SANTA BARBARA THEATER REVIEWS

Henri Murger, the author of the original French book, described Bohemia as bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage, and on the West and East by slander and the hospital. His characters, all based on real people he knew, wanted to free society of its st...

Hamill's Pride and Prejudice creates the bridge that connects the nuanced tropes of Austen's 19th-century feminism to the conversations about gender equality happening currently. Westmont's production was a refreshingly fierce look at the symptoms of the gender power imbalance that are still feste...

Hamlet's father, the King of Denmark is murdered by his brother, Claudius (Jarred Web), who then marries Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude (Olivia Rose Nathan), and takes the throne. No one suspects foul play except Prince Hamlet (Tadja Enos), who senses something rotten in the state of Denmark. His f...

Cleverly plotted, delightfully comic, and incessantly thought-provoking, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, produced by PCPA, is showing now until September 9th in Solvang. The action takes place in a room of the Coverly estate in two different eras: the early 19th century and the present. The plots of the two...

A musical comedy set to the ebullient music of Swedish pop group, Abba, Mamma Mia! takes audiences on a toe-tapping journey to a wedding on a small island near Greece....

On stage at Solvang's Festival Theater, PCPA presents the comic play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The title, a list of the Russian names of the main characters, suggests that it parodies the works of the great Naturalist playwright, Anton Chekhov, author of Uncle Vanya, The Seagull and The C...

PCPA's production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame - A New Musical, now on stage in Solvang's Festival Theater, delights audiences with its overtly theatrical storytelling style. If you are only familiar with the Disney film based on Victor Hugo's epic novel, this Hunchback includes new music, deeper ...

The year-end New Works Lab at UCSB, which challenges students to write, direct, design, and perform short plays, gives students a chance to experiment with form, style, and collaboration. This year's plays offered comedy, drama, and an excursion into the absurd, while expressing insecurities about t...

Christie's presentation is a colorful, and at times poignant, journey through personal memoir; his gruff-but-likeable stage presence and interesting story make for a thought-provoking evening in the theater. It's a casual style of performance, with a minimal use of traditional theatrical conventions...

On April 21, 2018, Opera Santa Barbara presented Douglas Moore's GALLANTRY and Leonard Bernstein's TROUBLE IN TAHITI at the Center Stage theater in downtown Santa Barbara. The Center Stage is a 130-seat black box auditorium on the third floor of the chic, user-friendly Paseo Nuevo....

A Delightful Southern Treat. SBCC's production of CRIMES OF THE HEART by Beth Henley, Directed by R. Michael Gros. April 11-28, 2018, Jurkowitz Theatre, SBCC West Campus, 900 block of Cliff Dr. 805-965-5935 or www.theatregroupsbcc.com for tickets and information....

A rare treat this weekend only, Opera Santa Barbara presents an evening of one-act comic operas in the intimacy of Center Stage Theater. Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti will be performed along with Douglas Moore's broadly comic work, Gallantry. Both showcase the talents of Opera Santa Barbara'...

Entrancing but, as the kids in theory class say, 'problematic'...

The punk rock musical American Idiot, now on stage at Center Stage, gives Green Day fans an opportunity to immerse themselves into the titular album through dance, imagery, and, of course, music. American Idiot does not tell a story so much as it performs the gesture of punk rock: a clench-fisted re...

Alan Ayckbourne's 'Communicating Doors,' produced by the SBCC Theatre Group, follows Poopay (Felicia Hall), a blue-collar London dominatrix who shows up at a luxury hotel to service wealthy business mogul, Reece (Matt Smith), but instead gets pressured into witnessing his deathbed confession of embe...

It's 1692, 1953, or 2018, or any year, as you see it......

Sharon Lawrence stars in The City of Conversation...

Ensemble's Pemberley boasts an attractive set, beautiful costumes, and a talented cast who maintain a smooth, frothy sugarplum taste throughout. But with so little at stake for over two hours and a concerning level of emphasis on a woman's place Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley seems too long a...

Critic A.C. Bradley claimed that of all of Shakespeare's tragedies, King Lear was too sublime for the stage. For Bradley, King Lear's depiction of madness, stormy landscapes, filial deception, and treachery went to extremities best conjured by a reader who can imaginatively fill in the breadth of Sh...

Though Shakespeare and Miller wrote their plays several centuries apart, the combo is fitting both plays articulate the struggles of frustrated protagonists trying to understand their function in a shifting social scape and their priorities within dysfunctional familial relationships....

Murder and mystery staged by San Marcos High School under the direction of Riley Berris...

Sophisticated and engrossing, 'Resistible Rise' is about more than a glory-hungry henchman for whom the price of power is never too high it's about the price tag of power (in this case: justice) and how quickly a desperate population will turn a blind eye to corruption and put their faith in a chari...

'One Man, Two Guvnors' is based on Carlo Goldoni's 'Servant of Two masters,' a 1746 commedia dell'arte piece featuring the Truffaldino harlequin as a prospecting errand boy who works for two different men, constantly confusing what tasks he's supposed to be performing for which boss. As the title su...

'Husbands and Wives,' Woody Allen's film--and now, Ensemble Theater Company's adaptation by Jonathan Fox--examines the slings and arrows of long-term pairing through the relationships of two middle-aged couples in crisis....

Ana s: A Dance Opera is a multimedia collaberation featuring the life story of writer, intellectual, and provocateur, Ana s Nin....