Tag archives: musical
Congratulations to director Mitchell Thomas, the cast, musicians and creative team for putting together such wonderful performances during Godspell, October 12-15. Unfortunately, the student actors and musicians have other artistic and scholarly commitments and the production has run its course. The enthusiasm and energy that emanated from this tightknit group of actors delighted audience members […]
Westmont presents Godspell, one of the most popular musicals of all time, on October 12-15 at 7:30 pm and October 14 at 2 pm in Westmont’s Porter Theatre. Music and theater students join together to stage a production for the first time since 2019. Tickets, which cost $20 for general admission and $12 for students […]
I recently enjoyed a Sunday evening Broadway Cruise onboard Hiroko Benko’s Condor Express whale-watching vessel here in Santa Barbara. The event featured two young singers – soprano Anikka Abbott and baritone Nicholas Ehlen – who sang classic numbers (accompanied by pianist Renée Hamaty) from a variety of Broadway musicals. The songs featured were such hits […]
Anastasia – the Broadway musical inspired by the 1997 animated film and the 1956 live-action movie that ran in New York from 2017-2020 and has been performed more than 2,500 times worldwide – has its Santa Barbara debut at The Granada Theatre on April 25-26 as part of The American Theatre Guild’s Broadway in Santa […]
Like every musical Out of the Box produces, Once is near and dear to company founder Samantha Eve’s heart. But its plot – the charming tale of an Irish busker musician ready to give up on his dream, the Czech immigrant in adoration of his songs, and their being drawn together by their shared love […]
There has been no dearth of film and Broadway shows about Aretha Franklin since the soul singer-songwriter star died in August 2018. First there was a documentary by Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack for a documentary about the recording of Franklin’s landmark 1972 Amazing Grace gospel album whose release the singer blocked for decades until after […]
New York Magazine called Ain’t Misbehavin’ the perfect Broadway musical when it premiered back in 1978, the show celebrating the music of Thomas “Fats” Waller and the joint is a jumpin’ scene of 1930s Harlem. Considered among the first major musical revues, Ain’t Misbehavin’ went on to win three Tony Awards, including best musical, and […]
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, the 2008 multiple Tony Award-winning musical that presaged Miranda’s even more astounding success with Hamilton, has been seen in town several times, including a PCPA production in 2016, Santa Barbara High two years later, and, in the 2021 film adaptation, just two months ago at the Sunken Gardens. But never […]
Carmen Jones, the Oscar Hammerstein musical that opened the latest season of the Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic, took two years to come to fruition given the pandemic delays, but it was clearly worth the wait! Directed by Artistic Director Jonathan Fox, the hugely entertaining show featuring an all-Black cast and based on […]
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Pacific Conservatory Theatre’s (PCPA) associate artistic director Roger DeLaurier is retiring at the end of the summer, heading off into the woods after 34 years and following one last time helming a show, which just so happens to be Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, a magical, memorable, […]
We were all clearly in the right aria when the Music Academy staged Tchaikovsky’s classic Eugene Onegin at the Granada, directed by Peter Kazaras, head of Opera UCLA. With the orchestra under Slovenian-born conductor Daniela Candillari, Yale-educated baritone Samuel Kidd as Onegin, and soprano Johanna Will as his lover, they were absolutely superb in the […]
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 […]
Also emerging from the pandemic for its first live theatrical production in 30 months, Out of the Box (OOB) is reviving a three-decade-old work as well, in this case tick, tick…Boom! (TTB), originally a semi-autobiographical one-man show that Jonathan Larson created in the early 1990s before his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Rent. Coincidentally, TTB […]
Nearly two years after taking over for the legendary Santa Barbara High School theater director Otto Layman, newcomer Justin Baldridge is getting his chance to put his stamp on the kind of big classic musical Layman loved to bring to the school’s auditorium. Chicago, the second longest-running show in Broadway history, is a song-and-dance filled […]
Something rotten happened to Lights Up!, the teen theater conservatory/company, which opened for business back in 2018. That would be the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course has been pretty rotten for all of us. But the pandemic really put Lights Up! through its paces as the company has been operating under the restrictions for more […]
Actress Jisel Soleil Ayon never suspected the casting directors were considering her for the lead role of Jenna when she auditioned for a part as a member of the ensemble for the musical Waitress last year. “I went through the entire process, from Zoom to my last call back in person, thinking I might at […]
The popularity of Simon & Garfunkel, the most famous duo in folk music history, remains unabated more than a half-century since the pair first broke up over artistic differences and personal issues following the release of the groundbreaking album Bridge Over Troubled Water. Problems persisted each time Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel contemplated reuniting after […]
Theater came roaring back to life in town since last we published these pages known as the Sentinel, with every local company save for Ventura’s Rubicon offering something to savor. I caught three of the productions, including the biggest of them all in the revival of Kismet,executive produced and presented by philanthropist/publisher Sara Miller McCune. […]
When the musical version of An Officer and a Gentleman plays November 9-10 at the Granada Theatre, it won’t be quite the singular sensation provided by the massive Santa Barbara-only one-off presentation of Kismet at the same venue two weekends ago. But Officer does offer a rare chance for locals to get an early viewing […]
The dictionary says “kismet” is an Arabic word that has come to mean fate or destiny in English. In theater, Kismet was a hit on Broadway back in the 1950s, as the love-and-duty musical about a glib-tongued street poet in old Baghdad whose family encounters princesses and a young caliph was smartly adapted from a […]
