Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Up-and-Comer in the Fashion World
  Ari Fish
  It might have been easy to overlook the work of Ari Fish at this year's 18th Street Fashion Show. Fish's designs were subtle up against the other designers' more obvious, seafaring creations that stepped in line with the show's theme, Summer at Sea. There were lots of bright colors, sailing... More >>
• Best Party Boy (1 Comment)
  Dutch Newman
  Dutch Newman — the 20-something rapper, not the 80-something Kansas City Democratic Party matriarch — likes to say, "The party don't start until Dutch gets there." What's crazy is that he isn't kidding, and the party can be anywhere. From the runway of the West 18th Street Fashion... More >>
• Best Drag King
  Buttwiser
  Sixteen years ago, performing to the tune of Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me," sporting a goatee, wearing leather chaps and a do-rag, and smoking Marlboro Red, the drag king known as Buttwiser made his debut. Since then, the 38-year-old Independence native has made huge strides for women... More >>
• Best Dance Performance
  Kimberly Cowen as Juliet
  Kimberly Cowen is one of the Kansas City Ballet's stalwarts. Her performance as Juliet in the spring performance of Romeo and Juliet was nothing short of transcendent. With heartbreaking emotion, she was the essence of innocence, young love, romanticism and crushing grief. More than a dancer,... More >>
• Best Choir
  Kansas City Chorale 
  Most local musicians would be overjoyed to get picked up by a major indie or to open for Built to Spill at The Granada, but a Grammy? Get out. Not so the Kansas City Chorale, which, in collaboration with the Phoenix Bach Choir and under the direction of award-winning UMKC conservatory grad... More >>
• Best Museum Tour Guide
  Dennis Winslett
  One day this past spring, the American Jazz Museum was filled with a couple of busloads of tourists. One group was aging baby boomers, maybe in town for some convention; the other group looked like European teenagers paying homage to the classic American art form that doesn't get enough love in... More >>
• Best Publication (1 Comment)
  New Letters
  New Letters, a journal of fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, is the best in the country. Don't just take our word for it — on May 1, the publication took home a National Magazine Award at a black-tie ceremony at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York... More >>
• Best Poets Society
  The Latino Writers Collective
  We've been to a few poetry readings at the Writers Place, but none was as beautifully diverse, as crowded or as festive as the March 20 book release for the anthology Primera Página: Poetry From the Latino Heartland. The Latino Writers Collective is a hardworking group of writers who meet... More >>
• Best Author
  Matthew Eck
  Kansas City, Missouri, author Matthew Eck's excellent novel The Farther Shore is informed by his military experience in Somalia in the 1990s. Four U.S. soldiers, in the ruins of what was once a thriving city, miss their rendezvous with the helicopters sent to extract them and set off on foot in... More >>
• Best Film Festival
  Kansas City Gay & Lesbian Film + Video Festival
  The military, motherhood and Muslims all took to the screen during this summer's seven-night run of the Gay & Lesbian Film + Video Festival. The documentary Ask Not exposed the flaws in the dreadful "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" half measure. The French feature The New World depicted a lesbian... More >>
• Best Real-Estate Transaction
  R. Crosby Kemper Jr.'s Purchase of the Dolphin
  Shrewd, modern, hip, uncannily prescient and a proud civic booster, R. Crosby Kemper Jr. keeps improving Kansas City by ensuring that buildings get built, art gets bought and a great space is made even better. We look forward to the Kemper at the Crossroads opening in the old Dolphin space in... More >>
• Best Money Spent
  SPARKS! The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative
  If you're going to collect some art, then you better put in the big money — $10 million oughta get you started. With cash in hand from the William T. Kemper Foundation, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art spent the past 10 years buying thought-provoking, excellent art. Relying on curator Jan... More >>
• Best Local Artist Working Internationally
  Jesse Small
  Sculptor Jesse Small is no stranger to China, having spent 2005 in Jingdezhen, a center of porcelain production. Before he ventured back there in September, he'd been showing his work internationally and nationally, including at the venerable Des Moines Arts Center. His Ghosts series, based on... More >>
• Best International Exhibition
  Distant Nearness
  India is the new China. Or maybe China was the new India. Who can remember? But contemporary art has been consumed by China fever, so it was about time that someone local did a good exhibition of artists from the subcontinent instead. The three artists in Bruce Hartman's Distant Nearness last... More >>
• Best Group Exhibition
  Locate/Navigate
  The artists in Locate/Navigate mapped how we map — places, things, people, ideas and the banalities of conversation. Thoughtfully curated by Kate Hackman, this was a densely packed exhibition that remained on task, each artist's work fitting specifically within Hackman's curatorial thesis.... More >>
