Alan Portner

The new 2025-2026 season schedule for the PNC Bank Broadway Series in Kansas City has been announced by American Theatre Guild Senior Director of Booking Operations Craig Aikman.  This year’s menu of traveling tour companies includes familiar offerings, but many more of the productions offered are still currently on Broadway or are making their premiere appearances in Kansas City,

HAIRSPRAY, a co-production of the White Theatre and the Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City, is the kind of old-fashioned, joyous, musical theater experience that recalls a PAJAMA GAME, or a DAMN YANKEES, kind of show that is just pure entertainment.  Additionally, HAIRSPRAY has a point to make and a super cast with which to make it.

Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre kicks off its 2025 calendar year offerings with an offbeat murder mystery/character study by Lanford Wilson called BOOK OF DAYS performed at The Westport Bowery. The play, originally commissioned by Jeff Daniels in 1998 for his own small town (Michigan) theater company, is set in a southwestern Missouri rural community at a time not specifically named. Lanford Wilson is best known for his naturalistic use of dialogue.  His best- known work is the two-hander “Talley’s Folly.” BOOK OF DAYS draws on Wilson’s own theatrical roots in small-town America. He was from Lebanon, Missouri.

The touring company of PARADE, now playing at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, recounts the sad, but true tale of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan. Mr. Frank was almost certainly falsely convicted of Ms. Phagan’s April 27, 1913 murder due to an early twentieth century eruption of rampant antisemitism.

Chicago, the Musical, now playing at the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, is a super evening out for you and your significant other.  It is a welcome respite from our incredible snow event last weekend. 

FUNNY GIRL is one of the crown gems of the American Musical Theater. Kansas City audiences will be treated to a first-class production of a show that many theater buffs know about but have never seen. Tuesday night’s performance starred Leah Platt in the lead role of Fanny Brice. Leah has a gangbuster voice fully displayed as she plows through an excellent score with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill.

Heating up the boards at New Theatre Restaurant now through February 2, 2025 is a new production of a reliable Off-Broadway Musical Review called NUNSENSE featuring a very funny quintet of comedy Sisters from the “Little Sisters of Olathe.”

One of the fun parts of reviewing shows in Kansas City is the occasional opportunity to meet and interview some of the talented touring performers who come through with road productions of Broadway shows.

Cirque Du Soleil’s excellent new Christmas Show, TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE… opens at the Kansas City Music Hall for eight performances beginning THE NIGHT BEFORE…Thanksgiving Day and continues through Sunday, December 1.

Meredith Willson’s THE MUSIC MAN opened this week at The White Theatre to an almost full house standing ovation. THE MUSIC MAN is a tribute to small town America around the turn of the twentieth century. The location is River City, Iowa on the Iowa/Illinois border in 1912.

Imagine a very funny stage comedy hidden behind a locked door, puzzler of a 1940s mystery movie and you’ve got AN OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY MURDER now playing at New Theatre and Restaurant. It is a World Premiere production. Double Tony-winning playwright Joe DiPietro has cleverly developed a recipe for an uproarious new farce. 

Kansas City audiences do not often get the opportunity to see World Premiere productions of plays by Tony Award winning playwrights.  This makes the current New Theatre & Restaurant production of Joe DiPietra’s new play “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” starring “All In The Family’s” Sally Strothers exceptional.

It is a quest to commit the perfect murder, and it almost works. “Dial M For Murder” is the twisted story of a failed novelist who has married an heiress and has decided to do her in to inherit her millions.

Victor Wishna’s new play “Tree of Life” deserves an audience beyond its current World Premiere production ending on September 22.   It is a blessing (a bracha) to those fortunate enough to see the premiere engagement. This unusual and original new play is directed by Jonah Greene.

The White Theatre presents a world premiere production of “Tree of Life,” a new two-act play, by Kansas City career writer and playwright Victor Wishna.  “Tree of Life” documents the journey of a sacred “Torah” that has rested in the arc of a small-town Iowa synagogue over more than a century.

One suggestion for guests on is a trip down to the Kansas City Music Hall to witness a new production by Montreal’s famous Cirque Du Soleil.   The new show is called “Twas the Night Before…”  It is the first ever holiday themed Cirque in the almost fifty-year history of the company.

It is funny. It is a slice of life. It is a literal peek behind the curtain. Kansas City Actors Theatre production of Alice Childress’s TROUBLE IN MIND allows audiences a long-delayed opportunity to vision America (and its theatrical community) as it appeared in 1955 from an African American point of view. I was struck by how much our country has matured (mostly for the better) over eighty years.

Looking for a little relief from the ongoing political season? If so, I should like to recommend the outrageous, belly-laugh of a show now playing in the Music Theatre Heritage Grand Theater on the fourth floor of Crown Center described by another audience member as “awesome.” It is the self-deprecating, six-time Tony Winning, best musical of 1984, “La Cage aux Folles.”

The final show of Theater In The Park’s 2024 outdoor season is a musical version of the 1992 film comedy “SISTER ACT.” 

What did our critic think of THE LITTLE MERMAID at White Theatre?