Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Local Artist
  Kim Humphries
  You may not even realize that you know Kim Humphries. He's the "kh" who posts all the "calls for artists" on the Critical Mass listserv. He's also president of Critical Mass itself, the organization that promotes art and artists in St. Louis. And he's a project manager at Arts in Transit,... More >>
• Best Local Writer
  Qiu Xiaolong
  Did you know a poetry-loving Chinese detective walks among us? Well, not really. But we do rub elbows with the creator of fictional sleuth Chen Cao: Qiu Xiaolong. The Shanghai native came to Mound City in 1988 on a Ford Foundation grant to study at Washington University. He's been here ever... More >>
• Best Local Poet
  Carl Phillips
  An associate professor in English and African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University, Carl Phillips is the author of four books of poetry. The latest, The Rest of Love, published this year, follows in the footsteps of Phillips' previous (multiple award-nominated) work, melding the... More >>
• Best Arts Organization
  Prison Performing Arts
  Go ahead, make the requisite joke about the "captive audience." Then acknowledge the fact that prison arts and education programs cut recividism rates. And that nevertheless, state and federal governments keep cutting funding for arts and education in prisons. Fourteen years ago, Agnes Wilcox... More >>
• Best Local Web Site
  www.archpundit.com
  OK! OK! Needlers, nitpickers and technophiles are correct: www.archpundit.com isn't technically a Web site; it's a blog. Score one for the digerati. But quibbles aside, the question becomes academic if what you're really after is the city's best round-up of local and regional politics. From... More >>
• Best Strip Joint
  Roxy's
  Sure, there are classier joints with glossier women and more refined amenities, but are you looking for "naughty" or "nice" when selecting a strip club? If you answered "naughty" -- and if you're honest with yourself, that's what you answered -- then there's no finer place in the land than... More >>
• Best Speaker Series
  Washington University Assembly Series
  Sure, Washington University has the inside edge for lining up guest lecturers. Wash. U. is a well-endowed institution with a sterling academic reputation in the liberal arts. You expect them to lure your former secretaries of Housing and Urban Development (Andrew Cuomo), your environmental... More >>
• Best Reading Series
  Left Bank Books
  Bibliophiles know there's no real substitute for experiencing an author reading his or her own work. Passages that are well-loved and familiar are recast when delivered in the voice of the person who wrought them. Accents and pauses change, the timing of the sentences alters slightly from your... More >>
• Best Hair on a Local TV Personality (Male)
  Glenn Zimmerman
  After hitting snooze for an hour on a Monday morning, the last thing anyone wants to do is actually get up and face the workweek. How's a stressed St. Louisan to cope? Well, turning on the morning news on KTVI-TV (Channel 2) is always helpful. You can find out about traffic, get some local and... More >>
• Best Hair on a Local TV Personality (Female)
  Vickie Newton
  Vickie Newton is no bubble-headed bleached blonde. But if she ever decides to ditch Larry Conners as co-anchor of KMOV-TV (Channel 4)'s evening newscast, she could star in one of Herbal Essence's erotic shampoo commercials. Vickie's sleek, black hair is gorgeous, bouncy and sexy. Her thick locks... More >>
• Best TV News Anchor
  Dick Ford
  Mick Jagger once said that fellow Rolling Stone Charlie Watts had a face that blossomed at 60 -- that the drummer's carved, sophisticated features seemed to mature at a late age, turning the odd-looking younger Watts into an incredibly handsome senior. The same can be said of Fox 2's Dick Ford,... More >>
• Best TV Station
  KPLR-TV (Channel 11)
  St. Louis' local WB affiliate features the seven deadly sins of late-night entertainment: the Cardinals, the Blues, Kathryn Jamboretz, Melanie Moon, elimiDATE, Blind Date and, last but certainly not least, the incomparable 5th Wheel. True, Moon has been demoted to the weekend desk, and none of... More >>
• Best Makeover
  KETC-TV (Channel 9)'s local programming
  PBS, as the old joke goes, stands for Primarily British Stuff, but on January 5 our own PBS affiliate, KETC-TV (Channel 9), stepped up to fill the glaring void of locally based programming. Now prime time -- or at least the first hour of it -- is our time. Living St. Louis airs Monday, Tuesday... More >>
• Best Local TV Commercial
  Dirt Cheap Cigarettes Beer & Liquor (low-carb version)
