Category: Performing
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Ballet Tells a Haunting Tale
Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” has haunted readers for almost seven decades. Its narrative is simple: In a fictional town, an annual rite is held in which one of the citizens is murdered — by stoning. The townspeople approach the lottery with a chilling nonchalance. Betraying one of their own — in this case, a wife and mother named Tessie Hutchinson — is merely something that must be done to maintain the social order.
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Concert to Come: “Goldberg Variations”
Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental “Goldberg Variations” is at once staggeringly difficult and uniquely beautiful, challenging and enamoring musicians for centuries. Kansas City’s Owen/Cox Dance Group will display these compatible contrasts in their final performance of the season, in collaboration with pianist Kairy Koshoeva. This is the second presentation of the work for Koshoeva and the company, which they premiered in June of 2013.
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Plays With a Punch: A Theater Critic’s Wish list for KC
I was heartened in February when the ever-feisty Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre undertook a drama that by rights should have been staged in Kansas City years ago — August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” “Gem” was the second-to-last play Wilson wrote in his historic 10-drama cycle depicting African-American life in each decade of the 20th century.