Tag archives: theater
Encounter Virginia Woolf, a lonely puppet, a curious opossum, and two worms who fall in love all in a single evening as the Westmont College Theatre Arts Department stages an eccentric, fast-paced slate of short-form storytelling. Performances of The Future is Short, set in a variety of site-specific locations in and around Porter Theatre, take […]
Last year, the Santa Barbara dance organizations Selah Dance Collective and Nomad Tango collaborated on a program called Malena: Between Two Worlds, which brought together champion Boston-based Argentine tango dancers Fernanda Ghi and Silvio Grand with Selah’s contemporary dancers. This weekend, they return to the Lobero with an even more ambitious double bill dubbed Beethoven’s […]
By Lisa Duncan “I was one of those kids that didn’t know where he belonged,” Brian McDonald, artistic director of Ensemble Theatre Company, told supporters at ETC’s annual Curtain Up! Gala. With a smile, he recalled his mother watching him dress up as Shirley Temple for Halloween and thinking, “Maybe this guy is a theatre […]
It took more than a decade for Mark Booher, Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA) artistic director and dean, to get the rights to mount a production of Come from Away. That isthe long-running, Tony Award-winning musical about the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander during the week following the September 11 attacks, when 38 planes carrying more […]
Anna Ziegler’s A Delicate Ship, the second production from local company HappySad Theatre (founded in 2025), is about memories, nostalgia, and the nature of interpersonal relationships. The show is particularly about growing from childhood to mature adult and imagining the future. The same dynamic could be applied to aspects of company co-founder and Ship’s Director […]
Veteran actress Kandis Chappell, whose theatrical credits pepper the country from Broadway to Los Angeles, leapt at the chance to portray Eleanor Roosevelt in the one-woman play by Mark St. Germain titled simply Eleanor. The former First Lady was frequently named one of the most admired women in America both during her 12-plus years in […]
Carole Eglash-Kosoff might be older than your grandmother, but a cursory peek at the title of her new one-woman show, I’ve Seen This Sh*t Before, makes it clear this is not your typical grandmother’s type of theater. Eglash-Kosoff swears constantly throughout the 92-minute show – yes, timed to match her age – but that’s just […]
Springtime means flowers, sunshine, and thoughts of romance, but (at least in the area high school’s theater departments) it’s also the season for massive musical undertakings, bringing Broadway shows into the on-campus auditoriums. As in all years, the three big public schools have staggered their shows, with each having only a single overlapping weekend, meaning […]
Two cops. Three crooks. Eight doors. Go! So reads the first line of the synopsis for SBCC’s production of Unnecessary Farce, which closes out SBCC Theatre Group’s 2025-26 season at the Jurkowitz on campus, where it plays April 17-May 2. Farce was the first play by Paul Slade Smith, a successful Broadway actor turned playwright […]
About 120 junior high and 40 high school students enjoyed a special matinee performance of Little Women by the Westmont Theater Arts Department on March 5 in Porter Theatre. The event, made possible through a grant from the Towbes Fund for the Performing Arts, brought students from La Colina, Santa Barbara and La Cumbre Junior […]
Pilobolus has been reshaping the world of modern dance since its formation more than half a century ago by students at Dartmouth. The continuously evolving cutting-edge company has been exploring the beauty and power of bodies connecting since 1971, performing feats that seem to defy the laws of gravity and physics, deftly intertwining their limbs […]
Lights Up! Theatre Company has been around for eight years and twenty-something productions, but the non-school-affiliated organization might have found its perfect musical to mount for its ethos and our times in The Addams Family Musical. The dark, funny, and unexpectedly heartwarming musical comedy is based on the macabre characters famously created by cartoonist Charles […]
Madeline Fanton remembers the first chapter book she read as a child: Little Women. Now the visiting professor of theater arts directs Westmont’s production of the novel by Louisa May Alcott, adapted by Kate Hamill, on Feb. 27-28 and March 6-7 at 7:30 pm; Feb. 28 and March 7-8 at 2 pm, all in Porter […]
Eighty years after its publication, George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm resonates in our world, speaking as sharply to the abuses of authoritarianism across the globe today as it did in addressing Stalinist Russia and the dangers of communism in 1945. The actor-director Andy Serkis – famed for his motion capture and voice-over roles for such […]
The smash hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon has music, lyrics and book by the inspired pairing of South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone with Robert Lopez, who co-created the puppet musical Avenue Q before co-writing the more mainstream songs for Frozen, Frozen II and Coco. Not surprisingly, the show is highly […]
After the leather-jacketed Fonzie literally leapt over a shark while waterskiing in a famously foolish episode of Happy Days, the absurd scene birthed the phrase (and industry concept) “jumping the shark.” The damning term is applied when a creative endeavor has so run out of gas it wanders untethered into vibrant twaddle wholly divorced from […]
Ensemble Theatre Company continues its new policy of presenting a pay-what-you-can performance of each new production as its first preview before the weekend offering. So you can see the company’s much-anticipated West Coast premiere of the hit Broadway play, The Shark is Broken, based on the now well-known technical mishaps and personality clashes that so […]
With the major local theater companies at rest in January, three smaller organizations are opening productions this weekend with wildly divergent genres. The newly-formed HappySad Theatre Company – from Santa Barbara-raised, SBCC-acting educated Robert Rodarte and his wife, Riley, who met at Circle in the Square Theatre School on Broadway in New York – launches […]
When Kerry Irish Productions founder Margaret O’Carroll moved to Los Angeles from the hills of her native County Kerry many years ago, she wasn’t able to find any sort of regular productions of anything Irish or Celtic around Christmastime in the bustling metropolis. So she decided to create something of her own. The one-time Irish […]
Back in 2017 when Susan Keller founded Santa Barbara Revels to make our city one of several in the nation to present annual Christmas-season traditional cross-cultural shows, she turned to fellow Montecitan Maggie Mixsell to serve as director. The acting coach, teacher, and director – whose credits include running the Speaking of Stories series for […]
