KCMETROPOLIS.org
Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

For complete Theatre listings through 2011, click here to visit the KC Events calendar. 

Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre
The Piano Lesson
Runs February 17 through March 6 at MET Space
For tickets call 816-569-3226 or online at www.metkc.org
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is the 1930s entry to the playwright’s 20^th-century play cycle. A bitter family history, born in slavery, is carved into the wood of a piano. For Berniece, the piano is a shrine, a monument to her family’s painful past. For her brother, Boy Willie, it’s a new beginning

Kansas City Repertory Theatre
Circle Mirror Transformation
Runs February 18 through March 20
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

Acclaimed as the debut of the year by one of the most exciting new writers in the country, Circle Mirror Transformation is a touching new comedy about the most unlikely of stories. Five citizens of a rural town begin a community acting class, each with his/her own expectations, but soon learn more about each other and themselves than they bargained for. Hailed as one of the most insightful and original new works of the year, the Rep is proud to present the Kansas City premiere of a play that explores the transforming powers of creativity.

Bell Cultural Events Center at MidAmerica Nazarene University
The Pirates of Penzance
Runs March 2 through March 5
For tickets call 913-971-3636 or online at www.mnu.edu/bellcenter
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

MNU's Fine and Performing Arts Department presents their annual spring musical. This year's performance is Gilbert & Sullivan's comedic opera The Pirates of Penzance.  Swashbuckling high jinks on the seven seas with a band of immature pirates, a squad of bumbling policemen and a bevy of beautiful maidens, this production will be filled with athletic stage combat, rollicking vocal numbers and outrageous antics.

The Coterie Theatre
The Greek Mythology Olympiaganza
Runs March 4 through March 6
For tickets call 816-474-6552 or online at www.coterietheatre.org
Call or visit the website for performance days and times 

Complete with action figure puppets, a beauty pageant, warring narrators, and general theatrical insanity, this is Greek Mythology as you have never seen it before! Creation myths such as Pandora's Box and Cronos and the Titans compete for the spotlight with other famous myths like Jason and the Argonauts (the origional Super Friends). Culminating in a heart-pounding version of The Iliad, this fast -paced, free -wheeling play is wild, silly, and a complete blast for young adults. Its hysterical and hisorical.

Unicorn Theatre
Two Jews Walk into a War…
Runs March 5 through March 20
For tickets call 816-531-7529 x10 or online at www.unicorntheatre.org
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

Funny, poignant and first introduced in our In-Progress New Play Readings, Ishaq and Zeblyan are the last two surviving Jews in a dilapidated old synagogue in Kabul during the Taliban regime’s final days. The only thing that binds them together is that they hate each other’s guts. Could the salvation of Afghanistan’s Jewish community actually be left in the hands of these two meshuganas?

Theatre Arts Dept. Calvary Bible College
The King and I
Runs March 10 through March 12, at Red Bridge Baptist Church
For tickets call 816-322-0110 or online at college.calvary.edu/events/the-king-and-i
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

The King and I is the incredible true story of how the conviction of a teacher and the courage of a king transformed a country. This production contains many of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s most singable and memorable favorites. There’s just nothing like a hoop skirt in “Shall We Dance!”

Quality Hill Playhouse
Look to the Rainbow: The Lyrics of Yip Harburg
Runs March 11 through April 10
For tickets call 816-421-1700 or online at www.qualityhillplayhouse.com
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

Working with a variety of composers, E.Y. "Yip" Harburg wrote a number of quintessential American songs: “Over the Rainbow,” “It's Only a Paper Moon” and the Great Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Through his songs, learn about the successes (The Wizard of Oz, Finian's Rainbow) and struggles (becoming placed on the infamous “Hollywood blacklist”) of this fascinating man.

