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 […]
Pacific Conservatory Theatre’s Solvang Festival Theatre season comes to a close with The Agitators, a powerful two-hander about two titans of America’s troubled history that runs for just 10 days, Aug. 29-Sept. 8. Focusing as much on the friendship between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony over the course of five decades as their tireless […]
The Music Academy of the West third Mariposa Concert Series, concerts and performances – each with a connection to at least one MAW alum – at Hahn Hall on the Miraflores campus is presenting its most ambitious season yet. The array of visionary artists, with a repertoire that spans more than 700 years, most assuredly […]
Recovery from the pandemic is still a part of our world, and if there’s anything that hasn’t fully come back, it might be our shared experiences of humor and magic. Combining those two for an immersive weekend is the point behind the first annual Comedy & Magic Festival at the Alcazar Theatre in Carpinteria. Fourteen […]
It’s been a couple of years since the local Nebula Dance Lab has produced its HHII Dance Festival, so Selah Dance Collective has stepped up to offer something similar in the same Center Stage Theater space this weekend. While the event won’t be as wide-ranging nor as long in duration as HHII, the vibrant and […]
If Donald Trump can re-post deepfake AI images implying that Taylor Swift has endorsed him in response to her terrorist threat-canceled European shows, there’s certainly no reason that Out of the Box theater company – which is much more politically/socially aligned with Swift’s actual proclivities – can’t co-opt the title of the pop singer’s massive, […]
Violinist Jessica Guideri, concertmaster of the Santa Barbara Symphony, and Amy Tatum, the orchestra’s principal flutist, head half a block south of their normal Granada Theatre venue to play a series of pop-up performances in the galleries of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on August 25. The pair of musicians will play a combination […]
Missed Robert Zemeckis at the Granada earlier this month when the Montecito moviemaker made it down the mountain to intro Romancing the Stone and launch the four-film retrospective as part of the Home Movies Centennial celebration? No worries. Zemeckis will also be on hand for a pre-screening chat at SBIFF’s Riviera Theatre prior to a […]
It’s been more than a decade since the eloquent words of William Shakespeare have been recited in the all-natural environs of Elings Park, the huge private nonprofit open space high above the Mesa that’s perfect for performances of the Bard’s best. But now late summer is bringing two different productions of Shakespeare plays to Godric […]
There are likely more Elton John tribute acts than Top 10 hits produced by Sir Elton himself over his more than 50-year-career. Page 1 of a Google search yields such bands as Simply Elton, Almost Elton John and Ultimate Elton, as well as Rocket Max, The Rocket Man Show, Crocodile Mock and Elton Jeff & […]
Ensemble Theatre’s Pay It Forward: Legends of Broadway benefit event last weekend was a smashing success, a sold-out soirée of song which even had some special surprises, including an appearance by the Gay Men’s Chorus augmenting the half-dozen veterans of the New York stage, screen and TV as they all celebrated the music of 10 […]
Crossing Encephalartos horridus with Encephalartos woodii might sound like the formula for developing the world’s next deadly disease. But horticulturalists will realize that it’s actually a unique cycad hybrid – one that results in super spiny and glossy green leaves. The Lotusland-created specimen will be among the hundreds of rare and specimen plants available at […]