UCSB Arts & Lectures is by far the area’s busiest arts organization, presenting in the pre-pandemic era upwards of 100 public events every academic year, not to mention add-ons in the summer. So, naturally A&L is stepping to the front of the line again as the COVID-19 crisis passes the six-month mark. After transferring its […]
Longtime Santa Barbara writer Peggy O’Toole Lamb plumbed her own family history for her latest nonfiction book, Darling – Love Letters from WWII. The alumnus of UC Santa Barbara’s Teacher Education Program researched the letters that her uncle Frank J. Foster wrote to her aunt Catherine during WWII when he fought in the European Theater […]
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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 […]
Venues and artists throughout the world are struggling with how to thrive or even survive during the extended pandemic. For Marjorie Luke board president Rod Lathim, joining the zeitgeist of endless Zoom performances proved completely unpalatable. Instead, the Luke – which only a year or so ago started producing its own events rather than simply […]
Gracing our town with five-part harmonies from heaven, four-time Grammy winner Lyle Lovett made a serious stop here with his all-strings acoustic band called Lyle Lovett and his Acoustic Group, presented by Arts & Lectures UCSB at Campbell Hall. One of 46 tour dates in a five-month spread across the country, he uses buses and […]
Michael DeVorzon grew up in Montecito, with a great family lineage in music, and carved his own way in film and TV. Still working actively during the lockdown, he is polished in defining the narrative of the hard work it takes to stay in the game, do it like a pro, and always with kindness. […]
Lights Up!, Santa Barbara’s newest teen theater company that serves as a professional, yet inclusive and creative home for the youngsters, is currently auditioning for its 2020-21 company membership. Interested actors, singers, and dancers aged 12-19 are invited to audition for admission and the opportunity to attend callbacks for specific shows with the rest of […]
For nearly 20 years, Hershey Felder has made a career out of creating one-man shows in which he portrays and plays famous artists from recent and centuries-old history, and the novel coronavirus hasn’t caused him to slow down much at all. Ensemble Theatre Company got in the mix when it presented his Hershey Felder: Beethoven […]
Although there is still a dispute over whether it was Napoleon or Adam Smith who coined the phrase “The British are a nation of shopkeepers,” there is no dispute that beekeepers in Santa Barbara want to convince us that America is a “nation of beekeepers.” The Beelievers, a short documentary made by UCSB graduate filmmaker […]
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Whales Without Walls, which screened at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival this past winter, is essentially a five-minute argument for a modern real-life solution to the issues that were addressed in the fiction film Free Willy. The mission of the Whale Sanctuary Project is to establish a model seaside sanctuary where whales and […]
UCSB’s much-beloved Naked Shakes program, which massages and presents stripped-down versions of works by Shakespeare, celebrates its 15th anniversary with Immortal Longings, a new adaptation by founder Irwin Appel that combines Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra into a single play. “We are in the middle of […]
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 […]
A reader called me to ask whether I knew why the summer issue of Santa Barbara Magazine with a wonderful, whimsical piece of cover art by Pedro de la Cruz included the number “45” on it? “Was the magazine promoting the re-election of our 45th president?” she pondered. Nope, this is not some subliminal message: […]
