Recommend me a city in North America.

[onodera]

My thread, I command thee to rise from thy grave and serve me once again!

Okay, I've reordered my preferences now that I'm married:
- I'm okay with driving now.
- I think I can manage living in the suburbs.

The most important thing is now culture. We need a city with theatres (real ones, not movie theatres and amateur drama) and museums of art that host important exhibitions. What does that limit us to? NY and SF?

[MikeH]

SF has crap for public transit.

Huh? I spent a week in SF and went everywhere on public transport.

Buses, trams, Muni and BART. Was great. Europe like.

[MikeH]

Oh this thread is like a year old did I already say that?

[Hauldren Collider]

My thread, I command thee to rise from thy grave and serve me once again!

Okay, I've reordered my preferences now that I'm married:
- I'm okay with driving now.
- I think I can manage living in the suburbs.

The most important thing is now culture. We need a city with theatres (real ones, not movie theatres and amateur drama) and museums of art that host important exhibitions. What does that limit us to? NY and SF?

DC has loads of theaters and museums.

[Dinner]

SF has crap for public transit.

WTF are you talking about? Between the subway (Muni), the trolley system, BART, and the city bus system it's definitely in the top five cities for public transit.

[Dinner]

Oh this thread is like a year old did I already say that?

God damn it. I fell into the same trap.

[MikeH]

Oh crap I'm as retarded as Oerdin.

[ColdWizard]

DC has loads of theaters and museums.

But traffic is horrible and the public transportation is questionable.

[The Mad Monk]

My thread, I command thee to rise from thy grave and serve me once again!

Okay, I've reordered my preferences now that I'm married:
- I'm okay with driving now.
- I think I can manage living in the suburbs.

The most important thing is now culture. We need a city with theatres (real ones, not movie theatres and amateur drama) and museums of art that host important exhibitions. What does that limit us to? NY and SF?

Kansas City. You will be pleasently surprised.

[The Mad Monk]

Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts to Open in Kansas City September 16-18, 2011

The Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, a new center for music, opera, theater, and dance, will open in downtown Kansas City, Missouri September 16-18, 2011 with a weekend of celebration. The Kauffman Center will host back-to-back Grand Opening galas to inaugurate its two new performance halls, bringing legends Placido Domingo and Itzhak Perlman to Kansas City on the evenings of Friday, September 16 and Saturday, September 17, 2011, respectively. The opening weekend will culminate with a community day on Sunday, September 18 featuring performances on the stages of the Kauffman Center’s new houses: the Muriel Kauffman Theatre and Helzberg Hall.

Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts will present a wide spectrum of entertainers and performances from around the world, including classical, pop, and jazz music, ballet and contemporary dance, Broadway productions, comedy shows and more. It will also be the performance home to three of the region’s leading performing arts organizations—Kansas City Ballet, Kansas City Symphony, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. The Kauffman Center will be one of the most technically and architecturally advanced performing arts centers in the nation, allowing its resident companies and presenters to stage more sophisticated work, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and foster the cross-fertilization of the companies’ audiences. The 285,000 square-foot facility will include two separate halls: the 1,600 seat Helzberg Hall and the 1,800 seat Muriel Kauffman Theatre— both housed within a dramatic overarching shell featuring a glass roof and glass walls. The Brandmeyer Great Hall will provide sweeping views of Kansas City.

The Kauffman Center’s Grand Opening events are designed to showcase the capabilities of the Center’s two venues, Muriel Kauffman Theatre and Helzberg Hall. The weekend will kick off on Friday, September 16 with a tribute to the center’s late namesake, Muriel McBrien Kauffman. The gala evening will feature a range of performances from opera to Broadway, headlined by world-renowned tenor and musician Placido Domingo, making his first appearance in Kansas City. The Center’s three resident companies, the Kansas City Ballet, Kansas City Symphony and Lyric Opera of Kansas City, will all take part in the program. The celebration will continue Saturday, September 17 in Helzberg Hall with a concert to showcase the acoustics of the new hall, featuring a special guest appearance by virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman accompanied by the Kansas City Symphony, conducted by Music Director, Maestro Michael Stern.

On Sunday, September 18, the Kauffman Center will open its doors to the community, hosting a series of short, family-friendly performances throughout the afternoon in both halls. Tours of the Center, including opportunities to see backstage areas, will give visitors a rare sneak peek behind the scenes.


