Shakespearean drama isn’t really Theatre Lawrence’s thing — don’t expect to see Lady Macbeth wringing her guilty hands in West Lawrence — but having fun with Shakespeare most certainly is. In the last few years, the community theater has produced “Something Rotten,” a musical farce centered on the bard, and “The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged),” a whirlwind romp through ...
One of the steepest hills in Lawrence is about to become a little shorter. Not so you’d notice — just 4 or 5 feet — but you might appreciate that missing morsel if you’ve ever ridden a bicycle up West 11th Street and felt like your calves would explode. A $4.2 million project recently got underway on West 11th, one of the main routes between the University of Kansas campus and downtown, resulting in ...
Updated at 11:50 a.m. Wednesday, April 10 A man who is suing the Lawrence City Commission and two former mayors suffered another defeat this week when a federal judge refused to order the commission to temporarily stop enforcing its speech policy at commission meetings. The man, Justin Spiehs, is a frequent commenter at meetings, and on at least two occasions — in October 2022 and July 2023 — he was ...
A man was convicted of misdemeanor endangerment Friday in Douglas County District Court after he had originally faced a far more serious charge of felony aggravated assault with a knife. Deonte Darrell Jackson, 35, was on probation on Aug. 24, 2023, when he approached a man in a delivery truck with a knife in downtown Lawrence. The crime he was on probation for at the time was a violent, and seemingly random, ...
Updated at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, April 3, 2024 Lawrence’s “most infamous” commenter has failed to demonstrate that the City Commission’s rules about comments at public meetings are unconstitutionally vague or that the city engaged in unlawful viewpoint and content discrimination against him. Federal Judge Julie Robinson in an order this week, using Justin Spiehs’ self-identification as “the most ...
Gayla Kelly thinks her son came to Lawrence in his final days because it was a place where he had been happy. “He said once that Lawrence was where he began his adult life” — he excitedly came to KU in 2012 to study music education — “so I believe that a part of him felt this was the right place to end his life,” she said. But she can’t be sure — even as she “relives and rethinks every action ...