theater composition by Kevin and Allison Cloud with a book by Lisa Kenner Grissom. It tells the unfamiliar story of the roughly hundred thousand Vilna Jews before and during the Nazi Holocaust period.
Review: FORBIDDEN BROADWAY at Starlight IndoorsMarch 10, 2023“Forbidden Broadway” the musical parody performs on the actual indoor stage (not the Butterfield Stage) at Starlight Theatre in Swope Park in front of an audience of about 500 wildly amused patrons.
“Forbidden Broadway” is a thorough skewering of all those Broadway shows you’ve either seen or hoped to see. Broadway sees its own reflection in a funhouse mirror and has a big belly laugh at its own expense.
Review: CONDO-MONIUM at New Theatre & RestaurantFebruary 20, 2023The North American Premiere engagement for CONDO-MONIUM opened last week at Overland Park’s New Theatre & Restaurant with a super cast and direction by Dennis D. Hennessey for an extended run through April 8. CONDO-MONIUM is an updated farce from a very similar British show called FLAT OUT. Both versions are by UK Journalist and Playwright Jennifer Selway.
Interview: Jennifer Selway Talks CONDO-MONIUM at New Theatre & RestaurantFebruary 19, 2023It is not often that Kansas City audiences are fortunate enough to experience the North American premiere of a new British play in our own backyard. It is even less frequent that the playwright makes the monumental leap across the pond to share notes with the cast and production staff. Such is the case with British playwright, author, and journalist Jennifer Selway. The new production of her play, a British farce called “CONDO-MONIUM,” at Overland Park’s New Theatre & Restaurant for an extended run.
Review: MY FAIR LADY at Kauffman CenterFebruary 8, 2023The core notion behind Lerner and Lowe’s 1956 “My Fair Lady.” This musical theater classic is the tale of an arrogant, egocentric, patrician, professor and phonetician named Henry Higgins and his fraught relationship with an attractive (behind the soot), unschooled, young flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle.
Review: KINKY BOOTS at The White TheatreJanuary 30, 2023Live, local musical theater in Kansas City opens for 2023 with a delightful, surprising, unexpected production of 2013’s six-time Tony Award winner “Kinky Boots.” The more or less true tale of “Kinky Boots,” performs in the unlikely setting of the White Theatre inside Overland Park’s Jewish Community Center. The show teaches life lessons about finding one’s passion and finding value in people different from ourselves.
Review: HADESTOWN at Kansas City Music HallJanuary 18, 2023Blend two ancient Greek myths, add the climate change crisis, a screed on capitalism, fears surrounding immigration, sprinkle in delightful, original folk music, and stir. The unlikely result is the 2019 eight-time Tony-winning folk opus “Hadestown,” an exceptional piece of musical theater.
Review: COME BLOW YOUR HORN at New Theatre RestaurantDecember 10, 2022New Theatre Restaurant’s new production of Neil Simon’s COME BLOW YOUR HORN is a holiday gift to its audiences. It is a charming, gentle entertainment that rekindles a time when you were too busy laughing to worry about anything else.
Review: MAN OF LA MANCHA at Music Theater HeritageOctober 10, 2022Playing now at Music Theater Heritage through October 23 at Crown Center is an imaginative new production of 1965's Tony award winning Best Musical 'Man of La Mancha' offered by Musical Theater Heritage.
BWW Review: SPECTACULAR CHRISTMAS SHOW at Musical Theater HeritageDecember 12, 2021One of the annual challenges inherent to creating an absolutely new “Spectacular Christmas Show” at Musical l Theater Heritage is how to differentiate this year’s production from the thirteen editions that preceded it. I have been privileged to see eight of the fourteen iterations and can promise you that each production is professional, well performed, entertaining and very different from earlier versions. Sure, you will recognize some of the music, but it is unlikely that the key will be one you are pre-programed to have heard before or that the various harmonies will be hackneyed.
BWW Interview: Scott Moreau of JOHNNY & JUNE at New Theatre RestaurantDecember 8, 2021“Johnny & June” at New Theatre Restaurant is an outstanding, original, tribute concert reminiscent of what TV audiences might have enjoyed at home between the premiere of the “Johnny Cash TV Show” in 1969 and the final “Johnny Cash Christmas Special” in 1985.
This New Theatre Restaurant original features Scott Moreau as Johnny Cash, Ashley Pankow, as June Carter Cash, and Cathy Burnett as Country Comedian, Minnie Pearl.
BWW Review: JOHNNY & JUNE at New Theatre RestaurantNovember 24, 2021New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park has opened an original and very enjoyable, new production, entitled “Johnny & June.” The show is a country music tribute concert to Johnny & June Carter Cash with Scott Moreau and Ashley Pankow as the title characters and with Cathy Barnett as comedian Minnie Pearl along with a five piece band.
BWW Review: COMPANY at Musical Theater HeritageNovember 7, 2021Now through November 21, Musical Theater Heritage offers a super production of “Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s breakthrough 1970 musical. “Company” marks the first appearance of the indelible Sondheim musical voice we have heard so often since.
BWW Feature: VAN GOGH ALIVE at Stalight TheatreOctober 26, 2021Imagine, if you can, the ability to see beyond the strict confines of a framed piece of art. 'Van Gogh Alive,' a joint project of Starlight Theatre and the Nelson Atkins Art Museum, offers visitors a total immersion into Vincent's familiar, Post-Impressionist vision by way of massive, all enveloping, thirty ft. tall projections, backed by carefully selected musical score, and the specter of the artist's own words culled from hundreds of letters written in his final years.
Kansas City Theatres Reopen With Health PrecautionsOctober 21, 2021Kansas City live theater companies have mostly reopened after enduring eighteen months of dark stages and empty auditoriums. Curtains first rang down in New York and shortly here beginning March 12, 2020. As of today, October 21, 2021, more than 732,000 Americans have died as a result of one of several variants of the Covid-19 virus.
BWW Review: FOUR CHILDREN at Kansas City Actors' TheatreOctober 11, 2021The World Premiere production of “Four Children” has been brought to life by the Kansas City Actors Theatre on the City Stage inside Union Station as a minimalist, sadly shocking view of war against children and on a number of levels. It is not to be missed during its several week run.
The playwright has taken snippets from the diaries of four childhood victims of successful or attempted genocides. Their testimony is woven together paragraph by paragraph into a seamless, searing whole despite each being separated by decades and thousands of miles.
BWW Review: ESCAPE TO MARGARITAVILLE at Starlight TheatreSeptember 22, 2021The final, outdoor, Broadway style show for the 2021 season at Starlight Theatre is Jimmy Buffet’s 2018 juke box musical “Escape to Margaritaville.” If you are a certified Jimmy Buffet fan, otherwise known as a Parrott-head, then this fun evening is absolutely for you.
BWW Review: AN EVENING WITH SIERRA BOGGESS at Musical Theater HeritageSeptember 18, 2021“An evening with Sierra Boggess” at Musical Theater Heritage’s Quixotic Theater is a delightful way to spend any evening. Sierra was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s choice to create the role of Christine in the original production of the “Phantom” sequel “Love Never Dies.” American audiences outside of New York will know her opposite Phantom Ramin Karimloo from the PBS twenty-fifth anniversary concert version of “Phantom.”