“We can hardly wait to welcome the Kansas City community into the Kauffman Center and invite individuals and families from across the region to take part in our opening,” said Jane Chu, President and CEO of the Kauffman Center. “We are thrilled that two of the classical music world’s most acclaimed and beloved artists will be here to perform as part of the festivities, and we look forward to the opportunity to show off both the beauty and enhanced capabilities of our new performance halls. This is a great moment that we’ve all been waiting for.”

“I know mother would be proud to welcome the entire community to take part in these joyous opening celebrations,” said Julia Irene Kauffman, Chairman of the Board of the Kauffman Center and Chairman/CEO of the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation. “The new performing arts center is a wonderful expression of her sense of civic responsibility and a gift that will keep on giving for generations to come.”

The Kauffman Center’s performance venues, Muriel Kauffman Theatre and Helzberg Hall, are two distinct structures, each existing in their own acoustical envelope. An overarching shell houses both venues and its glass roof creates a series of interior piazzas that serve as shared public spaces. The venues will share backstage facilities, including dressing accommodations for over 250 performers, as well as 11 rehearsal and warm-up rooms. The Kauffman Center’s grounds will be used for outdoor performances and as a public gathering space. The Center has been designed so it can accommodate future expansion along the eastern facade of the building.

The $413-million project includes $326 million for the creation of the performing arts center, a $40 million endowment, and a $47 million, 1,000-car underground parking garage funded by the City of Kansas City, MO. The Kauffman Center has raised more than $369 million to-date, more than 90 percent 3 of the total funding. Major gifts have included $30 million from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, $23 million from the Hall Family Foundation, $12 million from the Joe and Jeanne Brandmeyer Family Foundation, and $10 million from Shirley B. and Barnett C. Helzberg. In December 2000, the Kauffman Center received two gifts totaling $105-million to launch the project from Julia Irene Kauffman and the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation—a fund established by the late civic leader and philanthropist to support organizations and programs that enhance the quality and accessibility of the arts in the greater Kansas City community.

More information on the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts is available at kauffmancenter.org.

http://www.visitkc.com/things-to-do/arts-and-culture/kauffman-center-for-the-performing-arts-to-open-september-16-18-2011/index.aspx

[The Mad Monk]

Monet’s Water Lilies Offers Rare Opportunity to Experience Great Impressionist’s Work as Intended


Nelson-Atkins Exhibition Reunites Three Panels for the First Time in a Generation

For the first time in more than 30 years, all three panels of a remarkable water lily triptych by the preeminent Impressionist Claude Monet will be on view together, from April 9 to Aug. 7, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The exhibition reunites the right-hand panel, from the Nelson-Atkins collection, with panels owned by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The three were last exhibited together in 1979. With the exception of a triptych in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, this is the only Monet triptych in the United States.


“What this show does is it puts our Monet in context,” said Ian Kennedy, Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator, European Painting and Sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins. “This will be a much more intimate experience of his work than what you normally get in museums. It’s a very focused experience of Monet, without distractions, and you get to see the paintings as he intended them to be seen—not separated and surrounded by other pictures.”

Without doubt, Monet (1840-1926) was the most important of all the Impressionist painters, and his water lily paintings represent the culmination of his career, dominating the last decades of his life. “These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me," he wrote to a friend in 1909. “It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel.”

Monet’s famous garden at his home in Giverny provided the inspiration for these and all of his water lily paintings, and the exhibition will bring to life the importance and beauty of this garden—and the artist’s passion for it—through a range of archival photographs, as well as an early, rarely seen film from 1915, showing Monet painting outdoors in his garden.

It is believed that Monet began work on these three massive canvases, each measuring approximately 7 feet by 14 feet, in 1915 and continued to rework them in his studio at Giverny until his death more than 10 years later.

“We don’t even know for sure whether he considered them finished,” said Simon Kelly, who, as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum and former associate curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins, has been working on this exhibition for more than three years.

A major focus of Monet’s Water Lilies will be revelatory conservation work that highlights the extent to which the artist—widely thought of as a spontaneous painter—obsessively changed his composition over the years.

Through x-ray imaging, light boxes, and computerized cross-sections, conservators have discovered more about Monet’s changes. For example, beneath a cluster of water lilies on the Nelson-Atkins canvas, conservators found the image of an agapanthus plant that Monet suppressed halfway through painting it. An x-ray of the agapanthus will be part of the exhibition.

“The exhibition will explore the whole issue of process, really giving us a sense of how Monet worked, how he built up his paint layers,” Kelly said.

In a separate, dedicated space, the paintings themselves will be displayed with side panels at slight angles to recreate something of the panoramic experience of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris where several of Monet’s water lily triptychs are mounted.

