Tag archives: Ensemble Theatre
Billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso nearly came a cropper at the final hurdle when developing the Rosewood Miramar, he has revealed. Rick was at a ribbon cutting ceremony at the oh-so tony five star resort and recounted he was in our Eden by the Beach for the final hearing on his $200 million development, […]
The mad social whirl was at full throttle when UCSB Arts & Lectures hosted parties for guest speakers at the Granada and Campbell Hall. The first was held at the charming Montecito residence of Audrey and Tim Fisher, the former home of actor James Brolin, for global photographer James Balog, who spoke about his new […]
Montecito animal activist Gretchen Lieff and Beanie Baby billionaire Ty Warner‘s luxury beachside club, the Coral Casino, hosted a boffo bash for the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, which last year helped 3,297 animals in distress. The event, Love Our Wildlife, was a “friend raiser” to also help garner funds for the 31-year-old organization’s busiest […]
Santa Barbara Revels, presenting its 11th anniversary production at the Lobero, moved to Ireland this year after its Alta California Rancho period piece in 2017. “We wanted to honor the strength and courage of the intrepid Irish emigrants who left their homeland in the early 1900s, specially those who might have traveled on the S.S. […]
Long time Southern California and frequent Ensemble Theatre Company director Jenny Sullivan doesn’t want people to make same mistake she did, which was to wait until the last performance of The Legend of Georgia McBride when it ran at the Geffen Theater in LA in spring 2017. “It was so funny and so moving. I […]
Ensemble Theatre Company’s third annual Ghost Light Night was a real thriller! The 175-guest fête, which was expected to raise around $225,000, kicked off in the gardens of the Santa Barbara Club, when a local group of wonderfully costumed and choreographed players performed the late Michael Jackson’s hit “Thriller,” and then led supporters two blocks […]
It was like a scene from a Merchant-Ivory movie when CAMA – the Community Arts Music Association – kicked off its 100th anniversary season with a Music on the Riviera reception for major donors at Riviera Park. More than 100 guests strolled the grounds, seeking shade under the umbrellas from the blazing sun, as the […]
It couldn’t have been a more splendiferous end to the Music Academy of the West’s 71st annual summer fest when the Academy Festival Orchestra, under Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, in his academy debut, performed with the L.A. Master Chorale, under artistic director Grant Gershon, at a sold-out Santa Barbara Bowl. Soprano Susanna Phillips […]
A mother-daughter collaboration that started 10 years ago has just come to fruition. Montecito resident Helen Drachkovitch and her cultural anthropologist daughter, Nicole Sault, who lives in Palo Alto, have just published Celebramos/Let’s Celebrate: Seis Traditions de Mexico/ Six Traditions From Mexico, a bilingual work. “It all started a decade ago when my mother became […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s not about Halloween! When you see a luminescence in the pitch of the night in theatres across the land, it’s the Ghost Light. According to the Ensemble Theatre program, “The haunting bulb stands (a bulb on a stick) bare-bones and aglow defying the inky darkness and beckoning spirits to come hither and play.” Many […]