• Best Solo Exhibition
  Sanford Biggers at Grand Arts
  Grand Arts Director Stacy Switzer doesn't shy away from difficult artists, and she doesn't bring in only the popular artists. Sanford Biggers' exhibition included an outdoor projection at 18th and Vine's Gem Theater in addition to the big work in the gallery. Biggers, who grew up in South... More >>
• Best Conceptual Moment That Lasted a Month
  Nancy Hwang at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
  New York artist Nancy Hwang just wants to bring people together, to give a little of herself to them and call it art. She has given people manicures, shampoos and massages and served them drinks as part of her artistic practice. Equal parts performance, therapy session and personal grooming:... More >>
• Best Moment in a Theater
  Ron Megee as Mr. Pickel
  Throughout the Coterie Theatre's wild, colorful production of Louis Sachar's kids' book Sideways Stories From the Wayside School, costume designer Mary Traylor and local luminary Ron Megee came together like vinegar and baking soda. Combined, they fizzed over with pure, kid-pleasing craziness.... More >>
• Best Actress
  Cynthia Rider
  A couple of questions had to plague the audiences lucky enough to catch Cynthia Rider's stunner of a performance this past spring as the over-nerved, undersexed wife of a vicar in "Bed Among the Lentils," the funniest and most aching monologue in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. First: Where has... More >>
• Best Open Mic
  The Brick
  The Brick takes this one for its willingness to accept all sorts of craziness from the amateurs on Wednesday nights. An open mic for MCs at the Peanut can result in some great performances. Same goes for poetry slams, which are even trickier to pull off. Things are looser at the Brick... More >>
• Best Actor
  Gary Holcombe
  In The Drawer Boy, an honest, earnest drama at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, the twin Garys of the local stage (Gary Holcombe and Gary Neal Johnson) both demonstrated that, even on the biggest stage in town, nothing stirs audiences more than serious character work. Holcombe was... More >>
• Best Performer in a Musical
  Justin Van Pelt
  The show is getting to be a wheezy old standard, but Justin Van Pelt, white-dwarfing it every night as the botched-cock lead in Eubank Productions' umpteenth Hedwig & the Angry Inch, wasn't standard at all. No, this was a new standard, one to make future Hedwigs shake in their falsies. As... More >>
• Best Musical
  Reefer Madness, Eubank Productions
  This year has been a great one for musicals, which means it's been a great year for Steven Eubank, Kansas City's Napoleon of the Jazz Hands. Leaping this spring from his catch-as-catch-can Just Off Broadway venue to the Off Center Theatre, Crown Center's professional, reliable godsend of a stage... More >>
• Best Theater
  Actors Theatre of Kansas City
  Wandering among three performance spaces, staging shows only in the deadest weeks of winter and summer and bravely believing that good scripts acted well would be enough to draw a paying audience, the Actors Theatre of Kansas City demonstrated this year, in its third season, that it's no fluke.... More >>
• Best Play
  9 Parts of Desire
  As always at the Unicorn, art and news got all bound up in each other this year. Good for them, but timeliness does not guarantee artistic effectiveness. When the art is as good as the politics, though, the resulting fission can make a good show great, as happened with Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of... More >>
• Best Performance in a Bad Play
  Angela Cristantello in Quindaro
  It hurt to hate Quindaro, a well-intentioned, poorly focused, dramatically inert piece of utopian local history that came to life only when the actors — the most famous of whom dropped more lines than a season's worth of TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes — stopped talking and posed... More >>
• Best Comedy Show (1 Comment)
  Improv Thunderdome
  This was the year when the egalitarian back-patters in the area's improv community had to face facts: To win audiences for the make-it-up-as-you-go school of comedy, troupes had to offer more than tired guessing games and fill-in-the-blanks scenes. Each month at Improv Thunderdome, Jared Brustad... More >>
• Best Funny Performer (9 Comments)
  Rob Grabowski
  A long, lean guy with a look of high-plains blankness and a mind that churns much faster than his face lets on, longtime improviser Rob Grabowski gets audiences howling without seeming to try. He's soft-spoken, often still, and not given to spouting off whatever crazy thoughts come to him.... More >>
• Best Costumes (1 Comment)
  The Cure at Troy
  Usually, the best costumes are the ones that hardly register, the ones that blend with the lights, sound and stagecraft to create the seamless illusion of good theater. Sometimes, though, the pageantry and dress-up inherent in any stage show become the point, as in director and madman Barry... More >>
• Best Music Videos
  The Ssion  
  Anyone who looks at the Ssion and sees just a bunch of Kansas City Art Institute kids punking out in animal costumes hasn't been paying attention. The collective surrounding mad, gay boy-genius Cody Critcheloe has evolved into a local arts juggernaut, showcasing the videography of Critcheloe and... More >>