“Monet painted these in the panoramic tradition, but with no horizon line, so it’s an internalized psychological panorama,” Kennedy said. “We want people to contemplate, to become completely submerged in the experience. There will even be background music as visitors enter the main display so people will have this meditative, almost yoga-like experience looking at the pictures.”

After the exhibition premieres at the Nelson-Atkins, it will travel to the Saint Louis Art Museum in the fall of 2011, before showing at the Cleveland Museum of Art at a date to be confirmed.

This exhibition has been organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. In Kansas City the exhibition is supported by the Hartley Family Foundation, Carol and Fred Logan and the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Frontier Airlines is the official airline sponsor.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America’s finest art museums. The Nelson-Atkins serves the community by providing access and insight into its renowned collection of more than 33,500 art objects and is best known for its Asian art, European and American paintings, photography, modern sculpture, and new American Indian and Egyptian galleries. Housing a major art research library and the Ford Learning Center, the Museum is a key educational resource for the region. The institution-wide transformation of the Nelson-Atkins has included the 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building expansion and renovation of the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins.

The Nelson-Atkins is located at 45th and Oak Streets, Kansas City, MO. Hours are Wednesday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; Thursday/Friday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sunday, Noon–5 p.m. Admission to the Museum is free to everyone. For Museum information, phone 816.751.1ART (1278) or visit nelson-atkins.org.

http://www.visitkc.com/things-to-do/arts-and-culture/monets-water-lilies-exhibit/index.aspx

[pchang]

I can definitely recommend SF and the surrounding 'burbs, especially Southern Marin County.



As long as Onodera has a total net worth > $1million USD.

[The Mad Monk]

Kansas City’s theater scene takes a national bow
By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star

Craig Schwartz

The musical “Venice,” with Javier Munoz and Andrea Goss, had its world premiere in Kansas City. Soon it may be seen in New York.

Kansas City’s theater scene takes a national bow The exhausted Kansas City cliche says we’re known only for jazz and barbecue, but signs are pointing to a very different identity for a city that is too seldom on the national radar.

Try this out and see how it sounds: Kansas City, theater town.

Think of critics trekking to the prairie metropolis and discovering that the arts — no less than sports or steakhouses — are what Kansas City is about.

It could happen.

As the Lyric Opera prepares a blockbuster production of Puccini’s “Turandot” for its debut at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts and the city’s professional theater companies rev up for their fall seasons, off-the-radar events in New York this week could put Kansas City on the international theater map.

Eric Rosen, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, is preparing for a workshop production Friday of “Venice,” the audacious hip-hop musical he wrote with Matt Sax, at the Public Theater for a private audience of potential investors and producers.

The stakes are high. Rosen hopes he can announce that “Venice,” which premiered in Kansas City and was staged in Los Angeles, will be produced in New York with the backing of a major nonprofit theater, such as the Public, and a commercial producer.

The Rep’s presence in New York this week is one of a series of recent events drawing attention to Kansas City.

•The Coterie Theatre announced recently that it will take its whimsical production of the musical “Lucky Duck” to the New Victory Theatre in New York next March. The New York version will have largely the same cast that local audiences saw in 2010.

“Lucky Duck” will open immediately after the New Victory’s run of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” a co-production of four regional theaters, including KC Rep.

•Bob Paisley, co-founder of the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, has formed an independent company to create a sort of exchange program with theater artists in Britain. He recently took two shows — “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Event” — to Bedford, England, as part of that city’s fringe festival. In December, British artists will return to Kansas City for a second “British invasion” at the MET.

•Playwright Vicki Vodrey, who premiered her original comedy “Hanky Panky” at the 2010 KC Fringe Festival, took the show to New York in July as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival.

•Martin City Melodrama & Vaudeville Company will take the children’s show “The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly” to the New York International Fringe Festival this month, the second time since 2006 that Martin City has done so.

Certain cities outside New York and Chicago are perceived as strong theater towns — Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example — and Southern California claims important regional theaters, including the South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa and the La Jolla Playhouse and the Old Globe in San Diego.

Could Kansas City be mentioned in the same breath? Maybe. If “Venice” is a long-running New York hit, complete with a cast recording, a tour, and productions in London and elsewhere, all eyes will be on the Midwestern company where it all started.

Other theater companies, like those in Seattle and the respected Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, have taken shows to New York for years. Several Broadway hits began life in Southern California and Chicago. The Goodman Theatre and the Steppenwolf have frequently produced work that went on to claim Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes.