  An obvious choice, perhaps, but a worthy one. Seriously, who among us wouldn't recognize Dirt Cheap chief cheapskate Fred Teutenberg on a city street? This year, though, the folks at Dirt Cheap decided to come clean about a dirty little secret. That's right kids, the Dirt Cheap Chicken used to... More >>
• Best Museum
  Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
  The Contemporary is the new incarnation of the beloved, decades-old Forum for Contemporary Art, so its opening last September was accompanied by high expectations. It also had a new Brad Cloepfil building to deal with, a fairly prominent next-door neighbor (the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts),... More >>
• Best Museum (Wax Division)
  Black World History Wax Museum
  Josephine Baker is watching you. Oh, you thought she was dead? Well then, you obviously haven't been to the Black World History Wax Museum, where famous dead black people come to life via life-size wax figurines. Upon approach, one would be apt to wonder whether this St. Louis Avenue... More >>
• Best Museum Improvement
  Glen Gentele, director
  Laumeier Sculpture Park has long been one of the St. Louis art scene's greatest assets, but when Glen Gentele took on the directorship in 2001, he had his work cut out for him. The position was being redefined in the wake of lingering controversy surrounding the treatment of Beverly Pepper's... More >>
• Best Museum Exhibition
  German Art Now
  Any time the Saint Louis Art Museum wants to bring in more German art, that's fine with us. We trust their judgment to pick the great from the good, and whether it's Gerhard Richter's devastatingly beautiful paintings (Kerze all the way rocks) or Max Ernst's stark, scratchy work, we think it's... More >>
• Best Public Art
  Artica
  For a few days each September, Artica participants transform the industrial wasteland along the north St. Louis riverfront into an outdoor gallery of sculpture, music and anything-goes mayhem. The emphasis of Artica is public participation, with artists and audience members all taking part in... More >>
• Best Art Gallery
  Philip Slein Gallery
  As director of Washingon University's Des Lee Gallery downtown since 2000, Phil Slein has done an impressive job. So expectations were high in 2003 when he opened his own downtown gallery on the third floor of the historic Ely-Walker building at 1520 Washington Avenue. In its first year, the... More >>
• Best Gallery Show (Single)
  Daniel Raedeke: Always Almost New
  For this summer show, the second in the Kranzberg St. Louis Exhibition Series at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Raedeke went all-out, exploring new media and pushing his concept of art-as-consumable-as-art to a new level. There were paintings, sculptures and digital animations, all based on a cast of... More >>
• Best Gallery Show (Group)
  Schmidt's Picks
  This inaugural show at the Philip Slein Gallery was curated by the inimitable veteran of St. Louis' art scene, Jim Schmidt, who was permitted to let his imagination run wild and bring together works by some of the best artists in the area. Schmidt made some terrific picks, including large... More >>
• Best Place to Buy Local Art
  Xen Gallery
  This bright, inviting gallery occupies prime art-world real estate at the corner of Euclid and McPherson avenues in the oh-so-arty Central West End. But it doesn't try to compete with the neighborhood's higher-brow gallery trifecta, Smith-Shearburn-and-Schmidt. Instead Xen emphasizes the... More >>
• Best Casino
  Ameristar Casino
  Your kid's tuition money burning a hole in your pocket? Hell, that's what scholarships are for. Tell Junior to study a little harder and take your newly expendable income to Ameristar. Your best bet rides here. Not because the odds are that much better than on the other boats, but because of the... More >>
• Best Actress
  Meghan Maguire
  We only saw Meghan Maguire in two plays this season. Both were by the same author (George F. Walker) and staged by the same troupe (Muddy Waters). One production (Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline) was very bad; the other (Adult Entertainment) was very good. But the constant in both shows was... More >>
• Best Actor
  Terry Meddows
  Yes, Terry Meadows again -- and without apology. In last year's "Best of St. Louis" we described him as "the most reliably original and accomplished actor in town." This year, in addition to underscoring those words, we also want to note the range of his work. Meddows turns up in everything from... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  HotHouse Theatre Company