Egads! Theatre Company
In Trousers: A Musical by William Finn
Runs March 11 through March 26, at the Off Center Theatre
For tickets call 816-842-9999 or online at  www.egadstheatre.com
Call or visit the website for performance days and times

EGADS! THEATRE COMPANY presents the Kansas City premiere of In Trousers by contemporary musical master William Finn (composer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee).  In Trousers is Finn's earliest work and the first (and often over-looked) one-act musical of the Falsettos trilogy (AKA the “Marvin Musicals”). Marvin has a kid and a wife AND a lover - oy vey!  When this balancing act gets too hot for Marvin, he reverts to himself at age 14 dodging the affection of his high school sweetheart and chasing after his aloof English teacher. Finn's clever, catchy and breathless songs pitch us in and out of Marvin's confused adolescence and his current struggle between fantasies of kissing men and a desire to maintain a normal family life.

One Night Only
Westport Center for the Arts
Wilde Irish Prose: Short Stories by Oscar Wilde
Saturday, March 12, 7:30 p.m., at Westport Presbyterian Church 
For tickets call 816-931-1032 or online at www.westportcenterforthearts.org

Westport Center for the Arts presents a live staged reading, “Wilde Irish Prose: Short Stories by Oscar Wilde.” Oscar Wilde was a great wit and a versatile author. He wrote plays (Importance of Being Earnest). He wrote poetry (“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”). But did you know he was responsible for great short stories like “A Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Canterville Ghost”? Just in time for St. Patrick's Day! Let’s go Wilde with a tale or two before the festivities of the Great Day itself! Free Refreshments after the Performance! 

One Day Only
StoneLion Puppet Theatre
Puppets for the Planet
Saturday, March 5, beginning at 10 a.m.
For tickets call 816-221-5351 or online at www.stonelionpuppets.org

StoneLion Puppet Theatre for the fifth year is holding a series of puppet festivals celebrating our planet with ART. Come have fun, create and learn how to help the planet we live on. On March 5 please join us at The Southeast Community Center for a day filled with dance, puppets, music and interactive fun! Featuring a brand new show by StoneLion Puppet Theatre, Spelunk!, a wacky journey with a treasure-hunting adventurer exploring an underground cave complete with an ancient Indian treasure hunt, shadow puppets, and light up critters!

One Night Only
The Lied Center of Kansas
An Evening with Garrison Keillor
Wednesday, March 9, 7:30 p.m.
For tickets, call 785-864-2787 or online at www.lied.ku.edu

Known as the host of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor is also a syndicated columnist and best-selling author of more than a dozen books including Lake Wobegon, Love Me and Homegrown Democrat. Keillor’s distinctive, inviting voice is heard each week by more than 4 million listeners on 590 public radio stations. At the Lied Center, Keillor will share entertaining anecdotes about his experience growing up in the American Midwest. 

One Day Only
The Lied Center of Kansas
Carnival of the Animals/Peter and the Wolf 
Sunday, March 13, 2:30 p.m.
For tickets, call 785-864-2787 or online at www.lied.ku.edu

Carnival of the Animals and Peter and the Wolf—two classical music masterpieces—are reinvented for young audiences by Frederic Chiu’s brilliant piano transcription and David Gonzalez’ original, funky poetry. Written by French romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886, Carnival of the Animals is a musical suite introducing residents of the animal kingdom to classical music enthusiasts. Peter and the Wolf, written by Russian composer and pianist Sergei Prokofiev in 1936, is a symphony fairy tale for children to cultivate their musical taste.

For complete Theatre listings through 2011, click here to visit the KC Events calendar.

By Victor Wishna

Senior Editor, Theatre; Theatre and Features Contributor
Victor Wishna is a writer, editor, and author, among other things. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School's creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, Humanities, and other major magazines and newspapers. He contributes a weekly real estate feature to the New York Post and his column “Letter from New York” is syndicated nationally.

With photographer Ken Collins, he published In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), for which he conducted and edited interviews with 61 prominent stage writers including Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and many others. The book won a 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal (www.intheircompany.com).

He has always maintained a love for theatre, as a writer, an audience member, and even an actor, appearing in several community and semi-professional productions. As an undergraduate, he studied acting and playwriting with Anna Deavere Smith, in addition to journalism and psychology (and not engineering or medicine).

After nearly 12 years in New York City, Victor recently returned to his hometown with his wife, Annie, also a K.C. native. When not writing for publication or pleasure, Victor is honing his stand-up routine, which he has performed at numerous clubs and special events around New York, the Midwest, and elsewhere. In June 2010, he was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously.