It was on her thirteenth birthday that Isabelle Bridges moved to Montecito with her family – actor father Jeff Bridges, mother Susan, and sisters Jessie and Haley – leaving L.A. following the1994 Northridge Earthquake for the verdant hills of the village. So that was a few years after the last of the play dates with […]
Cottage Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation presents a fundraising screening of the 2017 film Charged: The Eduardo Garcia Story, which describes Eduardo Garcia‘s rehabilitation journey following injuries he suffered from a massive electric shock while hunting. A classically trained chef who found his passion for cooking at an early age, Garcia cut his teeth in the industry […]
Math-whiz turned massively successful investor Pete Muller is passionate about all of his pursuits. Besides his family, surfing, poker, and solving and creating crossword puzzles, there’s his day job as the creator and manager of one of the most sought after quant-driven hedge funds on the planet, the aptly-named Process Driven Trading, which has never […]
The NatureTrack Film Festival began in 2018 as a way to raise funds and draw attention to the then-seven-year-old nonprofit NatureTrack Foundation, which brings schoolchildren out into nature for docent-led treks along trails in the Santa Ynez Valley. With nature now even more important during the pandemic as outdoor activity is far less conducive to […]
Jaya Lakshmi and Ananda – the Oregon-based mantra music mavens who have performed their popular blend of kirtan, healing mantra music, original compositions in English and Sanskrit, and Kirtronica (a fusion of kirtan and electronica) at several venues in Santa Barbara – have a much-anticipated new album ready for release. But due to pandemic restrictions […]
Like every performing arts venue in town, the Magic Castle Cabaret has been closed since March as even private club prestidigitation has been rendered powerless by the pandemic. But the charming year-old establishment that serves as the local Santa Barbara-Montecito offshoot to the famed Castle in Hollywood co-founded by Milt Larsen in the early 1960s […]
On January 9, 2018, Ken Grand went through the kind of hell most of us could never even imagine. That was the night that a torrential downpour resulted in the infamous Montecito mudslides and debris flow that killed 23 people. Among the casualties was Grand’s wife, Rebecca Riskin, the popular professional ballerina turned realtor whose […]
Normally a designation as a red zone would mean no parking or even stopping. But when it comes to pandemic procedures, the designation is more like rolling out a red carpet, as two weeks of reduced cases means more businesses can reopen. Accordingly, Metropolitan Theatres plans to welcome back moviegoers at two of the Santa […]
With a little help from his friends, Alan Kozlowski looks back on a luminous life Climb the stairs to Alan Kozlowski’s spacious downtown loft and you’ll arrive at a living room that doubles as an acoustic music den. Here an entire wall is taken up by two rows of rare guitars, including pre-war Martins, and […]
PCPA previews America’s annual fall feast two month’s early with Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, the second in its new series of staged reading previews of relatively new works of current interest. The “bitingly funny satire” find good intentions colliding with absurd assumptions as a troupe of supposedly racially awakened white teaching artists are tasked […]
UCSB Arts & Lectures is by far the area’s busiest arts organization, presenting in the pre-pandemic era upwards of 100 public events every academic year, not to mention add-ons in the summer. So, naturally A&L is stepping to the front of the line again as the COVID-19 crisis passes the six-month mark. After transferring its […]
Described as part love letter and part political exposé, Public Trust: The Fight for America’s Public Lands investigates how we arrived at this precarious moment when America’s public lands – some 640 million acres – are in danger. Held in trust by the federal government for all citizens of the United States, these places are […]
Longtime Santa Barbara writer Peggy O’Toole Lamb plumbed her own family history for her latest nonfiction book, Darling – Love Letters from WWII. The alumnus of UC Santa Barbara’s Teacher Education Program researched the letters that her uncle Frank J. Foster wrote to her aunt Catherine during WWII when he fought in the European Theater […]
6Q’s with the writer of RTC’s A Song Rubicon Theatre’s September Blitz, a month-long festival featuring more than 30 events in 30 days, takes a turn away from classic fare toward a moving and innovative new one-act play with music from emerging young playwright Taylor Fagins. Preston Butler III, Greta Oglesby, Krystle Rose Simmons, and […]
Venues and artists throughout the world are struggling with how to thrive or even survive during the extended pandemic. For Marjorie Luke board president Rod Lathim, joining the zeitgeist of endless Zoom performances proved completely unpalatable. Instead, the Luke – which only a year or so ago started producing its own events rather than simply […]
Lights Up!, Santa Barbara’s newest teen theater company that serves as a professional, yet inclusive and creative home for the youngsters, is currently auditioning for its 2020-21 company membership. Interested actors, singers, and dancers aged 12-19 are invited to audition for admission and the opportunity to attend callbacks for specific shows with the rest of […]
For nearly 20 years, Hershey Felder has made a career out of creating one-man shows in which he portrays and plays famous artists from recent and centuries-old history, and the novel coronavirus hasn’t caused him to slow down much at all. Ensemble Theatre Company got in the mix when it presented his Hershey Felder: Beethoven […]
Since the pandemic forced its doors to close in March, Rubicon Theatre rose to the challenge by quickly pivoting in creating digital content, including taking its summer youth programs online, but also launched the nation’s first theatrical drive-in concert series. Now, as its Rubicon Goes Retro Drive-in Concert Series comes to a close this week, […]
Actor-director-playwright Ed Giron has been a very busy thespian despite the limitations of the pandemic. Although in-person appearances have been curtailed due to COVID, of course, the well-known Santa Barbara actor has found, or mostly fashioned, frequent opportunities to perform and/or direct theater events online. Giron’s lockdown list began with recording himself reading “Bedtime Stories” […]
Like everybody else, the Westmont Music Department has had to pivot during the pandemic from in-person events to online performances and instruction. Last weekend, the department launched its new virtual Friday Concert Series with a video on Vimeo featuring husband-and-wife faculty members Andrea (flute) and Neil Di Maggio (piano) that portends a potent season of […]
