Calendar

November 01

GO: The latest Highlights from the Photography Collection is open now through April 30, 2023, in galleries L10 and L11 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Free. WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IN NOVEMBER

“CRANE” TO SEE William Klein’s “Yellow Coat + Bus + Crane,” which is among the images in the Nelson’s latest show of highlights from its peerless collection of photography, was originally taken while he was working for Vogue magazine.

That was not his preference, says April Watson, the curator who put together the show.

“Klein really wanted to pursue his own work, and though he was very good at fashion photography, it was not his first love,” she says. In the 1950s, Watson says, photographers weren’t yet treated as artists by the gallery and museum world, so the best photographers of the day worked for magazines out of necessity.

While the images were snapped for magazines, photographers like Klein and his well-known contemporaries Robert Frank and Richard Avedon handled the assignments their own way. Klein, Watson says, “upended the way typical fashion photographs were made,” shunning studios with controlled sets and lighting and instead taking models out into the streets of New York, “using the gritty, everyday realities of the city as a natural backdrop.”

That background adds depth and richness to the very striking “Yellow Coat + Bus + Crane.” The work juxtaposes with another piece from this show, Richard Avedon’s “Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by

Dior, Cirque d’Hiver,” which Avedon shot in Paris in 1955 for Harper’s Bazaar. It’s part of Avedon’s body of work that portends much of contemporary high-end fashion photography. —MARTIN CIZMAR

November

WHAT YOU WANT TO DO THIS MONTH

05

Monet & Friends Alive

November 1

Starlight Theatre is partnering with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to present Monet and other impressionists’ works in a new way channeling them through “rich, dynamic display of light, color, sound and fragrance.” November 1–December 31. Times vary. Starlight Theatre.

Kevin Hart

November 3, 8 pm

Stand-up Kevin Hart knows something about checks— any comedian richer than he is spent a decade or more on weekly television. On the Reality Check tour, the pint-sized comedian returns to the road billing himself as “the biggest touring comedian of all time.” It’s telling that promotional clips for the tour depict Hart jumping around amid pyrotechnics but include no jokes. November 3. 8 pm. T-Mobile Center.

Chinatown

November 5, 1 pm

How do you make a fight over water rights into one of the great films of all time? Write a neo-noir screenplay in the vein of Raymond Chandler, get a talented director, and cast Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway as the leads. November 5. 1 pm. Screenland Armour.

First Fridays at Gallery Bogart Opening

November 5

November’s iteration of the monthly First Friday art walk brings a new gallery to the West Bottoms. Gallery Bogart focuses on contemporary Latin American art and picked the West Bottoms because gallery owner Miller Bogart sees the area as “the frontier of the art scene in Kansas City.” For its inaugural show, the gallery will present Dialogo Figurativo by Cuban artist Abel Massot, who lives and works in Havana. His work “explores the emotional bonds and existentialist questions of the modern human being.” Opening reception November 5. 4–7 pm. Gallery Bogart, 1400 Union Ave., KCMO.

Whiskey Expo

November 5

The second annual Kansas City Whiskey Expo will feature forty distilleries and the chance to learn about the whiskey-making process. As you sip, you can enjoy an appetizer buffet. There will be other spirits offered, but the expo is confident it can find a whiskey for everyone. November 5. 6:30–9 pm. Harrah’s Kansas City Casino & Hotel.

La Traviata

November 5, 7:30 pm

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata has become a staple of opera since its premiere in March 1853 in Venice. The classic tragedy follows Violetta Valéry, a famed French courtesan, and the hopeless romantic who falls in love with her, bringing them both to ruin. Lyric Opera will perform the piece in the original Italian with English subtitles. November 5, 7:30 pm; November 11, 7:30 pm; November 13, 2 pm. Kauffman Center.

Katt Williams

November 11, 8 pm

Katt Williams has the kind of flawless delivery and all-encompassing persona that can only come from working comedy clubs for decades. His new Netflix special includes a hilarious and profane defense of “big daddy” President Joe Biden who “be doing the best he can.” November 11. 8 pm. T-Mobile Center.

Legally Blonde: The Musical

November 12, 4 pm

The story of a California sorority girl turned top-of-her class Harvard law student, in a role made famous

13

Carrie Underwood

November 13, 7:30 pm

One of the most successful country crossover acts of all time, Carrie Underwood’s new record, Denim & Rhinestones, has a throwback feel and enough melodrama to carry an arena tour. November 13. 7:30 pm. T-Mobile Center.

by Reece Witherspoon, gets the Broadway musical treatment in this nationally touring production. November 12. 4 pm and 8 pm. Midwest Trust Center.

Festival Fever

November 18, 5 pm

Overland Park’s annual Mayor’s Holiday Festival is back this month with an evening full of train rides, hayrides, live reindeer, a performance and Santa. The free entry is a perfect way to kick off the holiday season. Make sure to bring your family and friends for a festive night. November 18. 5–8 pm. Downtown Overland Park.

Footprints

November 18, 7 pm

This showing is part of a series of screenings of four movies discussed in writer Kier-La Janisse’s influential House of Psychotic Women, “an autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films.” Footprints follows a freelance translator who wakes one morning missing all memory of her past three days. It’s described as among “the most criminally underseen giallo of the ’70s.” November 18. 7 pm. Stray Cat Film Center.

Reba McEntire

November 18, 7:30 pm

With fifty-plus top ten hits, a sitcom and a successful Broadway run, Oklahoma-bred country singer and actress Reba McEntire has done about everything there is to do. She can play an hour or two of nothing but No.1 hits and will close the show, as she always does, with “Fancy.” November 18. 7:30 pm. T-Mobile Center.

