Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts — Attraction in Kansas City

I just visited for the first time this week and thought I'd add my two cents' worth. Pros:

1. Beautiful, clean, airy space with good design for stage visibility (We were high on the Grand Tier but had a good view of the stage.)
2. Access to bars/concessions on multiple levels.
3. Great gift shop
4. Ushers who were quickly attentive to a complaint we had at intermission.

Cons:

1. No cafe in the building or within walking distance for those who want or need to arrive early.
2. Ridiculous concession/bar prices (e.g., FIVE dollars for a standard-size bottle of water, THREE dollars for a bag of chips of the size common for lunch boxes). This is much worse than what I recently paid at an airport!
3. Unsettling "cattle-drive" feel to the exit route after the performance, since everyone has to leave via stairs and elevator
4. An abysmal digital ticketing system

The last one is my biggest objection to attending performances here again. It is high-tech and all, but the way it's designed made me nervous. First, if you don't have a smartphone or just prefer hard-copy documents, good luck getting your tickets. I'm sure there is a way, but they don't make it easy. Second, they have a QR code system that doesn't actually show your tickets until the afternoon of the performance. I wanted to print mine out upon purchase because I prefer hard copies, but all I could print was a receipt. I didn't feel like I actually had tickets in my possession until I was about to go. I also found the whole system generally confusing. I'd much rather receive PDF tickets sent to my email that I can print or show on my phone. I really, really hated this system. That said, we had no incident when we arrived. If I ever go again, though, I will look closer at ways to avoid using this...

The venue is nice, the seats are easy to find, and the ushers are polite and helpful. The shows are great, but there are a few problems. #1, parking. They have two entrances, and absolutely no idea how many parking spots they have, or need. I was an hour early, and one entrance said they had no spaces left, and directed people to park across the street. They said the parking there was free, but it was labeled as a place that would tow you if you parked there, and I've seen the videos of how that ends up. Went around the corner, to the other entrance, which was happy to take my $10, and behold the awesomeness, there were many parking spots available. #2, I went to watch the Texas Tenors. They were great, the orchestra was great, but there were details they missed. For a high school performance, it was awesome, but the spotlights missed huge cues, had lights pointed at the wrong person, &etc. One entrance door was always open, spilling distracting light from one side of the stage, the other was closed every time after an entrance/exit, and blended in with the background. I know these are niggly details, but for the price of the tickets, I expect to see professionals at work, and I've seen high school performances pulled...

First and foremost. Allow me to say i am British, so well verse to fine dining and theater far superior to kansas City in England and Europe. However, my own personal experience compared to those theaters back home of the Kauffman is, upon first sight, it has a lot of unused open space on first entering the building. I found the overall construction was poorly designed on a whole, with their sitting leveling structure blocking view of the stage. A better layered seating plan would have resolved this issue.

Freakly, the inside is poorly designed, perhaps constructed by a contractor with poor design skills, but was cheap, no doubt.

The whole place on further inspection, not dissimilar to the city of Kansas, looks quite dated indeed, and in vast need of modernization in order to join the crest of Europe. Seats are very low-grade seating and very narrow rows by which to pass patrons.

Ballet performances are top-notch and deserve a 5 star rating. The place just lacks a certain atmosphere - chic to it. For high dollar ticket prices, I expect higher quality, but then we Brits are known for excellence so maybe my expectations were too high.

Room for improvement in many areas. Look to the rest of Europe,...