Emotions ran high on opening night for Seared – the kitchen comedy sans kitsch that closes out Ensemble Theatre’s current season as well as artistic director Jonathan Fox’s career at the company. It came from both the smartly cast quartet of actors in the play about art-vs.-commerce and power struggles, but also the audience who […]
Two-time Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke didn’t hold back in describing her single summer as a vocal fellow at the Music Academy back in 2002. “It changed my life,” she said last week. “Part of it had to do with Marilyn Horne and the incredible faculty, including John Churchwell, but a big part was also that […]
Grace Rachow started her Santa Barbara Writers Conference (SBWC) journey as a student and budding scribe back in 1992, and soon became involved in its administration later in the decade before taking over as director in 2016. So she’s as thrilled as anyone to have the word-lover’s institution returning to an in-person gathering for the […]
From DakhaBrakha and The Linda Lindas to Lang Lang and Ballet Preljocaj, UCSB Arts & Lectures’ 2022-2023 season included a luminous lineup of both world-renowned and up-and-coming musicians in a variety of genres, dance companies of far-reaching dimensions, and a full slate of forward-thinking and timely speakers and spoken word artists. The season was a […]
As part of its ever-expanding efforts to simultaneously raise the level of artistry for its summer festival while also deeply engaging the local Santa Barbara community, the Music Academy is making its first real foray into reaching the Latino population in the area by bringing in soprano Ana María Martínez as a Mosher Guest Artist. […]
Bloomsday is the commemoration and celebration of the life and literary output of Irish writer James Joyce, and particularly his epic Ulysses, held annually on June 16, the single day span featured in the book and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom. Santa Barbara joined the Bloomsday community last year on the 100th anniversary of […]
When New Beginnings began serving Santa Barbara as a nonprofit half a century ago, providing confidential, therapeutic psychological testing, assessment, and counseling to low-income individuals and families in the greater Santa Barbara area was its core mission. Experienced masters-and-doctoral-level counselors support clients exploring life transitions, relationship issues, and any number of other concerns – including […]
It’s likely that Jonathan Fox’s tenure at Ensemble Theatre Company will be seared into the local theater community’s collective memory for many years to come. ETC’s artistic director is departing after 17 years at the helm, a period that saw the company move from the quaint Alhecama Theater to the gleamingly refurbished New Vic, and […]
If the Music Academy’s eight-week summer festival (see separate feature) is the main course on the current classical calendar, the equally venerable Ojai Music Festival is a savory and sumptuous appetizer as the already contemporary boundary-pushing fest takes a further step afield with the highly-decorated roots music superstar Rhiannon Giddens as 2023’s musical director and […]
After 75 years of having the Music Academy (née “of the West”) in our backyard – marked last summer by a celebratory return to fully in-person programming – it can be easy to take the institute’s summer festival for granted. But the truth is, the Academy not only keeps the classical music scene afloat during […]
Santa Barbara nonprofit Community Environmental Council has long been on the forefront of the environmental movement ever since its founding more than 50 years ago. Among its groundbreaking accomplishments in those early decades, CEC founded one of the nation’s first ecology centers, as well as the first learning and research community gardens. CEC was instrumental […]
Asleep at the Wheel was just a country western band playing regular mountain music when Ray Benson co-founded the group in Paw Paw, West Virginia, back in 1970 – but after discovering Western Swing pioneer Bob Wills a few years later, the band never looked back. “I was 19 when we started out, but as […]
We’re hearing hints that suggest SB Acoustic might be moving on after the pair of shows at SOhO this weekend. Whether that’s relocating, retreating, reworking or reconfiguring we don’t know, but John Jorgenson and Carl Verheyen should provide a doubly delightful denouement. Guitarist Jorgenson is appearing with his J2B2 quartet, aka The John Jorgenson Bluegrass […]
Chaucer’s has booked a whopping four in-store signings at its Loreto Plaza location this week, starting with No. 1 New York Times bestselling Young Adult author P. C. Cast on Sunday afternoon, June 4. Cast, whose novels count more than 20 million copies in print in over 40 countries, had the last installment of herTales […]
Rona Barrett is most famous for her long career as a pioneering journalist, columnist, broadcaster, and producer who covered the entertainment industry for decades. The trailblazer interviewed a huge swath of superstars, including Raquel Welch and Tom Cruise, broke countless stories from the world of Hollywood, and became the public’s trusted insider – documenting the […]
Credit Covid as an uninvited collaborator for Ninette Paloma in creating her new evening-length aerial dance work making its debut this weekend. That’s because La Escalada (The Climb) grew out of both the restrictions and the sense of isolation engendered by the pandemic – as well as Paloma’s Santa Barbara Centre for Aerial Dance’s new […]
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the allegorical play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy), already turns typical storytelling on its ear as it involves a courtroom trial over the ultimate fate of perhaps the most famous sinner in the story of the Bible. To examine existing understandings of heaven, […]
The ephemeral meets the everlasting in the world of arts at the Old Mission Santa Barbara this Memorial Day weekend. I Madonnari – the annual chalk drawing that turns the pavement in front of the Santa Barbara Mission into a huge series of asphalt canvases for artists of all ages – celebrates its 37th edition […]
The Mission Poetry Series closes out its current season, which was curated by 2022-23 Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emma Trelles, with an event simply titled “Three Poets in Spring.” The free event offers readings and a meet and greet with the poets Catherine Esposito Prescott, Gabriel Ibarra, and Florencia Milito at 1 pm on Saturday, […]
It’s startling to realize that while the Lobero Theatre has been a beacon for the arts in Santa Barbara for 150 years, Chubby Checker has been around for more than half of those years, and is still going strong. As part of the Lobero’s year-long Ovation celebration, the now-81-year-old 1960s rocker who propelled “The Twist” […]
