Tag archives: Hershey Felder

Gershwin a Win
By Richard Mineards   |   June 3, 2025

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 […]

Rockin’ Rachmaninoff
By Richard Mineards   |   April 15, 2025

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 […]

Gardening with Rachmaninoff
By Steven A. Blum   |   April 8, 2025

Pianist-actor-playwright-producer Hershey Felder has appeared on stages across the world more than 6,000 times in original works focused on a single famous composer. His works include George Gershwin Alone, Beethoven, Maestro Bernstein, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, Our Great Tchaikovsky, and A Paris Love Story – Debussy. A few of his similar filmed creations have […]

Creating Hope with Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama
By Steven Libowitz   |   May 20, 2021

It’s no surprise that UCSB Arts & Lectures has turned to the XIV Dalai Lama for the keynote event in its year-long 2021-2022 Creating Hope programming initiative. After all, not only has His Holiness, who is believed to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, spent much of his life encouraging people to be […]

Mission: Impossible Objects
By Steven Libowitz   |   March 10, 2021

Ed Lister, who is known in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as a skilled scenic artist with credits in the theater credits and mural making, has created a series of vibrant abstract silk screen prints, or serigraphs. They were made starting in the early 1970s while he was teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School […]

VADA VADA Voom Art Show on Lobero’s Back Wall Quite a Project(ion)
By Steven Libowitz   |   February 11, 2021

Most of what the students in the Visual Arts & Design Academy (VADA) at Santa Barbara High create is seen on the school’s near-downtown campus. But the program has made a lot of efforts to exhibit the students’ artwork in public places, including showcases as part of the monthly First Thursday gallery walk. But with […]

Felder in Florence Salutes Tchaikovsky
By Steven Libowitz   |   December 24, 2020

Following the imposition of stricter protocols to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the area’s only planned live performance of The Nutcracker, a Concerts in Your Car production from Ventura Ballet, was canceled. Musician and theater impresario Hershey Felder, though, performs a pandemic pivot to point his next streaming production, Hershey Felder, TCHAIKOVSKY, toward the composer’s score […]

Felder Finds a New Forum: 6Qs with the musician-actor
By Steven Libowitz   |   November 26, 2020

Prior to the arrival of COVID-19, veteran virtuoso playwright, performer, and pianist Hershey Felder had made a career out of creating and performing solo shows about composers Claude Debussy, George Gershwin, Frédéric Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Berlin, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that have been seen across a wide range of […]

He’s Got Rhythm, He’s Got Music
By Steven Libowitz   |   September 10, 2020

For nearly 20 years, Hershey Felder has made a career out of creating one-man shows in which he portrays and plays famous artists from recent and centuries-old history, and the novel coronavirus hasn’t caused him to slow down much at all. Ensemble Theatre Company got in the mix when it presented his Hershey Felder: Beethoven […]