Back onshore, you can do your part to safeguard our local waterways for those animals that are still roaming free by participating in the pandemic version of Explore Ecology’s annual Coastal Cleanup. This year, instead of gathering together at beaches and sites throughout the county on a single day, the cleanups will officially take place […]
Whales Without Walls, which screened at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival this past winter, is essentially a five-minute argument for a modern real-life solution to the issues that were addressed in the fiction film Free Willy. The mission of the Whale Sanctuary Project is to establish a model seaside sanctuary where whales and […]
UCSB’s much-beloved Naked Shakes program, which massages and presents stripped-down versions of works by Shakespeare, celebrates its 15th anniversary with Immortal Longings, a new adaptation by founder Irwin Appel that combines Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra into a single play. “We are in the middle of […]
Every arts organization has responded to the coronavirus crisis in their own way and in their own time, from raiding the archives to shutting down completely to, in the case of Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre (see above), trying innovative new ways to still go live and in person despite the pandemic. PCPA Theaterfest, which in normal […]
Actress-singer Teri Bibb has played the role of understudy-turned-star Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera more than 1,000 times, both on Broadway and with the national tour that included singing a command performance at the White House. A veteran whose experience includes appearing in more than 50 musicals across the country, Bibb’s credits […]
Santa Barbara-raised award-winning photographer Thomas Kelsey started his World War II photo essay in 1986 and has just now completed the undertaking earlier this year. “75 Years Later – Warbirds, Airman, & Veterans of World War II” serves as a history lesson with facts, figures, and photographs of the wartime effort brought to the forefront […]
As with just about everything else that might involve an audience, polo tournaments have also been barred from permitting spectators at their matches. But rather than canceling the season, the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club has carried on sans the crowds, as only polo players, team associates and club staff are allowed to attend […]
Santa Barbara International Film Festival Film Talk finds its way to the Montecito hills for a viewing and discussion of The Garden is Singing, Karen Kasaba’s 11-minute paean to Ganna Walska’s Lotusland that screened as part of the 2019 film festival. Singing does a credible job of capturing the beauty, diversity, history, and breadth of […]
For Brian McDonald, selecting You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown as the production for Ensemble Theatre Company Young Actors Conservatory this summer was a no-brainer once it became clear that COVID-19 had made his original choice – Hello, My Baby, by Montecito’s Cheri Steinkellner – impractical. Not only had ETC’s Education Director played the title […]
Vera Cruz, the short film by UCSB professor and veteran documentarian Christopher Jenkins that follows artist-architect Jeff Shelton as he cajoles the creative community into decorating the outside of a colorful house at 521 Santa Barbara Street, gets renewed focus as this week’s entry in the film festival’s new online series of screenings and discussions […]
Despite a lack of socializing and being forced to sit on a car seat rather than a blanket or lawn chair, fans have still taken to UCSB Arts & Lectures’ 2020 free Summer Cinema series Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory, which has proven to be almost as popular as previous years held at the […]
The next episode of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s live broadcast series takes place at 3:30 pm on August 23, when the Music-Artistic Director Nir Kabaretti will be joined by the symphony’s new Director of Music Education, Kristine Pacheco, to shine the spotlight on students of all levels from the youth program. The young musicians persevered […]
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American born British-Libyan author Hisham Matar won the coveted award for The Return, his 2016 memoir about his journey to Libya to find out what happened to his father. An exiled opponent of the infamously brutal Gaddafi regime, the elder Matar was kidnapped in Cairo and flown back to Libya, where he […]
As its website says, graduates of The Adderley School for the Performing Arts have won Tony Awards, starred in blockbuster movies, appeared as Young Cosette on Broadway, and Winthrop in The Music Man with Kristin Chenoweth at The Hollywood Bowl. They have performed for Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey and have toured with Andrea Bocelli, […]
While you won’t be able to check out the talented kids at Ensemble Theatre’s Young Actors Conservatory this summer, audiences are invited to join in virtually for the season-ending production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. The musical that explores life through the eyes of Charlie Brown and his friends in the Peanuts gang […]
Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall was all set to make her Santa Barbara debut at the Lobero Theatre on January 8, back when COVID-19 barely had a name, just the novel coronavirus that seemed to be contained in China. Then illness forced the show to be postponed and rescheduled for October. But the coronavirus crisis has […]
The UCSB Department of Music not only didn’t cancel its annual Summer Music Festival in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, it’s actually using the event as something of a forum to address the situation. At least that’s the approach taken by HOCKET, the Los Angeles-based new music piano duo featuring first-year UCSB faculty member […]
The folks who run these one-time beachside events are getting pretty good at doing them online considering the first three have sold out. Maybe that’s because while the meet and greet and see-who-you-can-pick-up action can only happen virtually, the beer is real, as the organizers send samples to your home in advance. And while it’s […]
TED began as a conference converging “ideas worth spreading” in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design. So after 35 years, there was no way it would let a little thing like a global pandemic prevent its big annual gathering from taking place, even if all of the talk and energy exchanges had to happen […]
The series that shares the stage in the Ventura County Fairgrounds parking lot with Rubicon Goes Retro has a rather august lineup for the penultimate month of summer. Switchfoot, the San Diego alt.rock band that took its name from a surfing term, first gained a foothold (sorry) in the contemporary Christian music world before crossing […]