Tag archives: SBHS
Considering how many 1980s movies have been turned into Broadway musicals – from Footloose, Heathers, and Little Shop of Horrors to Fame, Xanadu, and even Back to the Future – it’s almost shocking nobody has adapted John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club for the stage. After all, the iconic film praised for its authentic portrayal of […]
Santa Barbara’s three major public high schools’ theaters are all buzzing this weekend with their big fall productions. SBHS’s Teenage Wasteland is an original piece of theater created by the Theatre Department’s 19 performers, including three student designers and eight ensemble members who have come up with a combined performance, concert, love story, fashion show […]
Nearly two years after taking over for the legendary Santa Barbara High School theater director Otto Layman, newcomer Justin Baldridge is getting his chance to put his stamp on the kind of big classic musical Layman loved to bring to the school’s auditorium. Chicago, the second longest-running show in Broadway history, is a song-and-dance filled […]
The following video was produced to raise funds for members of the Santa Barbara High School community who are food or housing insecure and could use a little help from their friends.
For some, stepping in as Santa Barbara High School Theatre’s new director might have included imagining the daunting task of filling the oversize shoes of predecessor Otto Layman, who retired last spring after 25 years at the helm. But Justin Baldridge doesn’t see his role as trying to duplicate what the beloved Layman accomplished in […]
With the Fall 2020 school year rapidly approaching, Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) is finalizing its plan for how to bring as many of its roughly 2,200 students back to campus as safely as possible. The key word here is, you guessed it, “safely.” Right now, the school is awaiting official rulings from Governor Gavin […]
If things were different, if the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 hadn’t turned into a global pandemic shutting down almost everything across the world, this would have been a weekend of wonder for Otto Layman. The theater director had planned a big blowout of a show to serve as his crowning achievement in a career […]
ON STAGE by the SBHS Forge Staff It’s a Monday morning, two weeks before opening night, and Otto Layman, the head of Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) Performing Arts, surveys a stage where an array of people and tasks occur simultaneously: students are painting or hanging lights under the guidance of lighting designer Mike Madden […]