• Best Music Blog
  (Tie) There Stands the Glass and Plastic Sax 
  Moving from occasional check-in to everyday must-read is every serious blogger's ambition. No one (who doesn't write for this paper, of course) has done that more effectively and unexpectedly than Bill Brownlee. Having established his blog creds with Happy in Bag (his chronicle of suburban... More >>
• Best Radio Show
  Black Clover Radio 
  When KRBZ 96.5 (the Buzz) invited Mac Lethal into its studio three years ago to do an indie-alternative hip-hop show with co-host Slimfast, the station got a funny, fast-talking spokesman from the cool kids' side of the hip-hop scene. Called The Jump Off, the show had lots of buddy-buddy... More >>
• Best Place to Cut a Record
  Chapman Studios
  Jewel, John Hiatt, Tech N9ne, Korn, the Insane Clown Posse, Nappy Roots, Ice Cube — they've all walked through the doors of Kansas City's Chapman Studios to lay down a track or two while passing through, or, in Tech N9ne's case, coming back home. Owner Chuck Chapman started out 35 years... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop Figure (4 Comments)
  DJ Fresh
  When it comes to the revolutionary history of hip-hop in Kansas City, DJ Fresh is Benjamin Franklin. A genius innovator who prefers to stay behind the scenes instead of run for president (like, say, Rich the Factor or Tech N9ne), he wields influence over just about every early scene treatise,... More >>
• Best Club DJ
  DJ Just
  DJ Just says he has no idea where his stellar reputation comes from. He has never promoted himself — not a single flier. His longest gig was spinning to a hip-hop crowd at the former Hurricane. But as a mixer who can expertly tailor a song list to fit whatever crowd he's confronted with,... More >>
• Best Rock for Kids
  The Terrible Twos
  Wonder why your baby niece's favorite band sounds strangely familiar, even though the songs are about little-kid rivalries and taking showers? It's the slight guitar twang and the sensitive vocal delivery. The Terrible Twos is venerable Lawrence musician — and father — Matt Pryor's... More >>
• Best Band Reunion
  The Pedaljets
  It's one thing to get the band back together. But when the Pedaljets started jamming again after 20 years, the band members actually rewrote their own history. Rob Morrow, Mike Allmayer, Matt Kesler and Phil Wade never got over the disappointment of their second and final album, released in... More >>
• Best Blues Moment
  Myra Taylor Gets the Key to Kansas City, Kansas
  June 28 was a gorgeous, sunny day, and the Kansas City, Kansas, Street Blues Festival was the best place in town to be that weekend. The scrappy, free festival in the parking lot of the Koran Temple at 13th Street and State Avenue celebrates all of the real blues still going on in this city.... More >>
• Best Sexy Musician
  Barclay Martin
  When Barclay Martin steps up to the mic in a snazzy suit and shines his 1,000-watt smile, you can almost hear all the hearts in the room quicken. Words such as dreamboat apply to the mellow folk-jazz musician; he's the kind of classically handsome guy about whom women, moms and gay brothers can... More >>
• Best Songwriter (2 Comments)
  Howard Iceberg 
  Howard Eisberg has been bopping around these parts for decades, bedecking his songbook with four-chords-and-the-punch-line hymns like a bowerbird gathering trinkets for its nest. And yet, few people realize what a fabulous creature Howard Iceberg (as he's known onstage and on disc) truly is. The... More >>
• Best Bilingual Band
  Making Movies
  About 20 years ago, the Chi family moved from Panama to the Kansas City metro. Little Enrique, then 6, began to learn English. His fluency now is demonstrated by the thoughtful lyrics he writes and sings for his rock band, Making Movies. Chi, whose olive skin and blond dreadlocks make him stand... More >>
• Best Band (1 Comment)
  The Wilders
  In naming our beloved honky-tonkin' Wilders Best Band, we're doing a couple of things (in addition to ensuring that they'll be lionized in the hearts of Lee's Summit youth). First, we're full-frontal hugging them for 12 years of being our city's greatest old-time American music band. That alone,... More >>
• Best Local Album
  The Republic Tigers
  This debut album from Kansas City's meteoric rocket boys not only exceeded the hype but also curled hype's hair, smeared its lipstick, spanked it three times and pushed it into a bush. There's not a weak moment on the Republic Tigers' stunning Keep Color. From the illusory, acoustic-electric... More >>
• Best Local Song (2 Comments)
  "The Journeyman" by Devil Blare 
  With bluesy swagger, a hunk of dirty guitarin' and a beat as catchy and brainless as repeated tambourine blows to the head, Devil Blare's "The Journeyman" makes us think of turtlenecked, Chelsea-boot-stomping teenagers turning over tables in the early '60s. A two-minute anthem to wayward... More >>
• Best Rock Mom
  Penny Valladares
  Born at the half-century mark and, in her own words, "perfectly aged at the hormonally crazed juncture of 14 for the Beatles' emergence," Penny Valladares (née Stronach) has always defined her life in terms of two things: rock and roll. Penny saw the Beatles play in 1964 at the Kansas... More >>