By RICK DANLEY // June 6, 2018 Billy Ray Hayes was born and raised on a Cherokee reservation in eastern Oklahoma. When he was old enough to join the service, the U.S. government shipped him to Hawaii. At the end of his military tenure, Billy Ray stayed on in Hawaii, but eventually his money dried up. … Continue reading Billy Ray Hayes, Leaf Weaver
by RICK DANLEY // September 13, 2017 Skeeter has a theory. Here it is: the Midwest produces more and better clowns because the Midwest — lovely though it can be — is, for the most part, dull. Kids here, says Skeeter, are compelled, by the encircling boredom into which they’re born, to create their own kinds … Continue reading Meet Skeeter
by RICK DANLEY // September 23, 2017 Fate smiled on eight high school boys Thursday morning when former Miss Kansas Adrienne Bulinski plucked them from among hundreds of students gathered at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center. She sat them in a row on stage and, after a minute of lively banter, sang a suggestive version … Continue reading Blood, Sweat & Tiaras
by RICK DANLEY // February 22, 2019 We all know the Frankenstein story: Mad scientist, through a special alchemy of repurposed flesh and raw electricity, invests a humanoid creature with life. The creature then proceeds to turn on his creator, and in this act of rebellion we’re meant to understand the ill-fated consequences of intellectual hubris, … Continue reading A Misunderstood Monster
by RICK DANLEY // January 14, 2019 Once upon a time — let’s call it the early 1950s — three colossi of the American theater overshadowed all the other playwrights in the land. Award-winning scripts tumbled from their desks and were picked up by Broadway and performed for packed houses and praised to the skies … Continue reading On Inge
by RICK DANLEY // April 7, 2018 The artist’s consolation is that she can take as her subject the everyday turmoil of life and make of it something beautiful, she can rescue from despair those essential splinters of light that go into making a dull thing gleam. “Everything is copy” Nora Ephron’s mother used to tell … Continue reading Father, Son, Feature Film
by RICK DANLEY // November 18, 2016 Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn, a professor of music at Wichita State University and an amiable evangelist for the importance of the arts in public education, appeared before a small crowd in the recital hall at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center on Wednesday to make, as the title of his lecture … Continue reading Arts Ed
by RICK DANLEY // October 21, 2016 Death proved no hurdle to the man, Mark Twain, who made a special appearance at the Iola Public Library Tuesday night. Shuffling up to the stage, wearing an all-white Stacy Adams suit and a satin cravat bundled under his chin, clutching a pipe, and casting a quizzical look … Continue reading Twain Brain
by RICK DANLEY // October 6, 2016 The Addams Family is so firmly wedged in the popular imagination that, during the 2004 presidential election, the then-editor of the New York Times referred to John Kerry as having an “Addams Family face.” It was an unkind statement, and yet everybody knew what he meant. (In case … Continue reading ‘The Addams Family’
by RICK DANLEY // December 3, 2015 Allen Community College’s excellently cast staging of Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black comedy “The Cripple of Inishmaan” is able to wring from the fast-paced script the same quotient of wit and deep feeling that made the play a hit when it first arrived on the London stage in 1996. The … Continue reading ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’
RG danley 