Theater is a living, evolving art, and that is aptly demonstrated this weekend when Ensemble Theatre Company opens its 2010 – 11 season with Alan Brody’s “The Housewives of Mannheim.” Brody’s play made it out of the 2007 writers workshops to the desk of director SuzAnne Barabas, whose New Jersey Repertory Company has since been living with the play, molding, creating and claiming the characters as its own.
In a rare move for Ensemble, the director and cast have come to Santa Barbara to mount this West Coast premiere.
Pity the wealthy upper class of the Northeastern United States, as typified by the family at the center of A.R. Gurney’s play “The Cocktail Hour.” In place of a quiet reunion upon prodigal son John’s return home, a family is rocked by the news that he intends to turn their foibles into a play. It’s title? “The Cocktail Hour.” Let the martinis and bickering commence.
Gurney’s comedy also toasts to the end of Circle Bar B’s theater season, and David and Susie Couch have called in their favorites to make the evening a proper sendoff to a year well done. Leesa Beck, Matt Cooper, Don Margolin and Kathy Marden star, and Jim Sirianni — a long-time favorite who most recently helmed DIJO’s “Frost/Nixon” — directs.
From left to right: Kelly Ary, Dan Gunther and Peter McCorkle sing about the origin of Center Stage at the theater Saturday night. NIK BLASKOVICH/NEWS-PRESS
Do we take the Center Stage Theater for granted? Board member Laurel Lyle put forth this question on Saturday night at the end of a short but very much appreciated celebration of 20 years of community theater. The black box at the top of the tiled stairs above the California Pizza Kitchen has been this reviewer’s destination several times a year, and to imagine Santa Barbara without it…well, it would be a pretty bleak existence for community arts. The evening — a reception, a comedic performance and a post-show champagne toast — was an affectionate tribute to a space that has been an essential part of the city’s downtown arts scene.
It could have been a formal affair, an evening that celebrated longevity and took it as a sign of cultural importance with a capital C.I. But this is Center Stage, and that means creativity comes first, stuffiness dead last. It says something when the actor in the closest thing approaching a business suit spends his moment in the performance doing a voice over.
In this file photo from March 25, 1990, the framework and scaffolding of the future Center Stage Theater can be seen in the upper left of the frame. Nine hundred productions and 20 years later, the building has proved its worth and durability. Rafael Maldonado/News-Press File
Was it really 20 years ago that Center Stage Theater opened its doors in the second-story area of Paseo Nuevo? Even Rod Lathim, one of the theater’s founders, finds the length of time hard to believe.
“Teri (Ball, executive director) called me to tell me, and I said, ‘No, that can’t be right. It must be 15.'”
But indeed, it’s true. To celebrate Santa Barbara’s longest running black box theater, the Center Stage Theater is holding a blowout anniversary party on Saturday, with a specially written and performed journey back through its history, along with a celebratory champagne toast and other surprises.
Center Stage Theater kicks off its 20th anniversary week with a reminder of how it has given breaks to up-and-coming playwrights.
“Hopeless Romantic” is Steve Kunes’ first foray into theater after a long career writing scripts for Hollywood. For Saturday night’s play reading, the writer has pared down his usual ensemble cast, instead opting for multi-scene works for two actors.
Susie Couch, left, Max Avila, center, and Jasin Ouisenberry star in Circle Bar B’s “Nonsense Precious.” Courtesy photos
When Susie and David Couch of Circle Bar B Ranch decided on “Precious Nonsense” as their next play, the two directors knew they needed someone special to take the helm. Someone who was adept at both comedy and musical theater, because Rachel Lampert’s play details a touring production of “The Pirates of Penzance” gone awry in 1930s upstate New York.
Enter Miller James, who has not only “Pirates” on his résumé (he directed it just last November for Opera SB, although not for the first time), but also other Gilbert and Sullivan musicals and several condensed operas for children.
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.
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).
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.
In 1927, housewife Ruth Snyder conspired with her lover Henry Judd Gray to murder her husband and collect the insurance money. The following trial became a media sensation, as the public was baying for blood.
Among others, filmmaker D.W. Griffith and author Damon Runyon covered the trial. On the day of Snyder’s execution, a photographer snuck in and grabbed a disturbing, iconic image as she died in the electric chair at Sing Sing.
