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.
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).
Hamlet may have died avenging his father’s murder, but he’s spent a bit of time in the afterlife brushing up on his Broadway musical knowledge. That is the admittedly silly thesis that results in a lot of song and dance behind “Ghosts of Broadway,” the first production from Big Stage Productions, the performance arm of Santa Barbara Dance Arts. Kids from ages 8 and up will show their love of musical theater this Monday night.
Big Stage answers what founders Dauri Kennedy, Laezer Schlomkowitz, Steven Lovelace, Alana Tillim and Kathy Kelley saw as a real need in Santa Barbara. With the increasing popularity of “High School Musical,” “Glee” and “American Idol,” as well as a new interest in Broadway through a new decade of classics, a generation of children is coming up desperate for training in the all-singing, all-dancing arts.
Can there be a fan of Speaking of Stories, a 14-year spoken word mainstay of Santa Barbara entertainment calendars, who isn’t a fan of T.C. Boyle? Since its earliest days, the short stories of our literary resident have been a constant, first as material read by actors, then read by the author himself. Actor Charles De L’Arbe reads Boyle’s story “My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain” on Sunday, while Boyle appears Monday night to read his story “The Lie.”
Many contemporary authors read their stories out loud, either over the radio (NPR is a major pitstop) or as part of a book tour. But “Speaking of Stories,” directed by Maggie Mixsell, allows its readers a performance space.
Before alcoholism was seen as a disease, one man decided that the best way to get a drunk off the booze was to have him talk to another drunk. The camaraderie and that empathetic, shared experience worked, and the organization Alcoholics Anonymous was born.
The new production of “Bill W. and Dr. Bob,” which opens at Center Stage this Thursday, drops us right into those early days in 1934, where the two men keep each other sober, helped over the course of the play by their respective wives.
There’s an attraction for directors to Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy.”
Its lampooning of psychobabbling me-generation members and profundity of rude language give it an edgy surface. It’s like a coarser, more farcical Woody Allen. It’s also incredibly dated.
Mr. Durang packs his dialogue with cultural reference that may have been funny when they were fresh out the oven. Prudence, the female lead in this romantic farce, says at one point that she thinks Shaun Cassidy’s cute, but “he’s too young for me.”
Not even 20 coats of irony can save that line from disappearing into the sinkhole. Plenty of other names and pop culture-isms get dropped, from Peter Schaffer’s “Equus” to Dyan Cannon, and they hit the ground, brick-like.