Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Night Out (2 Comments)
  U:Move Parties
  Bill Pile is our shepherd. He leads us to neon pastures where the booze and beats flow like water. For a good night out, we shall not want. Though u:move has been around since 2002 (and Pile's own history in concert promoting goes back even further), it seems like the homegrown promotions... More >>
• Best Drag Shows
  Saturday Nights at Bar Azul
  Bar Azul is a Mexican restaurant and bar by day, but on Saturday nights from 11 to midnight, the place turns fabuloso. Patrons pay $6 to gawk at the expert moves and stunning makeup jobs of Kansas City's best Latina drag queens, including Christina, 2009's Miss Gay Latina herself. Audience... More >>
• Best Festival
  Santa-Cali-Gon Days
  Driving along Interstate 70 or Truman Road, it's sometimes hard to remember that Independence was once the place where thousands of westbound settlers, fur traders and religious exiles embarked on the Santa Fe, California and Oregon trails in search of a new world. Historic Independence Square... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  AMC Mainstreet
  In the attention-span showdown between the big screen and every other screen — your computer monitor at work, your flat panel at home, the little glass teat in your hip pocket — the place where you queue up to watch a movie in hamthrax-passing proximity to strangers looks to be on... More >>
• Best Actor
  Walter Coppage
  With his sharp good looks, casual elegance and pleasing purr of a voice, Walter Coppage could command audience sympathy without bothering to act. He does act, though, with force and clarity and such deceptive ease that we never see an actor making choices. We just see the man he's playing.... More >>
• Best Author
  Clancy Martin
  Clancy Martin doesn't really need us to give him some love for his debut novel. Since the release of How to Sell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), he's been the subject of positive attention in national publications such as Newsweek and Rolling Stone. The astounding trick of the book is this: Nothing... More >>
• Best Theater
  The Kansas City Repertory Theatre
  Sure, it's been the biggest, best-known, best-endowed serious theater in town for generations, but when was the last time the Kansas City Repertory Theatre was just the flat-out best? In its first year under new Artistic Director Eric Rosen, the institution has achieved that and more: by taking... More >>
• Best Actress
  Vanessa Severo
  Because she's an intense, striking brunette, Vanessa Severo is often cast as the most hellacious hellion: vengeful goddess, ferocious prostitute, Lucy Van Pelt. Because she has a dancer's grace and a gift for silent comedy, she also turns up in darling curios such as The Coppelia Project, the... More >>
• Best Performer in a Musical (2 Comments)
  Nathan Granner
  He has operas to sing, classical CDs to cut, a company to run, and international gigs to perform as one of the American Tenors, so there's probably not much hope that Nathan Granner will become a regular in Kansas City musical theater. That's a shame. Taking on the pop songs of old Broadway, as... More >>
• Best Play
  The Glass Menagerie
  Director David Cromer's hit revisit of Tennessee Williams' classic The Glass Menagerie was both theater to savor and theater to shake — that rare production in which every element feels planned and balanced, arcing toward some tough emotional truth. As imagined by Cromer and his... More >>
• Best Costumes
  Megan Turek
  A rock-and-roll kids' musical about life and love among the insects in a trash heap, the frisky U:Bug:Me presented a costuming challenge: how to make actors into pests without making audiences want to swat. Designer Megan Turek found good taste in the bad — and inspiration in the trash.... More >>
• Best Funny Performer
  Lauretta Pope
  Lauretta Pope romped as Gertrude McFuzz, a lovesick lady bird who wouldn't let being born with just one tail feather keep her from shaking it. The Coterie Theatre's second go at Seussical: The Musical showcased her talent for gawky, all-elbows bird dances and ridiculous squawks, and for perching... More >>
• Best Humble Servant of the Arts
  Julia Cole
  These days, every mortarboard-wearing anyone loves interdisciplinary studies — applying the critical tools of multiple fields to the study of complicated problems. So it was a bit surprising that the Kansas City Art Institute quietly canceled its Interdisciplinary Arts program last spring.... More >>
• Best Illustrator
  Nathan Fox
  Houston-raised Kansas City Art Institute graduate Nathan Fox is the best working illustrator in Kansas City, the best in the Midwest and strongly in the running for best in the entire comics industry. There are life and movement in any comic Fox illustrates, and he's done a few — Dark... More >>
• Best Public Art
  Art in R Park
  For six months at a time, since the spring of 2007, Roeland Park has installed new sculptures by under-the-radar creative types as a simple gesture of art-friendliness. But the latest rotation of public art along Roe Boulevard goes above and beyond its intended thoroughfare enrichment: It... More >>
• Best Outsider Art
  Rare Visions–Detour Art
  Los Angeles and New York — "the coasts" — are the heavy regional influencers in American culture, each city like an ironic air quotation mark mocking everything in between them. Here in "flyover country," by which we mean everywhere else, there are thousands of talented artists who... More >>
• Best Cutting-Edge Gallery Space
  Mercy Seat Tattoo
  It's de rigueur for many Crossroads District businesses to nod at the neighborhood's assortment of artists and galleries by including their own small gallery spaces. Sure, there are dentists and eye doctors who mount great First Friday exhibits, but come Monday, it's back to root canals and... More >>
• Best Group Show
  Interchange
  Culled from the Kemper family's deep collection of Kansas City art, Interchange at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art's Kemper East is an ode to the city by the artists who lived here. Spotlighting the work of Charlotte Street Award winners, KCAI instructors and members of the Kansas City... More >>
• Best Rock Artist
  Jay Norton
  He has stamped commercial logos on the U.S. flag and depicted young men in homoerotic, quasi-Christian poses. Last fall, artist provocateur Jay Norton finally took that final leap into Satan's arms. His nine-painting show at the Pelea de Gallos Gallery, titled Dead Set on Destruction, featured... More >>
• Best Radio Music Show (2 Comments)
  Underground Heat
  The right-hand side of the dial has few champions of the little guy these days; of the ones out there, it's hard to imagine any of them flourishing. Thriving in the rough is what makes Kenny Diamondz, host of KPRS' Underground Heat, glitter all the more brightly. Every Friday and Saturday night... More >>
• Best Music Promoter
  Dawayne Gilley
  Over the first oppressively hot weekend of the summer, in a sweltering parking lot at a ragged intersection in Kansas City, Kansas, a crowd of people living on the edge of everything found relief in classic Kansas City style: listening to the blues. Two whole sweaty days of it, with musicians... More >>
• Best Free Music
  First Fridays at Midwestern Musical Co.
