Tag archives: New Vic
UCSB Theatre’s long-standing new play development program Launch Pad moves off campus to downtown Santa Barbara for the first time for a special one-day only staged reading of two works-in-progress at the Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic Theatre on August 27. It’s the result of both a new one-year-old collaboration between ETC and Launch Pad […]
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 […]
Hershey Felder has spent a good part of the last 30 years portraying musical geniuses from Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff to George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein in his ongoing solo composer series. Now with his latest musical play, Felder is revealing the life and musical experiences of someone he knows much more intimately: […]
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 […]
Longtime Montecito resident and four-time Emmy Award winner (Cheers) and Tony nominee (Sister Act the Musical) Cheri Steinkellner thought she had seen the last of Hello! My Baby, her original musical set in the apex of the Tin Pan Alley/Gangs of New York era. The song-filled musical is about “King of the Song-Pluggers” Mickey McKee […]
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 […]
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 […]
A new comedy about texts, sex, and empty nests, Parents in Chains – written by Emmy and Peabody Award winner Jay Martel – is the latest Ensemble Theatre Company production at the New Vic. Directed by Andy Fickman, the play focuses on six Los Angeles parents dealing with communications from their teenagers driving home from […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ensemble Theatre Company opened its latest season at the New Vic with Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, directed by veteran actor Jamie Torcellini and written by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen. The five-member cast played a variety of characters with the blood-sucking count portrayed perfectly – not to mention amusingly – by muscle-bound hunk Adam […]
Social gridlock reigned at the Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic when it staged a sold-out Play It Forward: Legends of Broadway which raised more than $50,000 for the theater’s education and outreach programs. The celebratory concert, featuring the music of the greatest musical theater composers of our time, and veterans of the Great White Way […]
As a high school student with governmental aspirations, I attended a two-week program in Washington, D.C. to study constitutional law – one of the highlights on the syllabus was the promise to meet and hear one of the Supreme Court Justices speak. While Antonin Scalia may not have been my personal choice of who to […]
Broadway veteran John Rubinstein was a true tour de force in the New Los Angeles Repertory Company’s Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground by Richard Hellesen, presented by the Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic. Directed by multi-award winner Peter Ellenstein, the two-hour show, with simple but effective scenic design by Michael Deegan and Sarah […]
The Lehman Trilogy, a Tony Award winning three-man show by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Oanh Nguyen, at the Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic is not to be missed! The three-hour-long production, with two ten-minute intermissions, chronicles the rise and fall of the Lehman brothers, a 160-year journey of three immigrant […]
Ensemble Theatre Company’s latest New Vic production The Pianist of Willesden Lane, a true story about a young Jewish musician navigating the Nazi regime in Vienna and London during the Blitzkrieg, is a truly thought-provoking show. Told by Mona Golabek, a world-renowned Grammy nominated pianist and the daughter of Lisa Jura – a pianist who, […]
