Out of the Box Theatre Company kicks off its new season with something different a few blocks up from its usual home at Center Stage. Family Album – a song collection by Joe Iconis, composer-lyricist of the Broadway hit Be More Chill and several other musicals – will be performed just once in a concert-style […]
Organizations don’t last 137 years if they’re not capable of changing with the times. For Santa Barbara Humane, the local nonprofit that – despite the mistaken notion that they’re part of a big network – is not affiliated with any national groups, the mission that guides them is that of championing both animals and the […]
Anybody who caught Tina Schlieske’s mini-set closing out the series of six vocalists fronting the “Granada All Star House Band” at the theater earlier this month – where the powerhouse singer belted out her take on The Beatles “I’ve Got a Feeling,” Aretha Franklin’s version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and her own composition “Everyday” […]
Maria Muldaur’s career has been a 60-year exploration of the music she grew up with as a Greenwich Village native who came of age in the early 1960s, the era of what John Sebastian calls the “folk scare,” when acoustic music of all kinds exploded in the downtown New York scene. “It was an incredibly […]
DramaDogs Theater Company is celebrating three decades of presenting compelling and largely offbeat theater with a new production called HERE! This Moment for Women, featuring a series of dramatic short plays and monologues by contemporary playwrights E. M. Lewis and James Still. The pieces highlight women’s grit, resiliency, longing, sorrow and wonder, such that, collectively, […]
Academy Award-nominated French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve gets SBIFF’s superstar treatment via a curated career retrospective of seven of the director’s important movies, including Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune Parts One & Two. The films – which have garnered a collective 28 Oscar nominations (with Dune 2 still pending) will screen in […]
For almost a century, the Santa Barbara Foundation has been a catalyst for change in Santa Barbara County, analyzing issues to identify challenges that burden people, and then convening community stakeholders to build coalitions and partner with nonprofits and other leaders working on the front lines to solve problems. While issues, approaches, and methods might […]
Jonathan Fox was both surprised and moved when he saw Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers in its original Broadway run back in the early 1990s, back when he was still a grad student in New York. “I was familiar with his earlier plays like The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park, so I was […]
While Lost in Yonkers walks a fine line between poignancy and humor, there’s no such balancing act in the play that opens Ensemble Theatre Company’s 46th season this month. Unless you count the challenge of mastering the fast pacing, quick-change scenes, joke-filled dialog and sheer physicality of Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, Gordon Greenberg and […]
In a strange twist of fate, The 39 Steps itself is actually being showcased in another venue over the next two weekends. The Alcazar Ensemble will present Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play, Joe Landry’s stage adaptation of three of Hitchcock’s most renowned stories, October 11-13 and 18-20 at the Carpinteria venue. The thrilling world […]
Colin Mochrie has been doing improv professionally for more than 40 years, the last 35 or so as a cast member of Whose Line is it Anyway?, the popular TV series that features actors performing short-form improvisation games based on formats and audience suggestions. WLiiA started in Britain in the 1980s, moved to ABC in […]
On October 2, 2023, Sansum Clinic became part of Sutter Health, a significant milestone that altered Sansum’s then 103-year history as the largest independent nonprofit outpatient healthcare organization between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay. The new relationship, cemented after a 15-year courtship between the equally venerable organizations, was created to take advantage of […]
David Bragger hadn’t had much exposure to old time music before 1999, instead spending his time as an itinerant street magician, collector of South Asian folk tales and filmmaker after graduating from UCSB with a Religious Studies degree. But then he inherited his great uncle’s fiddle and began exploring the genre that dates back centuries […]
Carpinteria goes green again this weekend courtesy of The California Avocado Festival, the free fest dedicated to the locally grown fruit that also serves as a massive musical extravaganza. The Avo Fest is also fully back to its pre-pandemic glory, stretching for three days and several city blocks, encompassing four stages of music including the […]
Johnny Irion never sounds more like Neil Young, one of his main influences, than when he’s playing acoustically, as he did as the co-headliner of the second annual Local Vibes concert at Elings Park – which by the way is still a vastly underutilized facility for concerts and such. This year, thankfully, the glaring lighting […]
UCSB A&L launches the season debut of the “L” part of their name with a lecture by Salman Khan, the much-valued visionary behind educational nonprofit Khan Academy, which seeks to remove the barriers to education that leave over 600 million children lacking basic math and reading skills. His free curriculum, available to all at any […]
UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center kicks off its CWC Docs series on October 8 with Borderland | The Line Within, the uber-timely investigation of immigration that dives into the border-industrial complex – the way businesses profit through the undocumented workers and the attendant human cost. The film, which was produced over five years with the assistance of […]
The Music Academy of the West is roaring back into action. Not two months after the summer festival came to a close, MAW is back with the third season of its Mariposa Concert Series – a collection of musical experiences staged at the intimate Hahn Hall with some connection to MAW alums. Mariposa makes its […]
There have been hundreds of adaptations of Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or works based in part on the story, whether on the stage, in movies, musicals, other books, or even in video and board games. Locally, just within the past 10 months, Ensemble produced Alice, Formerly of Wonderland about the romantic adventures of […]
For some reason, UCSB Arts & Lectures has decided to open its season on a mocking note dripping with sarcasm. Make that a lot of notes, as Snarky Puppy arrives at the Arlington Theatre on Tuesday, October 1, to kick off the 2024-25 slate of events. Not that the Texas-bred quasi-collective that boasts around 25 […]