  HotHouse took a real flyer last fall when its directors decided to devote the entire season to unfamiliar new plays. But the gamble paid off big-time. You could feel that payoff in the anticipatory audiences as each successive, unpredictable production informed the next. Theatergoers didn't wait... More >>
• Best New Theater Space
  Soulard Theatre
  Take four theater groups in need of a permanent performing space, add some cleaning fluid, sweat equity and a former Czechoslavakian social club, and you've got the Soulard Theatre Collective. DramaRama, ECHO, Hydeware and Spotlight theater companies focused their forces on Preservation Hall... More >>
• Best Children's Theater
  Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis
  Nearly 20,000 area children saw the 40-minute "mini-play" As You Like It -- Lickety-Split, adapted by Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis education coordinator Christopher Limber and performed by a nimble cast of five actors. Touring to 90-plus schools, the program introduced students to... More >>
• Best Stage Production
  In a Little World of Our Own
  Gary Mitchell's explosive drama about three brothers conniving and surviving in battleground Belfast has the worst title of any play to receive its American premiere in St. Louis during this (or probably any other) year. Even the actors had trouble remembering the awkward title. In time, it... More >>
• Best Historical Performance
  Cool and Hip: Gaslight Square
  In a year largely given over to the Lewis & Clark bicentennial and the the 100-year anniversary of the St. Louis World's Fair, Historyonics Theatre Company took a step off the all-too-beaten paths with Cool and Hip: Gaslight Square. Adapted by Joe Dreyer, Cool and Hip celebrated a time during... More >>
• Best Community Theater Offering
  Titanic
  Thirteen months ago Spotlight Productions in Chesterfield mounted a remarkably effective -- at times enthralling -- rendition of the 1997 Tony Award-winning musical Titanic. This August 2003 offering opened too late for inclusion in last year's edition of this issue. But the production,... More >>
• Best New St. Louis Play
  Great Day in the Morning
  Everyone knows The Glass Menagerie and Meet Me in St. Louis are set in St. Louis. And it's fun to hear onstage references to the Jewel Box and the Skinker trolley. But let's face it: Those scripts have been seen. So what a treat it was to be exposed to a brand-new St. Louis-themed play -- and... More >>
• Best Musical
  Falsettos
  Tough call. The Black Rep did a solid job with Raisin, complete with some breath-stopping choreography by Keith Tyrone. But last May's New Jewish Theatre production of William Finn's Falsettos continues to resonate in a vital kind of way that few productions do. Falsettos is actually two one-act... More >>
• Best One-Person Show
  St. Nicholas
  We've said it before and we'll say it again: In St. Nicholas, Joe Hanrahan did a splendid job as a jaded theater critic whose pursuit of a beautiful young actress leads him into the unlikely clutches of a coven of vampires. This play-monologue by the vibrant young writer Conor McPherson first... More >>
• Best Two-Person Show
  The Last Five Years
  Jason Robert Brown's time-traveling musical The Last Five Years is sustained by two characters and sixteen songs in one act. Sounds like an ideal show for the St. Louis Rep Studio -- and it was. Under the direction of John Ruocco, this dissection of the life and death of a marriage was perfectly... More >>
• Best Mother-Daughter Combo (Drama)
  Magan Wiles and Diane Peterson in The Glass Menagerie
  The Glass Menagerie chronicles the plight of a frustrated young son and brother whose immediate goal is to escape the confines of his drab St. Louis existence. (St. Louis, drab? Perish the thought!) For decades productions of The Glass Menagerie have been dominated by charismatic actresses like... More >>
• Best Mother-Daughter Combo (Musical)
  Carly Jibson and Bruce Vilanch in Hairspray
  Anyone who attended Hairspray at the Fox last March saw a wildly entertaining mother-daughter act in Carly Jibson as pudgy teenager Tracy Turnblad and Bruce Vilanch in drag as Tracy's endearing blob of a mother, Edna. No sooner did Hairspray depart St. Louis for Denver than the show's savvy... More >>
• Best Star Power
  Variety Telethon
  What a night for theater buffs! In April St. Louis Variety brought in six award-winning Broadway performers to entertain at the megabucks charity dinner that precedes the annual telethon. Later that night KMOV-TV (Channel 4) televised the concert so that we peons could hear some real theater... More >>
• Best Zoo Animal
  Giant anteater
