Tag archives: Ensemble Theatre Company
Brian McDonald has no trouble admitting to being a big fan of Barbra Streisand. “From when I first saw Funny Girl as a kid, I was just mesmerized,” he said. “I’ve just always found her incredible.” Which is part of what makes McDonald the perfect choice to star in Ensemble Theatre Company’s season-opening production of […]
By Lisa Duncan “I was one of those kids that didn’t know where he belonged,” Brian McDonald, artistic director of Ensemble Theatre Company, told supporters at ETC’s annual Curtain Up! Gala. With a smile, he recalled his mother watching him dress up as Shirley Temple for Halloween and thinking, “Maybe this guy is a theatre […]
By Lisa Duncan A warm summer evening, a glass of wine on the terrace, and a theater experience unlike any other welcomed guests to opening night of Every Brilliant Thing at Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic Theatre. Directed by Jenny Sullivan, narrated by Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, the production is staged in the round, allowing the audience […]
Mary Bridget Davies was just a teenager when she realized that her singing voice sounded a lot like that of Janis Joplin, the iconic rock singer who quickly shot to fame in the late 1960s before her accidental death from an overdose at 27. “My normal singing voice is pretty darn clean in comparison,” Davies […]
After the leather-jacketed Fonzie literally leapt over a shark while waterskiing in a famously foolish episode of Happy Days, the absurd scene birthed the phrase (and industry concept) “jumping the shark.” The damning term is applied when a creative endeavor has so run out of gas it wanders untethered into vibrant twaddle wholly divorced from […]
Ensemble Theatre Company continues its new policy of presenting a pay-what-you-can performance of each new production as its first preview before the weekend offering. So you can see the company’s much-anticipated West Coast premiere of the hit Broadway play, The Shark is Broken, based on the now well-known technical mishaps and personality clashes that so […]
Carpinteria’s Alcazar Theatre channels the radical era of the 1960s for the world premiere of Mark J Heller’s Social Insecurity, about an aging couple that long to experience the counterculture movement they just missed in their youth. Bea and Pete Lewis get a second chance at a retro-themed retirement community, where they encounter a free-spirited […]
Play It Forward is the annual benefit for Ensemble Theatre’s Education and Outreach programs, uniting award-winning theater pros and Broadway performers with talented young actors and community artists. This year’s benefit performance features a new concert version of All of Me, the comedy-musical formerly known as Hello! My Baby, written by longtime Montecito resident Cheri […]
Ensemble Theatre Company’s (ETC) supporter extraordinaire Dana White was honored at the annual Curtain Up! gala at the New Vic Theatre with a sunset dinner for 160 guests in the garden of the venerable Santa Barbara Club, which helped raise around $230,000. White hails from Connecticut and has called Santa Barbara home for more than […]
Ensemble Theatre winds up its 2024-25 season with one final weekend (through June 22) of Justice, a nearly new three-character musical that explores the first women appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor) early in their lives and careers up through the height of their judicial power. […]
What theatrical subject could be more suited to serious investigation than the first three female justices of the U.S. Supreme Court; the ladies who broke through a more than 200 year-old glass ceiling to reach the highest court in the land? Not to mention that Sandra Day O’Connor, the groundbreaker, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and […]
After the success of the show Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, actor Hershey Felder was back in our Eden by the Beach with his entertaining work George Gershwin Alone directed by Joel Zwick at the Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic. The show, which had sold-out runs from London to Broadway to Los Angeles, was retired by […]
Think of the Young Playwrights Festival as a reverse Launch Pad. The springtime program at Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic Theater gives aspiring playwrights ages 14-19 the opportunity to create a play that is produced and staged with professional directors and actors, and then presented as a staged reading at the theater. The Young Playwrights […]
Writer, actor and pianist Hershey Felder excels with the Ensemble Theatre Company’s latest world premiere production Rachmaninoff and the Tsar at the New Vic. Known internationally for his solo composer plays, for the first time he appears opposite another actor – British-Italian Jonathan Silvestri – in the role of the doomed ruler of Russia, Tsar […]
Hurricane Hilary heading up the coast to California when his own teenage daughter and several of her friends were due to drive back from a weekend in San Francisco was the impetus for prolific writer Jay Martel to create his latest play. But Parents in Chains – which has its official world premiere at Ensemble […]
The Ensemble Theatre Company’s presentation of a vastly entertaining new version of the Bard’s Hamlet, one of his best-known tragedies at the New Vic directed by Margaret Shigeko Starbuck, is not to be missed. The production is set in modern Denmark with Will Block playing the troubled titular character – with the Shakespearean text of […]
Shakespeare is hot in the Santa Barbara region: Hot on the heels of Rubicon Theatre presenting The Acting Company’s reinterpreted version of A Comedy of Errors, both Ensemble Theatre Company and PCPA are readying new productions of classics by the Bard. L.A. theater veteran Margaret Shigeko Starbuck is directing her own reimagined adaptation of Hamlet, […]
Talk about the Fab Four! The Tony Award-winning musical, Million Dollar Quartet staged by the Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic is set on December 4, 1956, when, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins were brought together at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, for […]
It’s way too much of a cliché to say that a rock concert blew the roof off the venue, but there’s no doubt that there will be a “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” at the New Vic Theatre when Ensemble Theatre Company performs Million Dollar Quartet from December 4-22. The Jerry Lee Lewis classic is […]
For the eighth consecutive year Atherton, California – 94027 – is America’s most expensive zip code while our rarefied enclave – 93108 – ranked Number 5 with a median property price of $5,052,000. The Hamptons’ Sagaponack and Water Mill ranked number two and three with median property prices just shy of $6 million, according to […]
