Author: tedmills

New Boy Band Zero Gravity features one member from Santa Barbara

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Zero Gravity is, from left, Peet Montzingo, Fredrick Rose, Adam Wilhelmsson, Michael Kean and Trevor Dow. Courtesy photo
Zero Gravity is, from left, Peet Montzingo, Fredrick Rose, Adam Wilhelmsson, Michael Kean and Trevor Dow.
Courtesy photo

How do you make a boy band? In the case of LA-based Zero Gravity, you hold auditions. You find five young men —two Swedes and three Americans, one from Santa Barbara —and you put them through boot camp. The result is a group that’s hitting the ground running, singing in tight five-part harmony, and playing a mix of social media and old school touring. When they headline the Santa Barbara Fair and Expo, they’ll be performing for a full hour, and plan to leave the stage having made a ton of new fans.

The group consists of Peet Montzingo from Seattle, who has already gained a following having been on “X-Factor”; Santa Barbara’s Trevor Dow; Fredrick Rose from Stockholm, Sweden, the one who takes lots of selfies; Adam Wilhelmsson, also from Stockholm; and Michael Kean from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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To celebrate State Street Ballet’s 20th, a remix of Vivaldi

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Meredith Harrill of State Street Ballet dances with Colton West. David Bazemore photos
Meredith Harrill of State Street Ballet dances with Colton West.
David Bazemore photos

State Street Ballet celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, not by focusing attention solely on itself, even though it has earned the right to do so. Instead it’s sharing the wealth, and inviting two other companies to share Saturday evening’s program at the Granada, to intermingle and produce one complete work. A symbiosis, if you will. With “Common Ground,” State Street Ballet will be joined by Detroit’s Eisenhower Dance and Santa Barbara Dance Theatre. All three companies will be performing, using Max Richter’s modernist remix of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

Just as Mr. Richter put Vivaldi’s four very distinct seasons into a bag and shook it up, “Common Ground” takes the members of all three companies and sees what happens when they dance together. The man behind this mission of mixology is Mexico City-born and Montreal-based Edgar Zendejas, artistic director of ezdanza and award-winning choreographer since debuting in 2001 after years as a ballet dancer.

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Playing Blanche in Opera Santa Barbara’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ Beverly O’Regan Thiele is in her element

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Baritone Gregory Gerbrandt sings the role of Stanley Kowalski and soprano Beverly O'Regan Thiele makes her company debut as Blanche in Opera Santa Barbara's new production of André Previn's operatic version of "A Streetcar Named Desire." David Bazemore

Baritone Gregory Gerbrandt sings the role of Stanley Kowalski and soprano Beverly O’Regan Thiele makes her company debut as Blanche in Opera Santa Barbara’s new production of André Previn’s operatic version of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
David Bazemore

André Previn wrote his operatic adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1995 and premiered it in 1998, with a critical consensus of “What took so long?” Tennessee Williams’ play is already pitched at a melodramatic level, and set in the kind of Bayou heat that frazzles brains, that it seems a natural for a musical adaptation. Fortunately, too, Mr. Previn’s score combines modern music with New Orleans jazz, and produced a good thing: a modern opera with some tunes.

Stage directed by Omer Ben Seadia, and conceived as a collaboration of Opera Santa Barbara, the Merola Program and Kentucky Opera, OSB’s production by Jose Maria Condemi opens tonight for two performances. Gregory Gerbrandt plays Stanley Kowalski, the brutish “common” man played memorably by Marlon Brando in the film version. MicaÎla Oeste plays his wife, Stella. And stepping up to take on an iconic role, Beverly O’Regan Thiele sings the part of Blanche DuBois, the aging Southern Belle with a tenuous grasp on reality.

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Stand-up comedian Brian Regan comes to the Arlington

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Brian Regan Jerry Metellus
Brian Regan
Jerry Metellus

Everybody in my family is kind of funny,” says stand-up comedian Brian Regan, who comes to the Arlington on Sunday. Growing up as one of eight siblings, there was a lot of competition to crack each other up.

“I used to love making my dad laugh. He was a very smart guy, so if you put something together that had some ideas to it, he would laugh like it was nobody’s business. There was something very powerful about that experience. My older brother Mike is one of the funniest people I know. Offstage he’s funnier than I am.”

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Ensemble Theatre stages Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s daring musical ‘Woyzeck’

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The "Woyzeck" cast includes Matt Gottlieb (Doctor), Stephen Van Dorn (Woyzeck) and Matthew Henerson (Captain). David Bazemore
The “Woyzeck” cast includes Matt Gottlieb (Doctor), Stephen Van Dorn (Woyzeck) and Matthew Henerson (Captain).
David Bazemore

When writer Georg Büchner died at 23 in 1837, he left behind the fragments of a play that had no ending and no official structure. Yet out of all his works, the “working-class tragedy” of “Woyzeck,” about a soldier gone murderously mad with jealousy, is the most read, most performed, and most interpreted. There have been operas, movies, a ballet and many stage adaptations. It is extremely open to interpretation.

Ensemble Theatre’s Jonathan Fox has taken on one of the most popular recent adaptations of the play — a musical by Tom Waits and his wife/collaborator Kathleen Brennan — and brought it to the New Vic, opening tonight. And even that is an interpretation: Mr. Fox has ditched the other third of that 2002 production: Robert Wilson’s direction and production design.

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