Alan Portner - Page 6

“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.

William Shakespeare's 1595 comedy A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is one of his most often performed light plays. Stripped down, it is a screwball romantic comedy of misdirection written across five acts in verse.

FOREVER PLAID is a delightful stroll down memory lane for you. This new production designed at Musical Theatre Heritage inside Crown Center is a hoot and one of those “best in kind” experiences.

Still planning your special holiday evening out with your best girl or guy? Kansas City has lots to offer. There can be over four hundred places to hear live music in Kansas City and multiple opportunities to see a great stage show. Here are just a few of the stage shows available to you and your sweetie. Tickets are available on the websites of the named theatres.

The Musical Parody of TV's THE OFFICE is for those who are devoted fans of the 2005 a?' 2013 NBC comedy series. This is an unauthorized version, but it is probable that the best audience members for the parody are those most steeped in the developmental history of how the source show came to be.

FUN HOME (the musical) is, according to KC Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Stuart Carden, a?oethe most important new musical theater piecea?oe of the last decade. 2015 American Theatre Wing voters agreed by rewarding FUN HOME with Tony awards for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Book, Best Lead Actor, and Best Director.

The World Premier engagement of Jacqueline Goldfinger's BABEL (as part of the National New Play Network) is enjoying its first, fully realized production at Kansas City's Unicorn Theatre in Midtown. BABEL is a fascinating, at times funny, and at times terrifying vision of a future that may not be very far off. The questions it poses do not unreasonably stretch technology and human impacts.

PROOF is an interesting, four person, theatrical enterprise that explores the nexus between genius and profound mental illness. This 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner by David Auburn is currently completing its extended run at Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre's Warwick Theatre in midtown this Saturday February 25.

DIXIE LONGATE'S TUPPERWARE PARTY on the Starlight Stage Indoors is a hoot.  Playing in Kansas City until January 19, Dixie is the outrageous drag stage personae of performer and playwright Kris Andersson.  It is a 90 minute, multimedia, comic presentation and an actual Tupperware Party.

Stopping only for one night on December 17, Johnson County Community College presented a new Broadway style musical called BANDSTAND in Yardley Hall. All told, BANDSTAND is a very good show and worth seeing should it come through again. It is one of those shows that aspires to be great, but doesn't quite get there.

A strong cast presents an excellent Unicorn production of a very new play, Bernhardt/Hamlet, A Woman Unbounda by Theresa Rebeck. Bernhardt/Hamlet is a smart, comedic, reasonably accurate portrait of a middle-aged, financially strapped, giant of the nineteenth century French stage still with her powers intact, but with a paucity of mountains she still desires to climb.