Brian McTavish

Brian McTavish

Brian McTavish is a freelance writer specializing in the arts and pop culture. He was an arts and entertainment writer for more than 20 years at The Kansas City Star. He regularly shares his “Weekend To-Do List” at KCUR-FM (89.3)/kcur.org.

The Job: Joseph Brandwein

The Job: Joseph Brandwein

Piano Tuner to the Masters By his own estimation, Joseph Brandwein has tuned pianos for virtually every major concert pianist who’s performed in Kansas City over the last 40 years. But he refuses to name-drop. “I’m strictly low-key,” Brandwein says. “I don’t need the praise. I don’t need more business. I just do what I […]

Robert Stewart: Leading Man of Letters

Robert Stewart: Leading Man of Letters

What is the written word really worth? Only everything you can put into it. So goes the ardent ethos of probing poet and essayist Robert Stewart, veteran editor of “New Letters” magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and founder of the Midwest Poets Series at Rockhurst University. Stewart’s credentials make him a high-profile player in the Kansas City literary community.

Quixotic Scores a Hit with Dazzling Digital Projections

Quixotic Scores a Hit with Dazzling Digital Projections

Known for state of the art dance, the KC-based group is gaining reknown for multi-media spectaculars. When is a far-out dance company far more than a far-out dance company? When it’s Kansas City’s Quixotic. The outer reaches of artistic possibility were never more palpable for Quixotic’s co-founder and creative director Anthony Magliano than in February […]

Tales from the Pit

Tales from the Pit

Hair petting, dandruff snow and kicking children are all part of the act for musicians playing below stage. For Ramona Pansegrau, music director of the Kansas City Ballet, there’s nothing like being in the orchestra pit conducting a Christmastime performance of The Nutcracker and being touched by the audience’s reaction. “One time, a little girl […]

Nostalgia Trip

Nostalgia Trip

Companion show revisits kicks of Route 66. Say what you will about the interstate system, the most fabled thoroughfare in American history remains Route 66, which in 1938 became the world’s first mega-highway paved end to end. Wending from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., the 2,448-mile, two-lane highway carried countless travelers before being decommissioned by […]

Road Show

Road Show

Linda Hall Library exhibit celebrates 60th anniversary of U.S. interstate system. Most Americans are too young to remember the discouraging roads that confronted long-distance travelers before President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, enabling the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System in 1956. Sixty years later, the virtually completed system’s 47,500 miles of […]