Four years and at least seven of his own scores ago, the distinguished conductor-composer Dirk Brossé made his debut with the Santa Barbara Symphony with the Granada’s first live-to-screening synchronized musical performance since the installation of the theater’s state-of-the-art rear-projection film system. Brossé and the members of the orchestra who often also frequently freelance on […]
Baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert was one of the few Music Academy of the West vocal fellows to span the changeover from Abravanel to Hahn halls in 2007-08, and his approach to his own career underwent a simultaneous metamorphosis during his MAW tenure. Sure, Herbert found his time on Mirafloras campus “enjoyable and fun” and made […]
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It was a delightful night of high camp when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo performed a hilarious program at the packed Granada, part of the of the popular UCSB Arts & Lectures series. Music by Chopin, Verdi, Glazunov accompanied the balletic high jinx. Having seen the 45-year-old company a number of times in New […]
State Street Ballet hosted its annual Evenings event at the Gail Towbes Center for Dance giving the company’s talented dancers the opportunity to create their own dance works and experiment with new movement, themes, music, and styles. This year’s event featured eight short world premieres performed in the rehearsal space followed by a question and […]
Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) wrote Heisenberg a couple of years after TV’s Breaking Bad anti-hero Walter White stared down another major meth manufacturer in the Arizona desert and demanded that his rival say the criminal’s nickname that had made him the DEA’s fictional enemy No. […]
Theater rarely comes as simultaneously raw and virtuosic as Mouthpiece, co-created and performed by the two co-artistic directors of Toronto-based Quote Unquote Collective. Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava have fashioned an hour-long piece that combines spoken text, strenuous movements, a cappella harmony, and vocalizations to express the inner conflict that exists within one modern woman’s […]
It was less than two months ago that the Bryan Titus Trio played his last gig in town as a Santa Barbara resident, the last in a series of shows that had established the organic roots rocker/Americana artist as a true local sensation, capable of exciting the crowd whether jamming in a bar’s outdoor patio […]
Santa Barbara Revels, presenting its 11th anniversary production at the Lobero, moved to Ireland this year after its Alta California Rancho period piece in 2017. “We wanted to honor the strength and courage of the intrepid Irish emigrants who left their homeland in the early 1900s, specially those who might have traveled on the S.S. […]
It was running hot and cold when the Santa Barbara Polo Club hosted a sold-out Fire and Ice party. More than 185 guests scoffed and bopped the night away when temperatures dropped into the 50s, the winds blew and the rain, briefly, poured. Fortunately a tent, with heat lamps, had been erected a few feet […]
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Long time Southern California and frequent Ensemble Theatre Company director Jenny Sullivan doesn’t want people to make same mistake she did, which was to wait until the last performance of The Legend of Georgia McBride when it ran at the Geffen Theater in LA in spring 2017. “It was so funny and so moving. I […]
The Kronos Quartet has never shied away from controversy. Over the course of its 45-year history, the ensemble has exploded any previous notion of the limitations of the string quartet, embracing everything from ultra-modern composers and unfamiliar sounds to wildly unexpected and some would say edgy collaborations, most recently with “Sight Machine,” a multimedia piece […]
Even in today’s post-#MeToo/women’s movement era, just about every little girl in America still dreams about being a princess. Witness the number of Cinderella dresses out on the streets and trick-or-treaters just three weeks ago on Halloween. On the other hand, not too many harbor a desire to wind up as a wicked stepsister, but […]
An even newer work also gets its Santa Barbara debut over the same two weekends as UCSB Theater presents Vanity Fair, based on William Makepeace Thackery’s classic 1848 novel, and adapted for the stage with a modern twist by playwright Kate Hamill. Thomas Whitaker directs the tale of misadventures, friendship, and morally questionable acts, which […]
Turning Amélie into a stage musical might appear to be a fool’s mission, given that the indie French film was a surprising hit in 2001 largely because of the movie’s tone and the charms of its breakout star, Audrey Tautou. But Out of the Box (OOB) Theatre Company founder Samantha Eve thinks the recent translation […]
