Driven by the belief that collective collaboration far outweighs individual effort, nearly 20 theater professionals from across the country gathered at Westmont College on August 13–14 to launch the Association of Christian Theatre Schools (ACTS). Funded by a grant from the Lilly Network, the new initiative helps faith-based drama faculty grow spiritually, artistically and vocationally […]

The old adage “write what you know” pretty much has not applied to John Romano. The East Coast scribe holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Yale and spent the first years of his career teaching English at Columbia University, authoring a book on Charles Dickens Dickens and Reality and reviewing lit for […]

Victorian women were expected to be demure, decorous, and to generally avoid spending their evenings in the company of bloodthirsty Transylvanian counts. Thankfully, times have changed. On September 19, some of Santa Barbara’s most formidable women will descend upon the Music Academy of the West for State Street Ballet’s annual gala, Victorian Vogue. There will […]

Dillon Yuhasz played the fairly deranged title character in Young Frankenstein last year at SBCC Theatre Group. He was perhaps the sanest of the bunch in the over-the-top comic take on the famous monster movie.  But as out there as that might have been, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Yuhasz’s current show, The Story of […]

Rubicon Theatre Company brings both the old and the new to its Laurel Street space on August 16, when Emmy & L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award-winning actor and longtime RTC member Joe Spano (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) stars in a benefit staged reading of King of the Wild Frontier, a new one-man play by […]

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 […]

For the past five years, former Indy arts editor D. J. Palladino and writer/publisher Jim Buckley (not to be confused with our former publisher) have teamed up to produce Bloomsday Santa Barbara, a celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses on June 16, to coincide with the international celebrations of the iconic novel – whose entire main […]

First Picnic is on Saturday, June 13, 2-4:30 pm. Sit back and enjoy the soulful sounds of Brian Kinsella, a jazz and blues guitarist. Pack your lunch, bring a cozy blanket or lawn chair, and settle in amongst the lush landscape. Well-Being Wednesday will feature a Sound Bath Meditation with Fabio Rambelli on Wednesday, June […]

Every Brilliant Thing, the interactive, one-person play by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, traces the narrator’s lifelong journey which, from age 7, includes  managing both their mother’s bouts with depression and her various attempts at suicide. The child comes up with the idea of cheering up his mom in the hospital by compiling an ever-growing […]