Alan Portner - Page 13

Unicorn Theatre Artistic Director Cynthia Levin enthusiastically welcomed a properly vaccinated, masked, and socially distanced audience to the Levin Theater for the first Covid delayed Unicorn production in eighteen months. The play is a dense, but extremely well performed ninety minute one act entitled “The Lifespan of a Fact.”

Metropolitan Ensemble Theater (MET) has reopened in an improved, more comfortable, and certainly more serviceable Warwick Theater. The building remains a work in progress, but marching toward an ultimate and stylish rebirth. The opening offering is a delightful, soulful, surprising, enjoyable, well-conceived, well-acted, and well-directed piece of theatrical storytelling in two acts called “Mother of the Maid” by playwright Jane Anderson.

It’s exuberant! It’s tuneful! It will make you want to dance! It is “On Your Feet,” the life story of Gloria and Emilio Estefan and their Miami Sound Machine. It is a happy exit from the lockdowns around the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was their special place; a run-down barn somewhere in a Canadian prairie province. Mary, a UK transplant during the early second decade of the twentieth century, has returned here for a kind of exorcism. “Mary’s Wedding” is the first Kansas City directorial outing for newly minted Kansas City Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Stuart Carden. This small play, only 90 minutes long with a cast of two by Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte, marks the reboot of live theater for KC Rep. Because of Covid restrictions, it is being performed outdoors on the tiered lawn fronting the sunken entrance to the National World War I Museum.

New safety limitations and significant high tech investment at New Theatre Restaurant has allowed dinner theater to return to Overland Park and the Kansas City area. New Theatre Restaurant, one of America’s premiere dinner theater/restaurants, reopened with “The King In Concert,” starring Elvis Presley impersonator Victor Trevino Jr and with Dominique Scott in a reprise of his characterization of Jerry Lee Lewis from last season’s “Million Dollar Quartet.”

Live, Indoor, Actor’s Equity sanctioned, precaution observed, musical theater has returned to Crown Center. Now running through August 22 is Musical Theater Heritage’s concert production of “Hair: Then and Now.”

Now running on the stage of the White Theatre at the Jewish Community Center’s Overland Park campus is a very credible production of 1977’s “Annie.” It is the first new, full, live, Broadway Style indoor production to tread the boards of this very nice auditorium in sixteen months.

Live Theater has returned to Musical Theater Heritage with the World Premiere production of “Dead Ringer.” Starring in this one man tour de force is Canadian performer and Kansas City favorite Zachary Stevenson.

Now open at Kansas City’s Union Station is a huge, new, historical exhibition. The exhibition is fronted by one of the freight cars that once transported hundreds of thousands of souls to the Auschwitz death camp in southeastern Poland between 1940 and 1945.

Dixie Longate is back, at least virtually, at Starlight Theatre.  It’s a far reaching, no holds barred, brave ninety minute performance. 

“The Music of Motown” is the third original cabaret show in a series of video streamed entertainments from Musical Theater Heritage in the wake of the great Covid-19 pandemic. Covid has eliminated live audience performances for the time being. Each new iteration becomes a little technically better than the one that preceded it. The music is always fine. This show is one R&B lovers should not miss.

A KC holiday treasures I always enjoy is the “The Spectacular Christmas Show” at Musical Theater Heritage. Covid-19 has forced the “Christmas Show” off the main stage, but it has has been re-incarnated virtually and not lost much on the “Spectacular” scale and lost nothing in musical performance.

MTH’s new virtual Musical Monday “Broadway’s Prince” is a delightful decompression from the all-consuming political drama that engulfs the country. “Broadway’s Prince” is a remembrance of the late, great, Broadway producer and Director Hal Prince. This production is a compendium of sixteen musical numbers from a selection of Prince’s shows sung by some really excellent, locally-based performers.

Fans of Musical Theater Heritage are in for a treat with a new, locally conceived and performed streaming remembrance revue featuring the iconic music of a?oeRodgers and Hammerstein.a?? This MTH production uses parts of the finished scenic design from the Covid cancelled production of a?oeCarousela?? originally scheduled for last spring. It is excellently videoed and sound engineered on the internet Vimeo platform.

AMERICAN SON is a bold, intense, ninety minute study of race and law enforcement in America during the early twenty-first century.  How you interpret what you see depends entirely on who you are and your own preconceptions. 

Barn Players production of TITANIC (The Musical) opened this past weekend at the Arts Asylum to full and appreciative audiences. TITANIC is a huge (pardon the play on words) Community Theater undertaking in all ways you might imagine it could be. TITANIC (The Musical) was written by Maury Yeston and Peter Stone. It won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The BARN PLAYERS production directed by Kipp Simmons is similarly complex but in different ways.

A third evolution of the American classic AN AMERICAN IN PARIS took the stage at Yardley Hall inside the Carlsen Center at Johnson County (KS) Community College to an almost full audience of 1500 souls. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS has been reborn as an ambitious piece of modern musical theater. It first opened in Paris n 2014, then in New York, before journeying across the pond for engagements in London's west end. This particular production is the second iteration of a road company. This one is a Non-Equity tour produced by BIG LEAGUE productions.

It doesn't much matter whether you happen to be Lutheran, Catholic, another flavor of Protestant, Jewish, or Muslim. All places of worship surely have CHURCH BASEMENT LADIES like these.

COME FROM AWAY is a 2017 musical play that memorializes the best of how humans can react in the face of the 911 tragedy. It is both a testament and the best new musical in many years.