Tag archives: Katie Laris

SBCC Comedy: From Simply Silly to Social Satire 
By Steven Libowitz   |   November 8, 2022

Fresh from the over-the-top antics, physical pratfalls, and intentionally terrible timing of The Play That Goes Wrong, which pulled out the stops – and mantle pieces and body parts, but no punches on closing night last weekend – SBCC Theatre Group segues into a student production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, one […]

A Rotten Spectacular
By Steven Libowitz   |   July 5, 2022

If campy and clever is your path to pleasure – at least in the theater – you can do no better than the mirth-making musical Something Rotten. The show, which earned 10 Tony nominations on Broadway just five years ago, takes place in the 1590s when the theatrically-minded Nick Bottom, whose lot is a lot […]

To the Garvin! New Revue Puts SBCC Theatre Group Back on Stage
By Steven Libowitz   |   July 22, 2021

If SBCC Theatre Group’s welcome back production at the Garvin Theatre this weekend evokes a feeling of deja vu, that might be because the show, now titled Here We Go Again! A Musical Revue is something of an update of one SBCC offered last fall. But while Looking Back, Looking Forward was made inside its […]

Skating on ‘Thin’ Ice for SBCC
By Steven Libowitz   |   April 22, 2021

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s crime caper series featuring the society couple Nick and Nora Charles, was first published as a magazine serial in 1933. But it wasn’t long before the tales of the high-life living couple and their dog, Asta, being drawn into the seamy underbelly of crime as amateur sleuths aiming to help […]

SBCC Takes on ‘Curious Incident’
By Steven Libowitz   |   February 27, 2020

Katie Laris wasn’t moved much when she took in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on Broadway back in 2014. Despite having enjoyed the original 2003 novel by Mark Haddon that is narrated in the first-person perspective by Christopher, a 15-year-old boy afflicted by unnamed Asperger syndrome, the veteran SBCC Theater professor […]

A Little Elbow Grease
By Richard Mineards   |   July 19, 2018

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 […]

Making His Case: Singer Returns to Town
By Steven Libowitz   |   July 12, 2018

Don’t talk to Peter Case about craft. The veteran singer-songwriter who started life as a power pop/punk rocker in such bands as The Plimsouls and The Nerves back in the 1970s and ’80s finds hearing that people love his “well-crafted songs” something close to an insult as it undercuts the artistry. Which seems reasonable, since […]