Time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson! For more events this weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Belfast Girls
April 6, 2018 – April 29, 2018 | $25 – $30
la Esquina
Fishtank Theatre is partnering with the Charlotte Street Foundation to present the regional premiere of Belfast Girls, a play by Jaki McCarrick at La Esquina in April 2018. A free, First Friday Open House and artist talk will take place on Friday, April 6, 2018 and 17 live, public performances will take place from April 7 through 29, 2018.
The production is directed by CSF Fellow Heidi Van and features a cast consisting of Rasheedat Badejo, Annie Kalahurka, Erdin Schultz-Bever, Lindsay Lillig, and Kaitlin Gould. The writer, Jaki McCarrick, won the 2010 Papatango Prize for New Writing for her play Leopoldville. Belfast Girls was developed at the National Theatre Studio, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award.
The Fishtank, founded in 2009, presents contemporary experimental live theatre that challenges the way theatre meets its audience. Material performed by the Fishtank is fresh, its content progressive and its writers and performers committed to the aesthetic of risk-taking.
Working with set designer, Mark Exline, Belfast Girls will be staged aboard a multi-level ghost ship, resembling a skeleton, and the skin and bones of the population a government let starve.
La Esquina white box walls provide a projection surface for the voyage from Ireland to Australia where the set will be completed by images of the night sky, circling birds, the sea horizon, and, finally, the destination.
Brother Toad
April 27, 2018 – May 27, 2018
Kansas City Repertory Theatre-Copaken Stage
Mellon Foundation Kansas City Repertory Theatre Resident Playwright and Kansas City, KS resident, Nathan Louis Jackson (Sticky Traps, Broke-ology, When I Come To Die), brings us an arresting new play about two families’ from different stations in life as they search for answers to gun violence right here on our own city streets.
Storling Dance Theater’s GREATEST HITS 2.0
April 27 & 28, 2018 @ 7:30 pm | $20
The Culture House Academy of the Performing Arts
Störling Dance Theater was established in 1996 and soon made its mark as one of the most prolific dance companies in Kansas City with reviews that included, ” Störling-Enna’s creativity seems to have no limits…”. Their shows have been chosen as Top 15 for Kansas City as well as To 10 for the decade. Known for both the beauty they create as well as their creative storytelling ability, Störling Dance Theater includes some of the most powerful and broadly talented artists in the region. Don’t miss Greatest Hits 2.0 as they revisit some of the work that made them famous as well as present new pieces including Heather Gray’s “In Perpetuum”.
SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE
April 27, 2018 @ 8:00 pm
Folly Theater
An all-star ensemble comprising eight of the finest performer/composers at work in jazz today, the SFJAZZ Collective’s mission each year is to perform fresh arrangements of works by a modern master and newly commissioned pieces by each Collective member. Through this pioneering approach, simultaneously honoring music’s greatest figures while championing jazz’s up-to-the-minute directions, the Collective embodies SFJAZZ’s commitment to jazz as a living ever-relevant art form. In 2017-2018, they pay tribute to trumpeter, composer and innovator Miles Davis. More than any other figure, Davis changed the sound of jazz throughout his career.
Down in Mississippi
April 28, 2018 – May 6, 2018
The Pearl
Down in Mississippi takes place during the Freedom Summer campaign to register African-Americans to vote in the dangerous, segregated world of Mississippi in 1964. It explores the transformational experiences of three young civil rights activists who leave their safe northern homes to go down to Mississippi to try to change the world and discover that before they can change the world they will have to change themselves. A celebration of a movement that gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter’s Rights Act of 1965.
Julia Bullock, soprano in recital [Free Discovery Concert]
April 28, 2018 @ 7:00 pm | Free
Folly Theater
The New York Times heralded that Julia Bullock is “poised for a significant career.” The charismatic soprano has been lighting up stages around the world, performing vocal repertoire from Schubert to Broadway. Her Folly Theater recital will show off her amazing range.
