July is coming to a close, and we have our weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson. The Kansas City Fringe Festival continues through Sunday at venues throughout the city. See the Broadway musical If/Then, also showing through Sunday, at Starlight Theatre. The Jazz Disciples perform with Tracey Hammond at The Blue Room Saturday night. Treasure of the Kings opens Saturday at The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures. And Heartland Chamber Music presents the its first concert for the Heartland Chamber Festival at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church on Sunday. For more ideas this weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
12th Annual Kansas City Fringe Festival
July 21 – July 31
Various Venues
The Kansas City Fringe Festival is an annual 11-day performing and visual arts extravaganza that straddles a thin, frayed line between mass appeal and eclectic tastes. Fringe links these two worlds together, showing that it is the bridge you take to be inspired and entertained no matter what your taste may be.
If/Then
July 28-31 @ 8:00 pm
Starlight Theatre
If/Then is a contemporary Broadway musical about living in New York today – and the possibilities of tomorrow.
With unforgettable songs and a story by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award®-winning creators of Next to Normal, this new musical follows one woman’s two possible life paths. If/Then paints a deeply moving portrait of the lives we lead, as well as the lives we might have led.
Jazz Disciples Featuring Tracey Hammond
July 30 @ 8:30 pm | $15
American Jazz Museum – The Blue Room
Treasures of the Kings: 18th Century French Interiors in Miniature
July 30, 2016 – July 30, 2020
The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures
T/m is honored to premiere three new fine-scale miniature room settings on long-term loan from Ede & Ravenscroft, the oldest tailor in London and the exclusive provider of robes for the British Royal Family. Treasures of the Kings highlights Louis XV and Louis XVI royal furniture arranged in two room settings from the Palace of Versailles and one from the Palace of Fontainebleau. The centerpiece of the collection is Denis Hillman’s Bureau du Roi. Comprised of over 16,000 individual pieces of fruitwood in seven marquetry designs, the desk took over four years to complete.
Heartland Chamber Music Festival
July 31 @ 3:00 pm | Free
Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church
The popular Heartland Chamber Music Festival returns this summer for a nine-day run from Friday, July 29, through Saturday, Aug. 6.
The festival, now in its seventh year with Johnson County Community College hosting, annually attracts more than 80 string and piano students, ages 8-26, from all over the world. Students receive instruction from internationally-renowned music faculty and present free summer concerts.
The event is coordinated by Heartland Chamber Music, an award-winning student chamber music academy located in Mission Kansas, in partnership with Johnson County Community College’s Performing Arts Series, Arts Education Program.
This year, the education portion of the festival will take place in JCCC’s Carlsen Center as usual. But because the college is renovating the center’s performance areas, the concerts will take place at venues elsewhere.
Here’s the concert lineup. All are free. The first concert, on Sunday, July 31, will take place at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, 11100 College Blvd., Overland Park, Kansas.
