Tag archives: play
Last summer, the community theater company at Carpinteria’s Alcazar Theatre launched Laugh Out Loud, a one-weekend summer series of several short comedic plays, both to keep its actors and the community engaged, and to test the waters of producing live theater during the pandemic. Audiences responded, filling up more than half of the seats at […]
The pandemic might have been a cause for pause for most of us, but Claudia Hoag McGarry took a different path. Not only did the screenwriter-turned-playwright take up watercolor painting – she’s created more than 575 pieces in 27 months, several hundred of which have sold online or, more recently, at Kathryne Designs in Montecito […]
Ensemble Theatre Company staged its tour-de-force one-man show Vincent at the New Vic, originally presented by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in March to sold-out audiences as it mounted its highly acclaimed Vincent Van Gogh exhibition. The play paints a thoughtful, imaginary scenario about one of the most famous names in the art world […]
Racial dynamics are at the forefront of the Ensemble Theatre Company’s latest New Vic show American Son. The nail-biting drama, directed by Jonathan Fox, takes place at a Miami, Florida, police station where, in the middle of the night, the parents of an African American teenager anxiously await news of their son, who may have […]
After two false starts forced by the pandemic, ETC is finally bringing American Son to the New Vic Theatre for a mid-April run. The nail-biting drama takes place in real-time in the waiting room of a Miami police station where the parents of a bi-racial African American teenager anxiously await news about their son, who […]
The Wolves, the first play by former college actress Sarah DeLappe to be produced and professionally written while she was still an undergraduate at Yale, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Now, SBCC Theatre closes out its season with the local premiere of the piece, ostensibly about a girls’ indoor soccer […]
The Rubicon Theatre Company (RTC) was the first of the local companies to find a way to produce something for its audiences when the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down way back in early spring 2020. Indeed, RTC was the first regional theater company in the country to offer a socially distanced drive-in series, bringing such […]
Ken Ludwig’s stage version of Murder on the Orient Express was written at the request of the Agatha Christie Estate, so the classic Christie mystery – which was also adapted into a hit movie – was in good hands when it premiered in March 2017 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Five years later, The […]
Spring is almost here and the Montecito Library is keen to bring back some weekly programs for younger children! Our answer? Stay and Play, an outdoor opportunity for little ones to play and their grownups to chill. No rushing to get anywhere at a certain time or abrupt transitions, just a wide window of time […]
While film lovers will be flocking to Santa Barbara over the next 10 days to watch scores of world premieres and welcome widely loved movie stars in the Arlington and other cinemas, the Ensemble Theatre will be staging a premiere of its own just across Victoria Street in the New Vic, one that also boasts […]
The Westmont College Festival Theatre and John Blondell, Westmont’s award-winning director and professor of theater arts, stage The Miser, or the School for Lies, Moliere’s funny, highly theatrical on-the-verge-of-the-absurd comedy February 25-26, March 3-5 at 7:30 pm, and March 5 at 2 pm, all in Westmont’s Porter Theatre. Tickets are $10 for students and seniors, […]
Sin City has never seen anything like it! Santa Barbara warbler Katy Perry unleashed her considerable talents with the debut of her three-month residency at the Conrad, a 59-story red 1,496-room monolith, part of the new Resorts World $4.3 billion complex of three tony hostelries with a total of 3,506 rooms and a 117,000-square-foot casino […]
The venerable Granada was socially gridlocked when Westmont College held its 17th annual Christmas Festival “Salvation For All” over two days given the demand for tickets. Michael Shasberger, Adams professor for music and worship, who is retiring in May after 16 years, created the hugely popular event and has directed it each year, normally at […]
Santa Barbara writer Claudia Hoag McGarry has been involved in the arts in town for more than 30 years, including teaching English Skills at SBCC for more than three decades, publishing three novels including two thrillers and a young adult memoir, producing four plays all in the historical drama genre, and writing screenplays and even […]
There was a time when the very word “toys” was magic to me, and the idea of a big department store, with a whole section devoted to them, was probably as close as I’ll ever come in this life to conceiving Heaven. Of course, there have always been children at play — and children must […]
Back in 1988 nobody could have predicted the success or impact of Storm Reading, a theatrical play starring and based on the life experiences of Neil Marcus, a humorist-philosopher who lives with a neurological disorder called Dystonia that dramatically impacts his ability to speak and control movement. That includes Rod Lathim, who as head of […]
Rather than collapsing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, PlayFest Santa Barbara is instead pivoting to digital to co-host an encore stream of Angela J. Davis’ Agathe, which was selected from an international pool of new works. The highly praised digital rehearsed reading of the play, which was directed by Saundra McLain and produced […]
I’ve told you I’m a realist. But that’s not the whole story. Reality is too hard to face all the time. That (I presume) is why we have sleep and dreams. But even when I’m awake, I like to think of life as a game. Games create their own reality. Within the game, nothing outside […]
6Q’s with the writer of RTC’s A Song Rubicon Theatre’s September Blitz, a month-long festival featuring more than 30 events in 30 days, takes a turn away from classic fare toward a moving and innovative new one-act play with music from emerging young playwright Taylor Fagins. Preston Butler III, Greta Oglesby, Krystle Rose Simmons, and […]
“Play is the meaningless moment that makes the day memorable and worthwhile.” – Stuart Brown, MD, author and founder of the National Institute of Play In the first three months of the pandemic there was a lot of COVID-humor in our inbox. We laughed online at ourselves as we coveted toilet paper, binged on everything […]
