SANTA BARBARA THEATER REVIEWS

San Luis Obispo Rep's craftily staged production of Deathtrap, a comedy thriller, delivers on the foreshadowing promise of its opening dialogue: 'One set, five characters. A juicy murder in Act One, unexpected developments in Act Two. Sound construction, good dialogue, laughs in the right places.' D...

Overall, 'A Winter's Tale' has visual richness, but the text is all over the place, and additional elements like modern pop music and choreographed slow-motion stage crosses pile superflua onto an existing wealth of 'eclectic' narrative components....

Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, currently on stage at the New Vic Theater, has been noted as a 'problematic' play due to a murky tone that's neither overtly comedic nor tragic. Director Jonathan Fox's production of this story of corruption and temptation is brazenly menacing, with a stylized Goth...

Just today, famed opera singer Plácido Domingo resigned from LA Opera amid accusations that he sexually harassed workers there. It seems as though such stories are far more common than they were a few years ago. In October 2017, journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the stories of women se...

PCPA closes its season with one of the sharpest, funniest, cleverest comedies written in the English language--Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Fans of this Victorian confection of drawing-room comedy will not be disappointed. A beautiful set, designed by Jason Bolen, and sumptuous Vic...

Before the first line of PCPA's The Addams Family had left the mouth of Gomez Addams (George Walker), my seatmate was already chuckling. And the laughs kept coming until the players took their bows to a standing audience. The cast's comic timing synchronized perfectly with Erik Stein's fluid staging...

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A friend remarked to British actor, Edmund Gwenn, on his deathbed 'This must be very hard,' to which Gwenn replied, 'It is. But not as hard as farce.' PCPA's production of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder met the challenge of the dangerously delicate timing demanded of a musical farce. Set in ...

An upbeat piece, 'Into the Beautiful North' brushes against self-awareness without being preachy by providing likable characters in stylized peril and a timely expression of another side of the "border crisis." The cast hits the comedic notes while sustains the eagerness that fuels the journey....

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women dominate theater audiences, yet lack a proportionate power in theater administration, acting roles, production jobs, as designers and as produced playwrights....

Opera Santa Barbara presented a musically dramatic rendition of THE CRUCIBLE. As an opera it struck the emotions with a stronger hammer than the play did with mere words. If you can be in Santa Barbara tomorrow afternoon, don't miss the performance at the Lobero Theatre....

Ensemble's production features many of the interesting aspects of this search for identity: a grumpy grandpa with a dark secret; an old Ukrainian woman who's mind has been warped by trauma and isolation; an underdog translator with a tenuous mastery of English; and an emotionally clumsy college kid ...

Out of the Box's FUN HOME is more than a story of one woman leaning into her queer identity while her father crumbles under the weight of hiding his-it's about familial legacy and the unsettling loss of innocence that occurs when you realize your parents are only human....

Sheep in wolves' clothing; wolves in sheep's clothing....

An affecting and thoughtful portrayal of a watershed event...

On March 1, 2019, Opera Santa Barbara presented it's first Russian opera, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's EUGENE ONEGIN. The opera was premiered in Moscow in 1879 but was not played in the United States until 1920 when the Metropolitan Opera performed it in Italian....

Ensemble's production of Death of a Salesman is intimate and Willy's final sacrifice is tragic and inevitable. The production offers high-caliber performances and a unique visual narrative, and it engages the audience with timely questions about inter-generational disconnect, the definition of succe...

PCPA's current production, Shakespeare in Love, imagines Will Shakespeare's (Yusef Seevers) madcap adventures in London early in his career. Because historians truly do not know much about the personal life of the greatest writer of the English language, his life is a blank page upon which almost an...

Stephen Simon's recent play, Heisenberg, opens this week at the Rubicon Theatre. Two strangers meet at a London train station where an unlikely romantic relationship develops between them. Joe Spano plays Alex, an Irish butcher, set in his ways. A complete stranger, Georgie (Faline England), kisses ...

'There's little a hot bath can't fix.' -Mothers everywhere 'It is impossible to say just what I mean!' -T.S. Eliot...

Springing straight from its production of The Glass Menagerie, Lit Moon Theatre now brings three additional productions to Center Stage: First, Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol, is retold as Humbug. Then, on January 4th, Lit Moon offers its visually arresting and emotionally captivating productio...

Ensemble Theatre Company's production of The Legend of Georgia McBride, directed by Jenny Sullivan, avoids the landmines. It's neither preachy nor offensive, and it tells a story of redemption that's timely, socially relevant, and charming. The show takes place over the period of a year, starting an...

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Santa Barbara theater-goers have had the opportunity to see two plays by Kate Hamill produced this fall. Westmont recently produced Hamill's adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice. Now UCSB gifts us with Vanity Fair, based on William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel. Having seen how ...

Out of the Box Theatre Company presents Amelie now playing at Center Stage, a musical based on the French film of the same name. The musical follows effervescent spirit and plot of the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film....