Rosen, a veteran Chicago theater artist who took over the Rep three years ago, changed the tone of theater in Kansas City, not only through his programming choices but also by bringing in prominent, nationally known directors, such as Moises Kaufman and David Cromer.

“There’s a running joke now that every road leads to Kansas City,” Rosen said recently. “It gives us a national profile through the work we’re doing. It’s remarkable. I get a call at least once a week from producers. It’s exciting. It’s really put us on the map, and this venue is part of that, but it’s not the only part.”

Rosen also has produced several shows in partnership with other regional theater companies. As a result, theatergoers in Seattle or at Berkeley Repertory Theatre or La Jolla Playhouse opened their programs to see the Kansas City Rep named as a co-producer.

“In one week you could fly around the country and see shows that were Rep shows,” Rosen said. “Those things add up to a national consciousness about who we are as a theater and as a city.”

Kyle Hatley, the Rep’s associate artistic director, who has staged Rep shows as well as his own productions elsewhere in the city, put it this way: “Just from the calls we field at work from agents in New York and people around the country, yeah, people are talking about Kansas City. Basically the question is: ‘What’s going on in Kansas City?’ ”

Chris Jones, theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, has kept tabs on the Kansas City Rep, largely because he had followed Rosen’s work in Chicago.

“I think part of what makes a town get noticed is original work and tryouts of new material, and I’ve certainly heard a lot about that sort of thing going on with Kansas City Rep more than I had in the past,” Jones said. “I also think there’s been a much closer link forged between Kansas City and Chicago artists, and that’s attracted our attention here.”

Some of the Rep productions, including Cromer’s staging of “The Glass Menagerie,” received national attention. That’s one Jones regrets missing.

In the world of theater, “national recognition” can be measured in different ways. There’s the sort that depends on articles and reviews in The New York Times. But there are other, quieter varieties.

The Unicorn Theatre and the Coterie, for example, enjoy national recognition among peer theater companies.

The Unicorn was a founding member of the National New Play Network, a consortium of 26 medium-size theater companies that develop new work that is sometimes performed at multiple member theater companies. Next summer the Unicorn will be host for the group’s national conference, which will give the visiting theater artists a chance to assess the local scene.

Cynthia Levin, artistic director of the Unicorn, recently was at the Kennedy Center working with playwrights pursuing master of fine arts degrees in a program between the center and the play network.

“Every time you get together at a conference … everybody talks about how the theaters (in their cities) are doing, the health of the theaters and what kind of shows you’re doing,” Levin said. “People flip out because the more we talk about Kansas City theaters, they’re constantly surprised by the numbers of theaters we have and the health of the theaters we have.”

New York casting agent Stephanie Klapper, who works with the Rep and the New Theatre in Overland Park, knows that if she recommends a performer from New York, that person has to be at least as good as the best Kansas City actor.

“I think it’s exploding with talent out there,” she said. “Sometimes it’s harder to pitch actors about going to Kansas City because they have a very different perception of what it’s like. But once they get there, they fall in love with the place.”

When Mary Rose Lloyd, director of programming for the New Victory Theatre, watched the archival videotape of the Coterie’s production of “Lucky Duck,” she knew it was essential to keep the local cast together for the New York run.

“I can’t say enough about Jeff Church and the Coterie Theatre,” Lloyd said, who has visited here regularly. “You talk about national treasures — you’ve got one.”

Something else is happening in Kansas City. More young theater artists are deciding to live here, at least for a while. Kansas City has never had a larger population of theater craftspeople.

“It’s really hitting critical mass,” Rosen said.

Does the general public here appreciate the wealth of talent? Maybe. But Klapper described an experience in Seattle that might be tough to imagine in Kansas City.

“I walked into a store at the Pike Place Market, and a woman behind the counter started rattling off all the local actors and saying what pride they take in their local acting community,” Klapper said. “This shopkeeper was so knowledgeable about the local theater community, and she wasn’t in the business. She was selling coffee and tea.”

To reach Robert Trussell, call 816-234-4765 or send email to rtrussell@kcstar.com.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/07/3063054/kcs-theater-scene-takes-a-national.html

[Dinner]

L.A. has many draw backs but America's second largest city does indeed have loads of cultural events, major museums, and live theaters/performing companies. The key is to not actually live in LA but live close enough that you can drive there for the day or weekend before going back home.

[onodera]

I can definitely recommend SF and the surrounding 'burbs, especially Southern Marin County.

As long as Onodera has a total net worth > $1million USD.

I like the sound of Marin County for personal reasons, but I'm afraid that I'll have to liquidate a lot of real estate assets in Russia to get 1M. Is the place really that expensive?