If there were any justice in the entertainment world, Don Was would be a superstar, with periodic concerts at the Santa Barbara Bowl selling out as soon as they’re announced, and records crashing the Top 10 on a regular basis. As it is, Was had some hits in the late 1980s with his funky duo […]
Former Montecito resident Johnny Irion’s new album, Sleeping Soldiers of Love, has roots deep in the world of nature, but also sounds like a cinematic score. For good reason. The songs on Soldiers were inspired by Jay Leutze’s 2013 bestseller Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along […]
Ventura playwright Kieron Barry’s latest work, Spy for Spy, is a two-character romantic comedy that’s also a memory play, and a mixed-up one at that. There are six scenes that serve as snapshots of significant moments in the relationship between high-strung lawyer Sarah and free-spirited aspiring actress Molly. These include when they first fall in […]
After seven years of following a broad format for its annual Granada Legends gala, the performing arts venue is turning its attention inward for this year’s fundraising event. Previous galas have called attention to the region’s rich and interconnected cultural heritage of artists, organizations and philanthropists, as the event each year honored one of its […]
Critics have unanimously praised Florian Zeller’s The Father, a play that takes the unusual perspective of presenting the world from the vantage of an elderly but still elegant man going through progressive stages of dementia. His shifting and relative reality – including concepts of such taken-for-granted facts as time and place – wreaks havoc on […]
Both the Granada Theatre and Old Spanish Days Fiesta marked their 100th anniversaries this year, and the Lobero also celebrated the centennial of its reopening, while the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Parade & Festival reached its half-century milestone celebration this summer. Now, mid-September also brings the 50th edition of the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, which […]
A trio of SoCal authors autograph and talk about their new books this week as the midtown bookstore Chaucer’s Books also gets ready for its own 50th anniversary celebration. On September 15, UCLA professor Teddi Chichester’s Wildlife Crossings of Hope: Connecting Creatures Around the Globe combines first-person reporting with research – and stunning two-color art […]
I can still recall the chill running up and down my spine, not to mention that evening’s nightmares, after a teacher read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” aloud during an English class. But fans of Master of the Macabre, those who find pleasure in Poe’s powerful and often poetic horror stories – some of […]
Jenna Tico – the multi-generational Santa Barbara native who has served as everything from a dancer to community organizer to grant writer for local nonprofits, Summer Solstice aficionado to AHA! staffer – is also the driving force behind Backbone Storytelling, a The Moth-style program that hosts periodic pop-up events at local watering holes. (Latest themes […]
It was around 15 years ago that jazz composer/arranger/bandleader Chris Walden brought his big band to SOhO for a third concert, cramming a full ensemble onto the club’s then still-tiny stage — with a couple of the musicians spilling over. That was not long after Walden had left his native Germany – where he’d started […]
Veteran Central Coast songstress Shawn Thies, who has been singing a variety of genres in public since her mid-teen years, makes her debut with the Santa Barbara Jazz Society at the monthly showcase at SOhO Sunday afternoon. Thies will lend her warm and playful voice to selections of jazz standards from the Great American Songbook, […]
The Santa Barbara Acoustic Instrument Celebration launched as an annual guitar convention back in 2016, branched into presenting a series of concerts that included workshops, and arguably peaked with bringing fingerstyle wizard Tommy Emmanuel back to town. But when the pandemic struck in 2020, it was hard to get audiences to return, and after trying […]
Kevin Costner, whose seaside Summerland estate will serve as host of the One805LIVE! benefit concert for the third straight year, will now also be singing for the first time at the star-studded fundraiser. Costner, who missed 2022’s show while away filming, spoke to the crowd at last year’s show but did not perform. The famed […]
This weekend offers an additional opportunity to aid area first responders in their mental/emotional health challenges — which is also a big part of One805’s oeuvre — via a world premiere event of the documentary short film 9-1-1 Project Harmony at the Lobero on September 8. The film covers the program of the same name, […]
Elings Park’s two-production experiment in bringing Shakespeare to its charming Godric Grove amphitheater this summer winds up with a pair of performances of Much Ado About Nothing from UCSB’s Naked Shakes, the Irwin Appel-founded-and-directed company that employs minimal props and costumes to keep the focus on the acting and the Bard’s prose. Ado, which boasts […]
The Alcazar Ensemble is staging a second weekend September 6-8 of the Hanne Pedersen Playwright Competition. That competition features four one-act plays from tri-county authors in honor of its late namesake, one of the co-founders of the Carpinteria Community Theatre. Sophie Goldstein’s This House is Legacy traces a neighborhood that no longer exists but has […]
Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Free Community Day features a flurry of family activities both participatory and observational in celebration of its continuing exhibit “A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection.” Music on the front terrace comes from the local ensembles Slideways Trombone Quartet, Bottom Line Brass Tuba Quartet, and […]
The next week of Santa Barbara Bowl’s September surge showcases with Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue with Big Boi on September 5, the final date of Isla Vista-born Iration & Pepper’s Daytrippin in Paradise Summer 2024 Tour on September 8, alternative rock trio Wallows on September 9, and Palo Alto singer-songwriter Remi Wolf on September […]
Will any public event in town ever come close to matching the Kick Ash Bash in pure megawatt star power? Back in 2018, over the course of a full day and evening, just about everybody in the entertainment industry with a local connection – rock legends, pop princesses and other celebrities – participated in the […]
You won’t see any water towers rising above buildings in painter Sophie Cooper’s Montecito neighborhood on East Mountain Drive near Westmont College, nor anywhere in Montecito for that matter. But you will find paintings of scores of antiquated wooden tanks – which New York City required of all buildings higher than six stories starting in […]