Grease was indeed the word at City College’s Garvin Theatre when the 1950s rock musical launched the Theatre Group’s latest season. Director Katie Laris has done a tip-top job with two excellent collaborators, UCSB choreographer Christina McCarthy and musical director David Potter, More than 150 auditioned for the colorful, energized show, with grueling rehearsals, four […]
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 […]
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ON STAGE by the SBHS Forge Staff It’s a Monday morning, two weeks before opening night, and Otto Layman, the head of Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) Performing Arts, surveys a stage where an array of people and tasks occur simultaneously: students are painting or hanging lights under the guidance of lighting designer Mike Madden […]
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 […]
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 […]
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For Santa Barbara’s first PuppetPalooza, creator Mitchell Kriegman has come up with a festival so vast and imaginatively populated with puppets, marionettes, and just about every other possible permutation of the genre giant and small, including literally the hand and glove, even his own character Clarissa might have a hard time explaining it all to […]
Happy Traum is merely the opening act for the next Sings Like Hell show starring Jack Sh*t, the super group comprising sidemen for singer-songwriter legends making at least its third visit to the Lobero. But before guitarist Val McCallum (Jackson Browne), drummer Pete Thomas, and bassist Davey Faragher (both Elvis Costello) hit the stage with […]
Anthony Giardina‘s 2010 play The City of Conversation has proven to be even more prophetic than even he might have imagined. Set in Washington, D.C., during three important periods in recent American politics, the play spans nearly 30 years, from Fall of 1979 to January 2009, and traces the evolution of 1960s-raised Hester Ferris from […]
When your company is named after a fungus that grows on cow poop, clearly you’re involved with an outfit that loves playfulness as well as metaphors. Pilobolus formed at Dartmouth back in 1971 but has grown more explosively than its light-seeking namesake, now numbering more than 120 dance works in its repertoire, including three entities […]
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 […]
