News-Press – Page 57

California Pizza Kitchen’s Cherry Lime Sparkler

July 23, 2010June 9, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Some journos spend months landing an exclusive interview with a Hollywood star. We spent six weeks working to bring you this exclusive review of California Pizza Kitchen’s cocktails. Our request went from server to manager to general manager to corporate office to public relations to marketing to… well, who knows? Way up we went in the halls of corporate pizza power and back down again to get the OK. At last it was on. CPK, we’re coming for your cocktails, so unlock that liquor cabinet.

First of all, has it really been 19 years since CPK hung its shingle at the former corner of De la Guerra? General Manager Kevin Secky has been here nine of those years, making sure the gears are greased and the dough is spinning. The full bar has only been open for three years, where it served beer and wine only once. But now there’s a page full of mojitos and margaritas and another page of assorted specialty drinks. Secky put the human face on the machine and welcomed us to it.

Putting Stock in Youth : SB’s Summer Stock is City’s longest lasting theater camp for kids

July 16, 2010June 9, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Eric Lehman thinks ahead, well ahead. When he was in his mid-20s he wanted to “keep something going and age with it.”

That something was Summer Stock, the Santa Barbara-based theater summer camp for schoolchildren that has been introducing young kids, from 6 years old and up, to the thrill of stepping onstage. Lehman and his wife Maureen have been at it long enough that their grandkids will be joining the cast for this summer’s first performance “The Cosmic Cools,” featuring kids aged 7 to 11, showing Friday at Center Stage Theater. That’s followed by “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” for 12 to 15 year olds, opening Saturday.

Precious moments, onstage and off: ‘Time of My Life’ caps Rick Mokler’s career at theater department

July 13, 2010June 9, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Rick Mokler retired last month after 20 years as a director, instructor and later the head of the Theater Department at SBCC. A great number of local actors worked under his tutelage, and Santa Barbara theatergoers, whether they know it or not, continue to encounter his graduates at Center Stage, Rubicon and beyond. So his swan song, Alan Ayckbourn’s “Time of My Life,” can only take on added depth with its comic examination of time, nostalgia, memory and appreciating the here and now.

“Time” dates from 1992, and is one of Ayckbourn’s lesser-known plays, yet it employs the same kind of time-jumping formalism as “Absurd Person Singular” and “Bedroom Farce.” The center of events is a 54th birthday dinner at a favorite Chinese restaurant for Stratton family matriarch Laura (Katie Thatcher), surrounded by her husband Gerry (Jon Koons), her son Glyn (Brian Harwell) and his wife Stephanie (Leesa Beck), and her other, younger son Adam (Josh Jenkins) and his date Maureen (Marisa Welby-Maiani).

Dargans’ Irish Coffee

July 9, 2010June 11, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

By the time you read this, the World Cup will be nearly over and you’ll have more of an idea about where your teams of interest stand, if they’re standing at all. At the time of visiting Dargan’s after a long absence, all the talk was on Koman Coulibaly, who was responsible for America tying rather than winning their match against Slovenia. “What was that ref thinking?” “He certainly was the villain of the piece.” And so on.

Because of the early hour for many of the matches, both Dargan’s Irish Pub and its neighbor The Press Room have been opening in the early morning. One would think no one gets up to watch a 4 a.m. match downtown, but they do. Dargan’s is not that bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but they have been opening at 7 a.m.

THE ORIGIN – UCSB A&L brings eight classic monster movies downtown

July 2, 2010June 11, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Alright, so Universal’s attempt to resuscitate its classic monster movie franchise hit a big, hairy speed bump with “The Wolf Man.” Its mixed reviews don’t bode well for the remake of “The Creature From the Black Lagoon,” coming next year. While Hollywood (in all its wisdom) tries to reinvent the wheel, why not take in the original wheel? This summer, Arts & Lectures presents all the classic Universal monster movies in one spooky fest.

Even if you haven’t seen these films, you’ve heard of the monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein (and his bride), Wolf Man, Invisible Man, Mummy, the aforementioned Black Lagoon chap and the Phantom of the Opera, who, by the way, isn’t some handsome guy in a mask.

And speaking of A&L…UCSB Arts and Lectures announced its overflowing 2010-11 season this past week

July 2, 2010June 11, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Is it too early to be planning the fall and new year? Didn’t summer just start? If you’re Celesta Billeci and her longtime staff at UCSB Arts & Lectures, thinking years ahead is just part of the job. Long before this story, A&L signed off on a full calendar of events beginning in August and ending next May, with lots of room in between for surprises to happen. (And good surprises, too. This time last year, that surprise turned out to be Elvis Costello.)

“People always ask us, ‘What’s new?'” says Billeci. “But ‘what’s new’ is our modus operandi. We’re always adding new events. We want to keep it fresh and relevant. We don’t want to say this is it, and nothing more.”

