Time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson for Memorial Day weekend. This is your last chance to see Kansas City Repertory Theatre‘s productions of Brother Toad and Welcome to Fear City, closing Sunday, May 27th. See the newest exhibition at the WWI Museum, War Around Us, featuring the work of soldier artists in WWI. Also opening this weekend is the latest production from Kansas City Actors Theatre, David Hare’s Skylight. Tomorrow, KC Meltingpot Theatre opens their production of Ain’t No Such Thing as Midnight Black, running through June 9th (May 25th and June 9th performances are sold out, so get your tickets now!). On Sunday, celebrate Memorial Day with the Kansas City Symphony‘s Celebration at the Station. For more ideas this Memorial Day weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Brother Toad
April 27, 2018 – May 27, 2018
Kansas City Repertory Theatre-Copaken Stage
Mellon Foundation KCRep 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.
Welcome to Fear City
April 27, 2018 – May 27, 2018
Kansas City Repertory Theatre-Copaken Stage
It’s July 1977 and the South Bronx is HOT — from a heat wave, from this new thing that would come to be known as “hip-hop,” and from the number of fires burning throughout the borough. WELCOME TO FEAR CITY takes a jarring, yet hopeful and funny, look at a community trying to get by in the midst of crime, apathy, poverty, and a whole new art form that’s about to electrify the world.
WAR AROUND US: SOLDIER ARTIST IMPRESSIONS
May 22, 2018 – January 13, 2019
National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial
Creating art when surrounded by war seems contradictory.
However, as the work attests, inspiration can take many forms, providing a glimpse into a world that otherwise would be unfamiliar. Although markedly different in their styles and subject choices, the featured artists—Jean Lefort, Curtiney George Foote, Charles Thatcher Shellabarger, Myron Chapin, and Clifford Warner demonstrate several ways one can capture wartime experiences.
Using the fields, villages, and people who witnessed the devastation of World War I, the artists convey a shared understanding of the importance in depicting the look and feel of war.
For some of these soldier artists, the desire to create functions as a way to explore complex feelings, as shown in Foote’s seemingly celebratory portrayal of a victory parade and Shellabarger’s image of a French soldier’s grave. For others, art captures impressions of everyday life, such as letter-writing, shoe shining, and socializing.
These images make clear that the war was indiscriminate in its effects, but rather all around us, devastating families, communities, and ways of life. Despite this catastrophic event, they convey a shared humanity. A century after the war, this art retains its power as a testament to the experiences of those that lived it.
Skylight
May 23, 2018 – June 10, 2018
H & R Block-City Stage
Sparks of another sort fly in the final show of the season. Abandoned love and clashing social views collide with wit and wisdom when an older, successful restaurateur comes to visit his much younger former mistress, a schoolteacher in a poor London neighborhood. Over the course of the evening (and the on-stage preparation of an actual meal), they revisit what brought them together and pushed them apart in this love affair that, strangely enough, reflects our world today. One of David Hare’s finer works, Skylight has won both the Olivier Award for best play and a Tony Award for Best Revival.
Ain’t No Such Thing as Midnight Black
May 25, 2018 – June 9, 2018 | $17.25 – $27.50
Just Off Broadway Theatre
KCMPT presents an original stage play by local playwright, Lewis J. Morrow at Just Off Broadway Theatre.
Kansas City Symphony’s BANK OF AMERICA CELEBRATION AT THE STATION
May 27, 2018 @ 3:00 pm – 10:00 pm | Free
Union Station Kansas City
The Kansas City Symphony’s 16th annual patriotic concert event is the largest FREE Memorial Day weekend festival in the Midwest! From a moving Symphony concert to the city’s grandest fireworks display, nothing celebrates our military and veterans quite like Bank of America Celebration at the Station. Make it an all-day family affair with pre-concert musical acts, food trucks, Lee Jeans Family Zone, the Honeywell Veterans Place with services for veterans, plus activities inside Union Station and the National World War I Museum and Memorial.
At dusk, swell with pride as your Kansas City Symphony builds to a grand finale featuring Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” with live cannons and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” We’ll recognize the 100th anniversaries of the WWI armistice, Leonard Bernstein’s birth and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” while paying tribute to the “Greatest Generation,” our community’s WWII veterans and local Gold Star families. This year, we also welcome special musical guests Airman First Class Melissa Edgmon from the United States Air Force Band of Mid-America and operatic baritone John Brancy with Jim Birdsall as host. Blankets and lawn chairs welcome. The event site opens at 3 p.m. The concert begins at 8 p.m. with a flyover provided by the KC Flight Formation Team. Learn more about the pilots and their aeronautical acrobatics at kcflight.org.
