Santa Barbara writer Claudia Hoag McGarry has been involved in the arts in town for more than 30 years, including teaching English Skills at SBCC for more than three decades, publishing three novels including two thrillers and a young adult memoir, producing four plays all in the historical drama genre, and writing screenplays and even […]
Growing up in New York during the 1950s turned me into a lover of Broadway theatre — especially musicals. By the age of 18 I’d been fortunate enough to see wonderful productions of West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and close to a hundred other musicals, dramas, and comedies. I next fell in love with […]
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Who could have predicted dance as the art form that would dominate reopening at the Center Stage Theater? Sure, the “black box” theater upstairs in Paseo Nuevo has been a happy home for several of the local dance companies that produce their own periodic performances and has also hosted a few festivals featuring revues. But […]
Meredith Cabaniss-Ventura, the Selah Dance Collective founder and artistic director, doesn’t remember where she first found the main word of her dance company other than remembering it’s featured heavily in the Bible in the Book of Psalms. But while she liked that the word isn’t directly translatable to English, one of the meanings struck her […]
With the continued easing of pandemic restrictions, PCPA is returning after two summers to the Solvang Festival Theater, the charming outdoor amphitheater in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley village. The stars will be live on stage as well as visible in the sky above starting in mid-July, when PCPA debuts an original production […]
The UCSB Initiative for New & Reimagined Work is presenting a staged reading of the classic Chekhov play Three Sisters at 6 pm on May 31. What makes this show most remarkable is that the performance will take place inside the intimate Center Stage Theater, where the general public is welcome to attend for the […]
Back in the virtual world, the Marjorie Luke Theatre this weekend unveils its eighth video presentation in its virtual concert series spotlighting local musicians and others in highly produced digital productions shot with multiple cameras and professional sound on the stage of the historic venue. All In For Love represents the live concert full-set debut […]
Ensemble Theatre Company (ETC) executive artistic director Jonathan Fox was already talking about reopening when he was interviewed for the original Giving List book connecting philanthropists and nonprofits that we published last November. At this point, to the surprise of no one, six months later that still hasn’t happened as the pandemic pounced once again […]
The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s crime caper series featuring the society couple Nick and Nora Charles, was first published as a magazine serial in 1933. But it wasn’t long before the tales of the high-life living couple and their dog, Asta, being drawn into the seamy underbelly of crime as amateur sleuths aiming to help […]
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Our troubles coping with the COVID pandemic have stretched beyond the one-year mark. But that’s a short blip of time compared to the arduous ordeal of relating conflict, rage, war, and more over three millennia — with no end in sight. Such is the plight of the storyteller in An Iliad, the modern-day adaptation of […]
Veteran journalist and author Robert Whiting is one of only a few Western writers to have written a regular newspaper column in the Japanese language. The author of several highly successful books on Japan and the city where he has lived on and off for more than half a century include the best-selling You Gotta […]
Ensemble Theatre Company isn’t letting the pandemic interfere with its production schedule. The popular company, helmed by Jonathan Fox, is presenting five live-streamed performances of the critically acclaimed 90-minute, one-act play An Iliad, with each live performance being aired and viewable on computers, smart TVs, iPads, and iPhones. Translated by Robert Fagles from Homer’s 3,000-year-old […]
In a COVID coincidence, the second weekend of the school’s zany take on Greek myth cozies up to a more serious – and perhaps even more ambitious – approach to some of the same material in the Ensemble Theatre Company’s live stream of the one-man show, An Iliad. The work is crafted around the stories […]
As if persevering through a pandemic isn’t sufficiently perplexing, Santa Barbara High’s theater arts department is undertaking the challenge of cramming years of classic sagas into a single evening performance. In The Iliad, The Odyssey, and All of Greek Mythology in 99 minutes or less, written by Jay Hopkins and John Hunter, the student actors […]