The Chill Is On – ‘Cabaret’ comes to Ojai ACT

June 25, 2010May 27, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

A nameless emcee (Cecil Sutton, left) facilitates the entertainment inside the Kit Kat Klub, which includes the sultry Sally Bowles (Holly Ferguson) in 1930s Berlin, but a growing Nazi party might have something to say about such a place. Photo by Dean Zatkowsky — A nameless emcee (Cecil Sutton, left) facilitates the entertainment inside the Kit Kat Klub, which includes the sultry Sally Bowles (Holly Ferguson) in 1930s Berlin, but a growing Nazi party might have something to say about such a place.
Photo by Dean Zatkowsky

“I saw the film version and … I wasn’t that impressed with it,” says Tracey Williams-Sutton, director of Ojai ACT’s production of “Cabaret.” Because it’s celluloid-centered, then video, Bob Fosse’s version of “Cabaret” with Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli has been most people’s introductory to the world that Christopher Isherwood created all those decades previous. But it also doesn’t take much to find the original source materials — Isherwood’s short stories, Josh Van Druten’s play based on the stories, and the musical with a book by Joe Masteroff (music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb) — have many more delights available. And that Williams-Sutton’s opinion is not rare.

The setting, for those who have be wilkommen’d to the Cabaret, old chum, is the Kit Kat Klub in 1931 Berlin. The Nazis are rising to power. Sally Bowles is young, British and a performer at the club. Cliff Bradshaw is young, American, a writer in search of inspiration, and soon to fall in love with Sally. And then there is the Emcee, who introduces us both to the club and to the society around them, which is becoming increasingly deadly.

Behind the Iron Curtain – An obscure but celebrated Santa Barbara synth band makes a cult comeback

June 25, 2010May 27, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Iron Curtain's Steve Fields, right, and Doug Norton, left, circa 1983. Rebecca Traver Photo — Iron Curtain’s Steve Fields, right, and Doug Norton, left, circa 1983.
Rebecca Traver Photo

In the early 1980s, a small genre of electronic music began to emerge: minimal, homemade, rough and icy. Influenced by The Cure, Joy Division, Kraftwerk and Krautrock, the sounds were made on early-model, cheap, portable synthesizers. The lyrics took on alienation, paranoia, fear and the general landscape of post-war anxiety. Retrospectively called either “minimal wave” or “cold wave,” the groups came from economically depressed cities like Sheffield, Berlin, Brussels, Manchester… and Santa Barbara?

When record label and Web site Minimal Wave put together its compilation of rare and obscure bands, “The Found Tapes: A Compilation of Minimal Wave From North America ’81-’87,” it included the little-known Iron Curtain, Steve Fields’ short-lived band that seems as out of place now as it did then, in a town used to feel-good beach rock and reggae.

Be Kind, Don’t Rewind – ‘Fast Forward’ at CAF offers primer in contemporary video art

June 25, 2010May 27, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

'HAPPY ENDINGS,' JEN DENKE — ‘HAPPY ENDINGS,’ JEN DENKE

As curator Annie Wharton likes to point out, video as an art form is just a little over 40 years old, a child compared to any other medium, save computer graphics. It’s a language she says that has grown dramatically considering that the first “portable” cameras weighed nearly 70 lbs. (the Sony CV-2000). As a young curator and maker of video art, she has been bringing her fascination with the art to galleries with video compilations, hoping to catch the rest of us up with the state of the art.

This Thursday, Wharton comes to Contemporary Arts Forum with “FAST-FORWARD: A Screening of Contemporary American Video Art,” a 50-minute show. Up and coming artists in the program include Susan Lee Chun, Jen DeNike, Spencer Douglass, Gustavo Hererra, Adriana Farmiga, Dan Finsel, Jesse Reding Fleming, Christy Gast, Alexa Gerrity, Aaron GM, Micol Hebron, Marc Horowitz, Jiae Hwang and more. In this brief interview conducted over e-mail, Wharton — who graduated from the University of Miami with a BFA in sculpture — lets us know what’s in store.

Carlito’s Pomegranate Margarita

June 25, 2010May 27, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Stunning to think that Carlito’s has been in Santa Barbara 32 years, serving up Mexican food across from the Arlington. That patio always stays packed when the sun is out, and that’s most of the time in our ‘burb. The chips and salsa keep coming, and oh my, that salsa! Or rather, those salsas, the chunky tomato version is so thick that the chips have a hard time standing under the weight. The black bean and corn salsa is oh so crunchy. What really could go with this lovely salt’n’corn combo?

Why, cocktails of course. Silly to ask, really. This is the Drink of the Week column, and Carlito’s was off our radar for a while only because it doesn’t have a physical bar to sidle up to. Instead, we sidled up to the menu, and found that there’s about 20 choices for the cocktail fan. So let the party begin, and come find us on the patio.