Mavis Staples

November 18, 7:30 pm

Legendary R&B/gospel singer Mavis Staples, is in her early eighties, but can belt out songs from across a catalog that now stretches over eight decades with intensity and grace. November 18. 7:30 pm. Lied Center in Lawrence.

Plains

November 19, 8 pm

Plains is a project from Overland Park resident Katie Crutchfield (better known as Waxahatchee) and LA-based singer-songwriter Jess Williamson. Their collaborative album, I Walked With You A Ways, released last month, finds the women leaning into The Chicks and Dolly Parton. “We gave ourselves permission to lean into the music that raised us and write the kind of classic timeless songs that we both grew up singing along to,” Williamson told Stereogum. This show marks the end of a national tour. November 19. 8 pm. Knuckleheads Saloon.

Big Dad Energy Recording

November 23, 7:30 pm

Jamie Campbell started his career in Chicago but now lives in KC, where he’s a member of the KC Improv Company and a fixture in the local comedy scene. His show Big Dad Energy debuted at the Kansas City Fringe Festival earlier this year and was a hit, so now he’s putting it on tape. The show is advertised as PG-13 and will be recorded at the Bird Comedy Theater the night before Thanksgiving (a.k.a. the second busiest bar night of the year). A friendly reviewer called the Fringe Festival production of the show “possibly the most positive stand-up act in existence.” November 23. 7:30 pm. The Bird Comedy Theater.

A Christmas Carol

November 18–December 24

Charles Dickens’ all-time Christmas classic tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption through visits from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. KC Repertory Theatre’s annual production of A Christmas Carol creates generations of memories and helps families of the meaning of the season. November 18 through December 24, KCRep Spencer Theatre.

Mayor’s Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony

November 25, 9 am

While a celebrity guest gets the honor of turning on the lights in Country Club Plaza, the city’s mayor gets the honor at Crown Center. Mayor Quinton Lucas will light up a hundred-foot tall pine tree from Oregon to kick off the busiest shopping day of the year. November 25. 9 am. Crown Center Square.

24

Plaza Lighting Ceremony

November 24, 5 pm

Kansas City’s ultimate holiday tradition, the Plaza Lighting Ceremony, finds a celebrity guest throwing the switch to light up the century-old shopping district on the evening of Thanksgiving. The tradition started just after thePlaza opened and is now in its ninety-third year. There’s also holiday music and fireworks. November 24. 5-8 pm. Country Club Plaza

SECOND BITES

Nigella Lawson defends brown food and anchovies while getting philosophical.

BY MARTIN CIZMAR

NIGELLA LAWSON’S NEW BOOK, Cook, Eat, Repeat, opens with a rapturous love letter to anchovies.

“Few other ingredients arrive in the kitchen with such confrontational pungency and yet manage to imbue so many dishes with transformational subtlety,” Lawson writes. “The anchovy’s initial attack lies in its fierce and uncompromising saltiness, it’s true, but it packs a double punch: After that first hit of saline intensity comes richness and depth, that resounding, flavor-enhancing savouriness we have learned to call umami.”

Lawson’s praiseful prose concerning the divisive tinned fish continues on for two thousand words without ever dragging thanks to the English food writer’s luscious, sophisticated voice on the page.

“I could probably have written twenty thousand [words on anchovies],” Lawson says by phone in advance of her engagement at Midwest Trust Center this month, which will be hosted by local food writer Jenny Vergara. “It’s a pointless thing to try and bully people about ingredients they don’t like, but if you can somehow contaminate them with your enthusiasm so that they think ‘well, maybe I want to try,’ that’s better.”

Lawson was thirty-eight years old when her breakthrough, How to be a Domestic Goddess, was published in 1998. She’s one of a very small handful of food writers of the era who are still writing cookbooks a quarter-century later. Cook, Eat, Repeat was written in 2019, before the pandemic, but if it feels of the era because Lawson spent four months writing it in seclusion. It was, Lawson says, a time to be reflective.

“Cooking is not something you do and then it’s finished with,” Lawson writes. “It is a thread woven through our lives, encompassing memory, desire and sustenance, both physical and emotional. It can never be an end in itself… It is precisely in those many mindless, mundane, repeated actions that cooking consists of, that allows it to be a means of decompression for so many of us.”

Lawson has come to believe that people are “losing sight” of what recipes are, so she memorialized her philosophy on the matter as part of a writing process in which she would “every now and then ask my publisher for more pages.”

“I’m always aware of how rigid the recipe looks when it’s printed out,” she says. “A recipe is really how you’ve cooked this before. And you cook it again, but really when you cook it you change it a little bit, maybe because of what you get at the market but maybe just because these things are not fixed for all time. The open-endedness of cooking I think is what draws a lot of us back in. You have to talk readers through it a bit so it becomes clear what can be changed or what might be difficult to change or why you’re using a particular ingredient because then it gives the reader more freedom to change.”

Talking readers through anchovies or stews, which get the spotlight in the chapter “A Loving Defense of Brown Food,” requires a skillful pen. Lawson certainly has that—fans of Domestic Goddess and Nigella Bites will find her as sharp as ever in Cook, Eat, Repeat.

“I went into recipe-writing partly through a love of language, and I feel that language and words are a very important ingredient because that’s what helps a reader imagine what a dish is before they’ve actually made it,” she says. “A recipe has to take root in the imagination as well as being practical and reliable.”

You’ll also find very on-trend recipes such as an oxtail stew—not that Lawson knew about the recent American foodie obsession with the butcher’s cut. “I’ve had oxtail recipes in a few books,” she says. “It’s quite funny: In my first book, I had a recipe for kale in it. This was 1998 and I said, ‘Isn’t it such a pity that no one cooks with kale anymore.’”

GO: An Evening with Nigella Lawson. Saturday, November 19. 8 pm. Yardley Hall at Midwest Trust Center. $25.