Tag archives: theater
On the Verge (OTV), Santa Barbara native Kate Bergstrom‘s repertory theatre company founded in 2015 with a mission of marrying new work created by female and LGBTQ writers with the local community of actors, directors, producers, and theater-goers, is taking a slight detour for its fourth year. In place of presenting several different plays in […]
Director Brad Carroll said it was just a coincidence that the sequel to the movie version of Broadway smash-hit musical Mamma Mia opened just days before PCPA Theaterfest’s production opens at the Solvang Festival Theater this Friday night, July 27. But there’s no accident that the long-standing conservatory booked the show as the centerpiece of […]
Don’t talk to Peter Case about craft. The veteran singer-songwriter who started life as a power pop/punk rocker in such bands as The Plimsouls and The Nerves back in the 1970s and ’80s finds hearing that people love his “well-crafted songs” something close to an insult as it undercuts the artistry. Which seems reasonable, since […]
Renowned New York theater producer Winthrop Ames (1870-1937) significantly influenced the development of Santa Barbara’s community arts programs, the opening of the new Lobero Theatre, and, by extension, Old Spanish Days Fiesta. Ames was born into a prominent family in Easton, Massachusetts, whose wealth derived initially from the manufacture of shovels and expanded exponentially through […]
It was some enchanted evening in the upper village when Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum launched his new well-researched, 386-page book Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution with a bibliophile bash at Tecolote, the lively literary lair. Purdum, who worked for The New York Times for more than 20 years as White House correspondent […]
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 […]
Sometimes it takes a village. That point was well demonstrated three weeks ago, when dozens of Montecito residents – mostly strangers to each other – gathered at a community roundtable to share what they’d learned so far from the Thomas Fire and Debris Flow insurance claim experience. There was some initial trepidation the group might […]
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 […]
Okay, let’s just come right out and say that Janet Adderley, she of the Santa Barbara Youth Ensemble Theatre (SBYET), is the best. Oh, sure, we’ve got Otto Layman at Santa Barbara High School squeezing and cajoling high-school kids to perform professional-style musical extravaganzas on the high school stage. Otto is as good as it […]
Santa Barbara photographer-journalist Brett Leigh Dicks has spent the better part of 20 years documenting desolate urban places, including the last five inside of abandoned prisons across several continents, where his pictures portray the passing of successive generations through structures rather than individuals. This weekend, his new exhibition of black-and-white shots from inside of decommissioned […]
Theatrical coach Janet Adderley has another winner on her hands with 13-year-old Dakota Lotus, who has just landed a star role in a new Disney TV series Coop and Cami Ask The World. Janet, who founded the Santa Barbara Youth Ensemble Theatre, is also helping coach Dakota, a Santa Barbara Middle School student, during the […]
Mark Morris got on the phone only a few minutes after the interviewer finished reading the latest about the furor surrounding Michelle Wolf’s controversial set at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Quickly it was apparent – but not surprising – that the choreographer famous for creating dances to curated classical music can be as crude […]
The saga of George Christie, Jr., from a Hell’s Angel head man to star of a one-man play based on his own life would be something almost beyond belief if it weren’t actually true. Christie, who was born in 1947 in Ventura and returned more than three decades later to found the Ventura chapter of […]
Ensemble Theatre has got a bona-fide hit on its hands with Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar‘s The Invisible Hand, directed by Jonathan Fox, at the New Vic. The riveting 2014 drama features John Tufts as an American banker kidnapped by an Islamic group in Pakistan, who bargains for his life with guards by demonstrating how […]
In an offering that wouldn’t appear out of place at a Fringe Festival, New York’s acclaimed theater company Bedlam makes its Santa Barbara debut on April 19-20 with a two-night stand featuring two different programs of classic works. The four actors take on 49 characters in adrenaline-fueled performances unexpectedly funny, stripped-down stagings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet […]
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, […]
Samantha Eve laughed when I told her that the only time I saw American Idiot, the Broadway musical version of Green Day’s iconic album, I hated it so much I wished I had left. Really loud. A story that was too hard to follow and a little dated, and so much incongruous activity I wasn’t […]
State Street Ballet was in fine form at the Lobero with its sold-out production of Romeo & Juliet to the classic music of Sergei Prokofiev. Deise Mendonca was a delight as Juliet while Australian Aaron Smyth, a former member of ABT II in New York and London’s Royal Ballet, played the dashing beau, with choreography […]
Greg Spencer, Westmont professor of communication studies, hopes that his new book, Reframing the Soul: How Words Transform Our Faith, will help members of the local community as they remember the challenging events of this past winter. On the night after the massive January 9 debris flow, Spencer said his last thought before going to […]
Hector Sanchez appeared in so many of the pieces performed at last year’s BASSH – the theatrical showcase for local dance professionals and their protégés to show off their choreography in a wide variety of social dance genres – that one was thinking they might have to change the name of the two-decades old production […]
