Tag archives: play

Society Invites was contacted by Jeannine Morgan – former Head of School for El Montecito School in Montecito (ELMO) – about her son Judson Pearce, who has volunteered to direct the Providence School play Annie Jr. The performances are April 25 – 26, tickets are on sale now. Proceeds benefit the school. Jeannine is a […]

Hurricane Hilary heading up the coast to California when his own teenage daughter and several of her friends were due to drive back from a weekend in San Francisco was the impetus for prolific writer Jay Martel to create his latest play. But Parents in Chains – which has its official world premiere at Ensemble […]

Sanctuary City, by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok, makes its Central Coast debut in what could scarcely be a more timely moment. The powerful coming-of-age story is set in Newark in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it could easily be taking place in any city right now.  In the coming-of-age story, two […]

A park ranger and her trainee find blood in the snow outside a trailer. There’s an open door, but no people. Where they went, what happened and how to figure it all out as an impending winter storm arrives is the story of a new play called Strange Birds that centers on five strong, smart […]

Critics have unanimously praised Florian Zeller’s The Father, a play that takes the unusual perspective of presenting the world from the vantage of an elderly but still elegant man going through progressive stages of dementia. His shifting and relative reality – including concepts of such taken-for-granted facts as time and place – wreaks havoc on […]

Indecent is a 2015 play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, inspired by the controversial events surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch. God of Vengeance was briefly produced on Broadway in 1923 before the producer and cast were arrested and convicted of obscenity due to the play’s depiction of lesbian love. Vengeance […]

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 […]