Tag archives: Ensemble Theatre Company

It was kid’s play when Poppy Marché, a high-end children’s clothing emporium that just opened in the Montecito Country Mart, showcased its colorful wares at a pop-up Coral Casino bash. The founders – Heather Rosenfield and Jennifer Belushi, wife of actor Jim – joined young fans noshing on the grilled cheese bites and yogurt fruit […]

It was pores for thought when the Sense Spa at the Rosewood Miramar hosted a sunshine-drenched rooftop soirée when it introduced Anda, a new line of organic vegan products developed by Swedish Los Angeles-based cosmetologist Kerstin Florian and named after her late daughter. “We are the first ones to have it, which is quite a […]

Saundra McClain would seem to be an inspired choice to direct Ensemble Theatre Company’s area debut of Dancing Lessons even if she hadn’t already helmed several successful prior productions for ETC, including Intimate Apparel, In The Continuum, The Fantasticks, and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. While McClain found her earlier ETC efforts […]

Karen Zacarías’ theatrical adaptation of Into the Beautiful North, which gets its area debut in six performances over 10 days beginning Friday by UCSB Theater Department, is based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Luís Alberto Urrea – which served as the selection for UCSB Reads back in 2017. Urrea was inspired by the […]

Montecito Rotary Club has awarded ten $1,250 scholarships to high-performing City College vocational and career technology students. “For more than 25 years, the club has made scholarships available, with the total amount of support provided during this time exceeding $120,000,” says club foundation president, the aptly named Cathy Cash. “The club membership believes in the […]

Billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso nearly came a cropper at the final hurdle when developing the Rosewood Miramar, he has revealed. Rick was at a ribbon cutting ceremony at the oh-so tony five star resort and recounted he was in our Eden by the Beach for the final hearing on his $200 million development, […]

Montecito animal activist Gretchen Lieff and Beanie Baby billionaire Ty Warner‘s luxury beachside club, the Coral Casino, hosted a boffo bash for the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, which last year helped 3,297 animals in distress. The event, Love Our Wildlife, was a “friend raiser” to also help garner funds for the 31-year-old organization’s busiest […]

Santa Barbara Revels, presenting its 11th anniversary production at the Lobero, moved to Ireland this year after its Alta California Rancho period piece in 2017. “We wanted to honor the strength and courage of the intrepid Irish emigrants who left their homeland in the early 1900s, specially those who might have traveled on the S.S. […]

Long time Southern California and frequent Ensemble Theatre Company director Jenny Sullivan doesn’t want people to make same mistake she did, which was to wait until the last performance of The Legend of Georgia McBride when it ran at the Geffen Theater in LA in spring 2017. “It was so funny and so moving. I […]

Ensemble Theatre Company’s third annual Ghost Light Night was a real thriller! The 175-guest fête, which was expected to raise around $225,000, kicked off in the gardens of the Santa Barbara Club, when a local group of wonderfully costumed and choreographed players performed the late Michael Jackson’s hit “Thriller,” and then led supporters two blocks […]

It was like a scene from a Merchant-Ivory movie when CAMA – the Community Arts Music Association – kicked off its 100th anniversary season with a Music on the Riviera reception for major donors at Riviera Park. More than 100 guests strolled the grounds, seeking shade under the umbrellas from the blazing sun, as the […]

It couldn’t have been a more splendiferous end to the Music Academy of the West’s 71st annual summer fest when the Academy Festival Orchestra, under Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, in his academy debut, performed with the L.A. Master Chorale, under artistic director Grant Gershon, at a sold-out Santa Barbara Bowl. Soprano Susanna Phillips […]

A mother-daughter collaboration that started 10 years ago has just come to fruition. Montecito resident Helen Drachkovitch and her cultural anthropologist daughter, Nicole Sault, who lives in Palo Alto, have just published Celebramos/Let’s Celebrate: Seis Traditions de Mexico/ Six Traditions From Mexico, a bilingual work. “It all started a decade ago when my mother became […]

Ensemble Theatre Company has clearly found the recipe for success with the fifth and final show of its season at the New Vic. Cookin’ at the Cookery: The Music and Times of Alberta Hunter, a production about the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman infused with jazz and blues, is written, directed, and choreographed by […]

Jazz and blues legend Alberta Hunter – who reigned from the 1920s-1950s – did what would be almost unthinkable nowadays, setting aside her life as an artist at the peak of her career to become a hospital nurse shortly after her mother died. But when she was forced to retire at age 70 (though she […]

John Tufts‘s most recent pair of theater jobs featured the actor playing multiple roles. In I Am My Own Wife – in which Tufts just finished reprising his stunning turn in Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning one-man show that played at Ensemble Theatre in 2016 at the Laguna Playhouse – he played some 40 different roles, […]

Gaby Moreno moved from Guatemala to Los Angeles at 18 to pursue a career in music, and really never looked back. Not even musically, at least not for almost a decade. The singer-songwriter who blends blues, jazz, ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, and Latin American influences into something she calls “Spanish folk-soul” fell in love with […]

Santa Barbara’s musical youth shone at the First United Methodist Church when the youth opera and youth symphony under Opera SB artistic director Kostis Protpapas performed a creative production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s Flood. The 1958 work, based on a 15th-century Chester mystery play, featured bass-baritone Vincent Grana and mezzo soprano Chelsea Melamed as his […]

Ensemble Theatre Company’s charming production of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley is a real Yuletide cracker! The New Vic show, directed by Andrew Barnicle and written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, follows the colorful characters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice two years later as they gather at Pemberley, the stately pile of Fitzwilliam […]