If you have the inclination and the stamina, you can catch live performances from some of the oldest members of the musical community and several of its youngest on a single Saturday this weekend. The Prime Time Band, a group of amateur musicians whose ages span from 40 to 90-plus but definitely skews toward the […]
Local artists are the focus of “Mixed Up,” the new exhibit at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. The annual Tri-County Juried Exhibition was curated this year by Rae Dunn, popular Bay Area-based ceramic artist, designer, author, and illustrator most recognized for her line of household wares, who will also display a small exhibition of […]
Despite its official title, Old Spanish Days is making it abundantly clear this year that it’s not an organization firmly attached to being stuck in its old ways. Not only did Fiesta, one of the area’s most popular and long-standing cultural festivals, earlier announce that it had chosen a male as Spirit of Fiesta for […]
Kimberly Ray, the founder and CEO of Marine Conservation Network, remembers what it was like to grow up in and on the water. As the daughter of a fisherman, she spent countless hours swimming, diving, snorkeling – “Whatever I could do to get in the water,” she recalled. Wanting to continue that path, Ray earned […]
As might be expected with an organization that has been around for 100 years, there have been a lot of changes at United Way of Santa Barbara County (UWSBC) over the course of a century of service that began in 1923. Originally known as the Santa Barbara Community Chest, the nonprofit’s model focused almost exclusively […]
Jazz singer Tierney Sutton’s Friday, May 12, show at the Lobero Theatre, the nine-time Grammy nominee’s first concert at her self-professed favorite venue in the world, is actually two concerts in one. Sutton – who in the interim not only released a sequel to her 2014 collaboration with classically trained Parisian guitarist-arranger Serge Merlaud, but […]
Before Jack Harwood was named Spirit of Fiesta on April 15, people really couldn’t have been faulted for not knowing that a male could actually be chosen as the Spirit – after all, in the 73-year history of the tradition that began in 1949, only girls and young women have been named to the coveted […]
Banjo player Noam Pikelny and guitarist Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers have teamed up with bassist and founding former member, Greg Garrison of Leftover Salmon fame, and mandolinist Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse) to form a bluegrass bound band called Mighty Poplar. Born out of impromptu backstage jams at festivals, Mighty Poplar lets the members return […]
During the lockdown period of the COVID pandemic, the Westmont College-spawned Lit Moon Theatre met online for nearly two years as an international collective of artists and actors. The 18-member group created online versions of Libby Appel’s translations of Chekhov plays: Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters,and Ivanov. This weekend, Lit Moon World emerges in person with […]
Steven Gilbar – attorney, artist, litterateur, gadfly – is Montecito’s answer to the Gutenberg press. This lone figure’s prolific authorship is surely responsible for our community’s overweening literacy – the screamfests about Dickens over breakfast, the fisticuffs over the provenance of the term “Chicken à la King.” Gilbar, once and future member of the California […]
Homelessness has been growing in Santa Barbara, where last year nearly 2,000 people were living without shelter, a situation that has been very visible as evidenced by the number of encampments encroaching along railroad paths, roadsides, and waterfronts throughout the county. The same story exists in virtually every corner of California in what increasingly seems […]
Three long years after the original plan, the Lobero Theatre Chamber Music Project is finally getting the chance to perform its first series of concerts in a full-fledged festival format, launching what is sure to be one of the classical music highlights of the year. The project grew out of the ashes of the Santa […]
The Black Keys saunter onto the Santa Barbara Bowl stage on the heels of their latest album, 2022’s Dropout Boogie. The garage rock/raw blues duo, with singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney, was founded in Akron, Ohio, more than two decades ago. They saw their commercial breakthrough with the studio album and hit single […]
Please bear with us as we share about the multi-date month of funny shows during the merry month of May from Bear Cave Comedy, the folks who feature titanically talented comics on the tiniest stages. Samantha Bearman, aka Sam Bear, hosts the Not So Secret Comedy show on May 4 at McConnell’s Ice Cream’s downtown […]
Montecito Journal correspondent Leslie Westbrook produced Voces de Old Town Carpinteria, the short documentary focusing on five Carpinterians who attended one of California’s last segregated schools – Aliso Elementary, which was “Mexicans Only” until it desegregated 75 years ago back in 1947. The film premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February, and […]
The programming for the Santa Barbara Symphony’s milestone 70th anniversary has resulted in a sensational and supremely successful season, a nine-month musical journey that has weaved together a variety of collaborative explored genres and cultural traditions. Concerts have cut a wide swath across and beyond what is traditionally considered classical music, including such uniquely Santa […]
The 2003 epic period war-drama Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World concerns a British captain pushing his ship and crew to their limits in pursuit of a French war vessel off the South American coast. Based on Patrick O’Brian’s beloved series of novels set in the Napoleonic Wars, the film received 10 […]
Love & Justice: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera – is the second film in Lompoc native and former Santa Barbara resident Kerry Candaele’s Beethoven trilogy, and an effort we may safely describe as a case of art imitating life imitating art. Candaele, who taught for years at Cate School, spent the last decade […]
It’s been four years since Earth Day in Santa Barbara – where the annual celebration originated nearly 50 years ago – occupied Alameda Park for a weekend festival. But, hey, in the relative timeline of the planet, that is barely more than a nanosecond in a human life. Or maybe not, given some of the […]
If Earth Day is all about the environment and ecology – you know, healthy organic food? – another of Santa Barbara’s long-running family-oriented festivals takes an altogether different tack: we’re talking corn dogs and cotton candy. We’re also talking farming, enthralling exhibits, and a full focus on fun. Yes, it’s the Santa Barbara Fair & […]