Tag archives: Rubicon Theatre Company

The title role in Jesus Christ Superstar was neither the first nor the last major part in a musical or movie for Ted Neeley, as he had a record deal at 22, played the lead role of Claude in both the New York and Los Angeles productions of the breakthrough rock musical Hair, and later […]

Despite being nominated for the Outer Critics and Drama League Awards and hailed by The New York Times’ critic as a rare “funny and moving, wonderful and weird” play from the “most singular voice of his generation, [one that’s] humane, literate, and slyly hilarious,” Will Eno’s 2004 The Realistic Joneses is only now having its […]

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 […]

The concept behind Almost, Maine, written by Tony-nominated actor John Cariani best known for playing forensic expert Julian Beck on Law & Order, is very simple on the surface, according to Stephanie Coltrin, Rubicon Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director, who is helming RTC’s production this month. The play is composed of nine vignettes featuring nine different […]

The New Vic sounds like a theater in England, but the downtown venue is actually an old, converted church, although Ensemble Theatre Company’s lavish remodeling left few of those attributes visible inside. But there’s no way ETC’s old digs at the antiquated Alhecama Theater could have supported the sets and stagecraft required for its next […]

Rubicon Theatre Company (RTC) officially kicks off its first full season since the pandemic shuttered its doors in February 2020 with a new production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at 8 pm on Friday, April 29. That would be exactly 30 years and just shy of five hours since the not guilty verdicts were announced […]

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 […]

Later this month, Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre Company finally reopens, more than two years after the pandemic put the kibosh on live theater everywhere, and long after virtually every other venue in the area has returned to roughly regular schedules. The mounting of theater shows again at the converted church a few blocks from downtown Ventura […]

The COVID pandemic has been an ongoing career if not a personal crisis for a lot of musicians around the world. But for Drew McManus, the shutdown actually afforded him a chance to slow down, regroup and, most importantly, reconnect with his roots in the mountains of Montana. Although he was born in the western […]

Ed Lister, who is known in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as a skilled scenic artist with credits in the theater credits and mural making, has created a series of vibrant abstract silk screen prints, or serigraphs. They were made starting in the early 1970s while he was teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School […]

Rubicon Theatre in Ventura has done a lot of great work, from classic musicals to heart-rending dramas to serving as a home for developing new works. But over the years one show has stood out as qualifying for all three of those categories: Little Miss Scrooge, subtitled “A Dickensian Christmas Story,” which was conceived by […]

PCPA previews America’s annual fall feast two month’s early with Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, the second in its new series of staged reading previews of relatively new works of current interest. The “bitingly funny satire” find good intentions colliding with absurd assumptions as a troupe of supposedly racially awakened white teaching artists are tasked […]

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 […]

Every arts organization has responded to the coronavirus crisis in their own way and in their own time, from raiding the archives to shutting down completely to, in the case of Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre (see above), trying innovative new ways to still go live and in person despite the pandemic. PCPA Theaterfest, which in normal […]

Actress-singer Teri Bibb has played the role of understudy-turned-star Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera more than 1,000 times, both on Broadway and with the national tour that included singing a command performance at the White House. A veteran whose experience includes appearing in more than 50 musicals across the country, Bibb’s credits […]

When the coronavirus caused shutdowns in California in mid-March, the married couple who run the Rubicon Theatre Company thought at first that maybe the Ventura outfit could just wait out the virus, postpone a couple of shows and get going again later in the spring. When it became clear that the Ventura venue wouldn’t be […]

Carey Crim finished her original draft of Never Not Once – which gets its area premiere at the Rubicon Theatre Company this weekend – three months before the revelations about Harvey Weinstein exploded into the #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017. “So it became unexpectedly – and unfortunately – timely,” the playwright said over […]

Long time Southern California and frequent Ensemble Theatre Company director Jenny Sullivan doesn’t want people to make same mistake she did, which was to wait until the last performance of The Legend of Georgia McBride when it ran at the Geffen Theater in LA in spring 2017. “It was so funny and so moving. I […]