If Anikka Abbott’s career had taken a different turn, she might be about to sing a soprano role at the Granada in the Music Academy’s opera in Santa Barbara this weekend. As what happens in life, there’s been a bit of a detour, including serving as first runner-up to Miss Washington in the Miss America […]
It’s likely that Jonathan Fox’s tenure at Ensemble Theatre Company will be seared into the local theater community’s collective memory for many years to come. ETC’s artistic director is departing after 17 years at the helm, a period that saw the company move from the quaint Alhecama Theater to the gleamingly refurbished New Vic, and […]
Recently Trending
More from Montecito
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the allegorical play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy), already turns typical storytelling on its ear as it involves a courtroom trial over the ultimate fate of perhaps the most famous sinner in the story of the Bible. To examine existing understandings of heaven, […]
Jonathan Fox, artistic director of the Ensemble Theatre Company for the last 17 years, is moving to newer pastures. Jonathan, who I’ve known since moving to our Eden by the Beach in 2007 when the company performed at the rustic Alhecama Theatre, directs his latest and last play Seared at the New Vic, the final […]
During the lockdown period of the COVID pandemic, the Westmont College-spawned Lit Moon Theatre met online for nearly two years as an international collective of artists and actors. The 18-member group created online versions of Libby Appel’s translations of Chekhov plays: Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters,and Ivanov. This weekend, Lit Moon World emerges in person with […]
The small-town civic theater is an enduring symbol; the unassuming downtown performance company – founded long ago by beloved local dandies – that secretly fuels the community’s daily life. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (the professional class, that is) have always been the gray-flannel measure of community progress. The town playhouse, though – dowdy […]
Anastasia – the Broadway musical inspired by the 1997 animated film and the 1956 live-action movie that ran in New York from 2017-2020 and has been performed more than 2,500 times worldwide – has its Santa Barbara debut at The Granada Theatre on April 25-26 as part of The American Theatre Guild’s Broadway in Santa […]
Ensemble Theatre Company’s area premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 drama The Children winds up its three-week run at the New Vic on April 23. ETC favorite helmer Jenny Sullivan directs the trio of well-traveled actors Michael Butler, Linda Purl, and Nancy Travis – all of whom are familiar to recent ETC audiences – in the […]
Ensemble Theatre Company’s latest production The Children at the New Vic confronts the three-member cast with a stunning moral dilemma regarding the older and newer generations and environmental accountability. After a tsunami wreaks havoc on a nuclear reactor in rural England, a married couple’s lives are further disrupted by the mysterious appearance of a long-lost […]
Read more...
TV and film writer-producer Jonathan Prince – whose adaptation and book for the world premiere of a musical based on Dark of the Moon opens at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura this weekend – wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way; least of all the discovery that several big theatrical icons had previously […]
Several former Dos Pueblos High School “theater geeks” who are pursuing their dreams of a professional life in the performing arts have created a cabaret show called Our Time: Celebrating High School Theater Kids Gone Pro. The one-night only event serves to honor Clark Sayre, their beloved high school theater teacher and Broadway veteran (Merrily […]
Wet weather and storm watches didn’t keep people away from the opening weekend of the Westmont College Festival Theatre’s world premiere Diamond to Dust: A Flying A Fantasy. Director John Blondell and writer Michael Bernard, a local actor, educator and playwright, have brought Santa Barbara’s treasured cinematic history to the stage in a creative exploration […]
In the early days of the pandemic, Angelin Preljocaj, the French choreographer famed for creating contemporary classics, dove into developing his distinctive version of Swan Lake, perhaps the most iconic ballet in the canon. Transforming the timeless tale of love, seduction, betrayal, and remorse into a modern cautionary story of ecological tragedy and societal failure, […]
If Diamond to Dust: A Flying A Fantasy is even half as much fun as interviewing the principals who dubbed themselves “good whiskey collaborators” in a conference call, audiences are in for a heckuva ride. This screwball comedy from the pen of actor/director/UCSB Theater professor Michael Bernard will have its world premiere at Westmont this […]
