Tag archives: play
The Lehman Trilogy, which not even two years ago won five Tony Awards for drama including Best Play, is set to make its Santa Barbara debut at Ensemble Theatre Company from April 6- 21. The play explores the human drama behind the Lehman brothers’ empire, tracing the family’s humble beginnings from their immigration from Bavaria […]
Playwright James Still has authored several dozen plays over his long career, many of which focus on a combination of political, cultural, and personal topics, including The Velocity of Gary, Appoggiatura, and the much-translated, globally produced And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank. But his current passion project is one […]
In the film Pretty Woman, courtesan Vivian catches lightning in a bottle when she meets Richard Gere’s charming and chivalrous billionaire businessman. Being cast in the title role of the film’s touring stage musical serves as a similarly unlikely lucky break for Ellie Baker. A really big break. Not only does Pretty Woman: The Musical represent […]
Both the #MeToo movement and The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s allegory about the Salem Witch Trials to examine the McCarthy-Era Red Scare of his time,inspired playwright Kimberly Belflower to come up with John Proctor Is the Villain. “What would it be like to be a teenager in rural America at that moment, feeling the world shift […]
If the innumerable performances of Shakespeare’s plays are any testament – theater has the ability to preserve a story for centuries. And it is exactly that preservation that the play Survivors hopes to achieve at the Raise Our Voices event at the Marjorie Luke Theatre this Thursday, October 19, at 7 pm. Written by Wendy […]
Every literate person knows who Shakespeare was, but if a couple of his aging actor friends hadn’t taken it upon themselves to get all of the Bard’s plays published in a single, bound volume after his death in the early 1616, chances are nobody would have ever heard of Romeo or Juliet, or Hamlet, King […]
PCPA Theaterfest kicks off its 2023 summer season on June 22 at the Solvang Festival Theater with Emma in the West Coast premiere of Joseph Hanreddy’s latest adaptation of a beloved Jane Austen novel. Opting to direct the playwright’s new piece was an easy choice for Polly Firestone Walker, a veteran PCPA resident artist (and […]
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the allegorical play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy), already turns typical storytelling on its ear as it involves a courtroom trial over the ultimate fate of perhaps the most famous sinner in the story of the Bible. To examine existing understandings of heaven, […]
Santa Barbara High School is the first of the local public schools to mount their spring production, leading the charge with the ever popular The Rocky Horror Show, the stage musical from which the 1975 cult film was adapted, running April 14-22 at the school’s theater. New theater department director Gioia Marchese chose the deliberately […]
Wet weather and storm watches didn’t keep people away from the opening weekend of the Westmont College Festival Theatre’s world premiere Diamond to Dust: A Flying A Fantasy. Director John Blondell and writer Michael Bernard, a local actor, educator and playwright, have brought Santa Barbara’s treasured cinematic history to the stage in a creative exploration […]
Westmont’s John Blondell discusses the world premiere play that will bring Santa Barbara’s silent film history to the stage in a Westmont Downtown Lecture Thursday, February 16, at 5:30 pm in the Community Arts Workshop (CAW), 631 Garden Street, in downtown Santa Barbara. “The Film Within a Play: Celebrating Santa Barbara’s Flying A Studios on […]
An age-old artists’ conundrum of the relationship between creativity and madness gets explored anew in a world premiere original play, The Patient, at Center Stage Theater this weekend. Peter Frisch, the veteran theater director, TV producer, and educator, collaborated on the writing with Shay Munroe, an L.A.-based actress and writer (and former student of Frisch’s […]
The late Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin was a larger-than-life character with vocal talents to match. The singer, songwriter, and pianist, the daughter of a Detroit Baptist church preacher who died in 2018 aged 76, was admirably brought to life again in the American Theatre Guild’s electrifying Broadway production R.E.S.P.E.C.T. at the Granada with four […]
What could be more festive for Yuletide than Charles Dickens’s classic ghost story A Christmas Carol? It is a show dear to my heart as it was the first-ever theater production I saw at the tender age of eight at the Northampton Repertory Theatre in England with a group of classmates from my local prep […]
Jumping from high school to college, and from a harrowing drama to an absurdist comedy, there’s also UCSB Theater’s offering of a long weekend of The Government Inspector at the Hatlen Theater on campus November 16-20. UCSB faculty member Michael Bernard, whose tenure in town following 10 years as Associate Artistic Director of the 52nd […]
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 […]
Given that Abraham Lincoln might be the most popular president in U.S. history, one whose story is the stuff of legends, it would seem there isn’t a whole lot left to tell about Abe. And even less likely, that a practicing insurance litigator would be the one to tell it. Yet, here’s Terrence L. Cranert, […]
The Play That Goes Wrong began life in 2012 in a British pub as a frothy vehicle for its three writers to star in. But the comedy about amateur actors attempting to mount a fictional murder mystery called The Murder at Haversham Manor that goes hopelessly awry, chock full of pranks and pratfalls and all […]
PCPA Theaterfest could hardly have found a more appropriate director than Catalina Maynard to helm Native Gardens, Karen Zacarias’ 90-minute play in which a battle between formerly friendly new neighbors over cultivating gardens in their separate yards echoes the polarization and cultural wars currently characterizing the country. Maynard has previous PCPA experience as an actor […]
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, […]