  Children scream in delight at the monkeys, and the giant anteaters abide. People coo over the penguins, and still, the giant anteaters abide. The giant anteaters do not wish to impress you: They will not hurl themselves from treetops or trip adorably over their own feet. They seem to have loped... More >>
• Best AM Radio Personality (1 Comment)
  Frank Cusumano
  Frank Cusumano is best known for his anchor exploits on KSDK-TV (Channel 5) and as the sometime host of the NBC affiliate's superb Sunday-night Sports Plus, but it's in his radio work where Cusumano really shows that he's head and shoulders above everyone else in St. Louis' saturated sports... More >>
• Best FM Radio Personality
  "Radio Rich" Dalton
  Commercial FM rock radio is a washout, a racket we skip over in search of greener aural pastures. But we make an exception for KIHT-FM (96.3), commonly known as K-HITS. Why? Decent (classic-) rockin' and genial, veteran DJs, in particular "Radio Rich" Dalton. A KSHE jock from back in that... More >>
• Best Reporter (Radio Division)
  Andy Strickland
  Is there a more mundane media gig than St. Louis Blues beat reporter? In a typical year, no: Blues have slightly better than mediocre season, make playoffs, lose, fail to bring in impact player in off-season, repeat. That's been the upshot for a quarter-century and running. But this past year... More >>
• Best Radio Pitchman
  John Carney
  KMOX late-night radio personality John Carney is hawking a 2005 cruise to Alaska. The trip can only accommodate a hundred, Carney complains into the microphone, which is really upsetting, because he hates the idea of having to turn anyone away. Despite the fact that you can almost hear his nose... More >>
• Best Radio Station
  WGNU (920 AM)
  The mystery of WGNU's call letters was finally revealed at station co-founder Chuck Norman's funeral earlier this year. "It stands for 'We've Got National Unity,'" declared Norman's wet nurse as she wept into Earl Holt's handkerchief. Just kidding. National unity is about the last thing WGNU... More >>
• Best Weathercaster
  Ben Abel
  Weathercasting in St. Louis is a crapshoot. Any meteorologist worth his Doppler will admit it, but they still go through the motions. Why? Because all things considered, anyone (us, you, the neighbor's kid with the lazy eye) can half-ass predict tomorrow's weather. It'll rain or it won't. It'll... More >>
• Best Traffic Reporter
  Tony J.
  Traffic jams aren't very sexy, and they sure as hell ain't fun. There's not much inherent excitement in the business, and the problem up until Tony J. arrived in town is that most Eye in the Sky copter guys and earnest, deep-voiced morning-show reporters were just plain dull. If you have to... More >>
• Best Reporter (Newspaper Divison)
  Todd C. Frankel
  We all fondly remember St. Louis Cardinals utility man José Oquendo, who had the tools to play every position -- and did. In 1989, Oquendo didn't miss a single game. Todd Frankel, then, is the José Oquendo of St. Louis journalism. Young, earnest and aggressive, Frankel gives his... More >>
• Best Newspaper Columnist
  The Shadow
  Is The Shadow a man? A woman? One person, even? The guy who employs her (or him, or them), Evening Whirl editor Anthony Sanders, professes not to know. "It's probably like Jerry Berger," Sanders says. "Jerry Berger had people call him and tell him what was going on, and he had other people... More >>
• Best Film Festival
  St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase
  A guy in a dress, a bass guitar strapped to his chest, screaming, "I feel like a woman!" The history of a seedy motel. Alien death invaders. And all of them from St. Louis! Home sweet home might never be known as a hotbed of filmmaking, but for the past four summers our heart has swelled with... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Ciné
  Ronnies teems with teens. Especially on the weekends. Teens dropped off by their parents, slipping into the bathroom to apply makeup or remove a piece of clothing that detracts from their outfits, which they were only wearing for Mom's benefit anyway. A trip to Ronnies will surely take you back... More >>
• Best Art Cinema
  Tivoli Theatre
  St. Louis may not have much in the way of old movie palaces, but we do have the Tivoli, dammit! Built in 1924, the graceful theater -- or, as its owners at Landmark like to say, theatre -- now plays host to films you won't find at your average AMC. Sure, the Tivoli shows its share of foreign and... More >>
• Best Dirty Movie
  Raja's birth video
  Look, we're not implying any impropriety on the Saint Louis Zoo's part. We know that video of Raja the elephant being born -- the one shown on the endless loop in the educational pavilion just south of the River's Edge, where the elephants live -- is supposed to be educational. Miracle of birth,... More >>