Alan Portner

The air at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park is thick with the scent of high-end buffet favorites and the electric hum of a sold-out crowd. The curtain has risen on a revival of the 1960s Broadway classic Cactus Flower, and if the opening week's standing ovations are any indication, Kansas City has another bona fide hit on its hands.

It is not often that Kansas City audiences get the chance to see the “World Premiere” engagement of a new comedy from an award-winning Broadway performer and playwright. This month Unicorn Theatre presents “Don’t Touch My Hair,” by Douglas Lyons.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Moments before the world premiere of “Don’t Touch My Hair” at the Unicorn Theatre, playwright Douglas Lyons sits relaxed, thoughtful and unmistakably energized. The new play, opening May 8, 2026, marks the latest chapter in what he calls the “Deep Breath Trilogy,” a body of work dedicated to centering Black women not only in struggle, but in joy.

Marilu Henner is currently starring as Stephanie Dickinson in Cactus Flower at The New Theatre & Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. Best known for her work on Taxi and for her Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) - Henner remains one of the most dynamic and wide-ranging performers working today.

The show I saw last week on Wednesday, July 8, featured three warm-up acts and Ayrn performing under the stage name A.J. Chris. A.J. Chris was the feature comic of the evening. A.J., who has already had significant success in the UK, had warned me that she had come home to try out a new routine in development to see how a U.S. audience would respond to her acquired U.K. sensitivity might play to a Kansas audience. A.J.I was impressed with A.J.’s fearlessness, her body control, and her facial expressiveness. She is a funny young lady with the looks that could easily help her catch on. .

This joint White Theatre and Coterie production succeeds with dazzling sets, super special effects, the best pit band I have heard in many years, and a cast who seems determined to wring every bit of value out of the playscript and the score that is there.What did our critic think of DISNEY'S FROZEN at White Theatre?

You will never see a production of “Legally Blond, the musical” better performed or sung or danced than what you can see currently running at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park. This is pure, show-biz entertainment as rendered by this cast and Director/ Choreographer Jerry Jay Cranford and his team.Based on the popular 2001 film, the musical follows Elle Woods, a fashion-obsessed UCLA sorority president. Elle enrolls at Harvard Law School to win back her boyfriend. This begins as a two-hour sugar rush of bubblegum pop, cheerleader enthusiasm, and enough pink to repaint Barbie's Dream House.

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The year is 1905. The place is New York City. The play is Lynn Nottage’s intimate and surprisingly affective comedy/drama “Intimate Apparel.” “Intimate Apparel” tells a tale drawn from Nottage’s own passed down ancestry stories and perhaps a little imagined history. The inspiration is a sepia toned photo of a seamstress from the turn of the twentieth-century. The lights come up on Esther Mills (Chioma Anyanwu), a thirty-six-year-old gifted seamstress, who has carved out a niche business for herself designing and creating intimate apparel for a widely diverse customer base. Esther’s customers represent both the upper crust of New York’s society, the 400, and others who populate the raunchy Tenderloin district and whose less public clientele are the bored husbands of society’s 400.

Musical theater reviewers infrequently and pleasantly rediscover an old friend. “Wicked,” just opened at the venerable, 2400 seat Kansas City Music Hall with a recently refreshed cast, is an entertaining example.