The teen theatre company Lights Up! launches its seventh season with an unusual offering during the holiday season: the sci-fi horror romantic comedy/rock musical Little Shop of Horrors. An off-beat work from Howard Ashman and Alan Menken – better known for their Disney musicals The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin – Shop […]
Don’t make this mix-up mistake: The marvelously mesmerizing performance of MOMIX Alice at the Granada in October was actually a make-up from a date postponed by the water damage at the theater last winter. So American Theatre Guild’s 2024-25 season of Broadway at the Granada isn’t getting underway until November 26-27, when the official North […]
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If truth be told, UCSB Theater’s Annie Torsiglieri probably would have preferred that The Threepenny Opera, which she is directing at UCSB’s Performing Arts Theater, wouldn’t have turned out quite so resonant for its November 15-23 run. But she very intentionally chose Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s groundbreaking musical – and dark satirical commentary on […]
SBCC Theatre jumps the gun on the holiday season, turning to Tony Award-winning playwright Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge for its student showcase, even before the campus collectively takes a break to talk – er, eat – turkey. A twist on the classic A Christmas Carol, Binge gets all unhinged in a […]
Santa Barbara’s three major public high schools’ theaters are all buzzing this weekend with their big fall productions. SBHS’s Teenage Wasteland is an original piece of theater created by the Theatre Department’s 19 performers, including three student designers and eight ensemble members who have come up with a combined performance, concert, love story, fashion show […]
The Westmont Theatre Arts Department staged a hilarious version of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps that brought plenty of laughs through an unrelenting barrage of creative set-design gags and physical comedy. Director Mitchell Thomas masterfully squeezes out every laugh while navigating a plot that doesn’t take itself seriously. This was good lighthearted fun at its […]
For the last several years, New Beginnings’ annual fall fundraiser has moved beyond the typical wine-and-dine gala concept to actually put the focus on the longtime nonprofit’s areas of service – via presenting a theatrical event that mirrors themes of issues it works to combat. This year’s offering, The Boys Next Door, examines issues of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
The decorous sunken lawn in front of Pierre Lafond is ordinarily a still point of shade-dappled peace, the calming eye of any given day’s hurricane. The trees lean in with leafy solicitude, birdsong seasons the scented air, and the good people of Montecito engage in lively conversation, gesturing and gabbing. Into this bucolic set piece […]
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 […]