  For those who are drawn to guitar stores but lack the chops (or the audacity) to hang out and jam, the work is done here for you. Earlier this year, following a six-year stint in the El Torreon building, Midwestern Musical Co. (est. 1989 in Shawnee) set up shop in the former MoMo Gallery at 19th... More >>
• Best Band Reunion (1 Comment)
  The Blue Riddim Band
  It seems like there hasn't ever been a better year for KC reggae. The growing popularity of progressive newcomers such as SeedLove and 77 Jefferson unintentionally paved the way for a reunion of ska-stronomic proportions: the return of the Blue Riddim Band, Kansas City's original purveyors of... More >>
• Best Cover Band (1 Comment)
  The Good Foot
  Taking its name from a James Brown hook — and taking an example from the man's famous work ethic — the Good Foot kicked onto the scene around the turn of the year with an unstoppable, instantly refined take on classic American soul, and then just kept going. In a sense, the group's... More >>
• Best World Music Experiment
  Hearts of Darkness Afrobeat
  Afrobeat is not for the faint of spirit. Pioneered by the mercurial Nigerian Fela Kuti in the '70s, the genre is a Yoruba spin on James Brown-style funk. It's loaded with horn breakdowns, improv jazz solos, call-and-response vocals, and rhythmic figures woven as tightly as clay-dipped braids.... More >>
• Best Weekly Musical Moment
  Jubilee at Rural Grit Happy Hour
  The members of the Rural Grit music collective, Kansas City's own bluegrassy-folksy Americana outfit, have been singing, strumming, producing, collaborating, planning, gigging and supporting one another for the past 10 years. Their long-running Rural Grit Happy Hour is every Monday from 6 to 9... More >>
• Best Viral Videos
  Max Kunakhovich of Nuthatch-47
  Born in a fishing village on the eastern coast of Russia, KC émigré Max Kunakhovich sings like Eugene Hütz with a head cold and frequently trips over his English. His musicianship is choppy, and a 5-year-old could probably draw stick figures better than he does. Yet these... More >>
• Best Sexy Musician
  Enrique Javier Chi
  Enrique Javier Chi must inspire butterflies and perspiration in the kids he mentors at the Mattie Rhodes Center, 'cause the soft-spoken, dreadlocked, Panamanian-born musician sure sparkles with charm. It doesn't matter if his lush lips are issuing coffee-shop talk about social issues — in... More >>
• Best Song
  "Caked Up (Remix w/Ron Ron)"
  It's like something out of West Side Story — two rappers from opposite sides of the tracks making beautiful music together. "Caked Up," which originally appeared on Stik Figa's Babylon EP, is one tasty cut — a slow, sugar-drizzled Greg Enemy beat with a moaning bass line and slinky... More >>
• Best Debut Album (1 Comment)
  Carrot Atlas
  In the final seconds of "Girls Want Teeth," track No. 4 on Rooftop Vigilantes' 16-song, 27-minute debut on Wooden Man Records, a guitar lick references Santo & Johnny's languid pedal-steel classic "Sleepwalk." It is a sick, sick joke. This Lawrence foursome is about as chill as a milkshake... More >>
• Best Podcast
  KC DIY Radio
  Since September of last year, KC DIY Radio's Justin Betterton and Ben Smith had been the irreverent and unbelievably cool older brothers we never had, two Kansas City-transplanted punks who guided us into an Alexandrian library of hardcore. Until Smith moved to St. Louis in August, the show... More >>
• Best Filmmaker (1 Comment)
  Joe Heyen
  At the beginning of Cowtown Ballroom ... Sweet Jesus! filmmaker Joe Heyen inhales deeply and just admits: "It's bad enough when other people connect you to a cultural stereotype, but when you do it yourself ...." What follows is, as we wrote in May, an "85-minute love letter to the Kansas City... More >>
• Best Poetry Readings
  Midwest Poets Series
  The Midwest Poets Series doesn't call itself the Kansas City Poets Series. No, it claims the entire Midwest. That's huge. But so are the poets who have appeared here over its 26 years: Andrei Codrescu, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Lorrie Moore, Jane Smiley, Grace Paley and Ed Hirsch among them.... More >>
• Best Director
  Kyle Hatley
  Quantity matters. In the last year, Kansas City has been treated to strong individual plays, but it has seen nothing like the inventiveness — on such a scale, with such varying budgets — of the one-two-three punch comprising Hamlet, The Death of Cupid and The Borderland. On the most... More >>