‘Santa Barbara Independent’s’ 2025 Indy Awards for Theater

Santa Barbara Independent’s 2025
Indy Awards for Theater

Our Annual Celebration of the Bright Lights of
Our Inspirational Theater Community

By Leslie Dinaberg | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
May 29, 2025

Santa Barbara’s theater community came out in wonderfully energetic, resilient force for the 2025 Indy Awards.

Held on Tuesday, May 20, at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club, the festive crowd was once again excited to come together to cheer on their fellow artists and theater aficionados in a beloved tradition that began more than 30 years ago — before many of our honorees and some of our judges were born — in 1991 when, as Santa Barbara Independent Editor in Chief Marianne Partridge explained, former Arts Editor Michael Smith wanted to come up with a way to show our support for the theater community of Santa Barbara. 

“I was just talking, just reminiscing with several people here who have been at the Indys over the years,” said Partridge. “We were at the Center Stage when it had just started, and it was such a small audience and such a small group of people doing theater in Santa Barbara — it’s really grown. And so, we’re very happy for that. We’re very grateful for the many years we’ve had at SOhO, and we’re grateful to Gail Hansen and her son, Tyler, for keeping this incredible venue open.”

She continued, “Every year, we do things a little differently, because we’re completely disorganized. And in fact, when we had a four-year hiatus, so really, we were doing these for 34 years from now to the beginning. But when Leslie Dinaberg came to become, thank God, our savior and editor of our arts and culture, we got organized. So, it was very frightening, and very few people were happy about it, because it meant they had to come in on time and things like that. But in any case, we now have a wonderfully organized event!” [Editor’s Note: Everyone else at the Independent LOVES it when we’re organized and on time.]

From high school musical singers to playwrights, set designers, directors, actors, producers, ushers, and more, this was a joyous way to celebrate the work that goes into everything we see throughout the year on area stages.

Working on the Indy Awards this year — which honored work between April 2024 and April 2025 (with some May high school musical performances) — was yours truly (Leslie Dinaberg, Arts, Culture & Community Editor) and Indy Marketing, Event & Promotions pro Richelle Boyd, with a crackerjack planning and judging team that included Indy Calendar Editor Terry Ortega, Creative Director Xavier Pereyra, Theater Writer Maggie Yates, and Reporter Callie Fausey, with support from EJI Events. 

Indy Award–winning artist and two-time Santa Barbara Independent Local Hero Rod Lathim proved himself a hero once again and served as our heartfelt emcee for the evening, accompanied by cellist Blythe Davis and our life-sized Shark (embodied by Independent team player of the week Erin Lynch), to make sure that award winners didn’t go over their allotted time for acceptance speeches. Appropriately, given his Shakespearean street cred, the first and only person to get “sharked” off the stage for talking too long was UCSB Naked Shakes founder and creative director Irwin Appel,  who has been presenting energetic, exciting, raw, vibrant Shakespeare in town since 2006 and most recently teamed up with Elings Park in a promising alliance to bring Shakespeare to more people in the community.

New to the Indy Awards this year was a special Local Theater Hero Award for Pam Lasker, for her noteworthy dedication to SBCC Theatre Group and the Santa Barbara theater community as a whole. “I feel really fortunate that, for close to 40 years, I’ve been able to go to this job that I love, with people that I love, and make people who are coming to the theater happy. I think when you find your calling, it’s such a great thing, and I hope that more people are able to do that,” said Lasker. 

“The next group of awards are for the hardworking people that keep Santa Barbara’s theaters from turning into the Santa Barbara Zoo — being the first friendly face someone sees when they walk in is an art in and of itself,” said Callie Fausey, who presented awards to four well-deserving ushers of the year — Ken Jurgensen, Sandy Hartley, Kitty Christen, and Ginny Nixon — to represent the unsung volunteer work that all of Santa Barbara’s ushers do. 

Along with charming performances from students of Santa Barbara, Dos Pueblos and San Marcos high schools — and songs from Hadestown, Mamma Mia! and Urinetown, respectively — almost two dozen people gave entertaining, gracious, charming, and heartfelt acceptance speeches full of gratitude to be able to create work they love and have it be recognized and appreciated by our community.

Lathim ended the program on a more serious, personal note, with a call to action. “As artists, we have an enormous obligation to exercise freedom of speech and protect and defend the voices of the people. We’re living in a very scary reality where our freedom and our democracy are being challenged. The current administration is censoring and cutting arts funding and institutions. NEA grants locally have been cut. Our history is being whitewashed. Our culture is being dictated by people who threaten us if our words, actions, or our art do not fit the administration’s policy views. As Robert De Niro recently said, ‘Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. That is why art is a threat to autocrats and fascists.’ There’s now a threat to impose a new tier tax of up to 10 percent on foundation investment income, taking critical funds and resources away from nonprofits, away from arts organizations. Unless we speak out, we could see the government unilaterally revoke a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status without due process oversight or clear standards. This opens the door for this administration to target nonprofits based on ideology or political dissent. This is happening now. Please, speak up, be heard, keep theater alive, be bold, and do not go quietly into that good night. Rage, rage against the dog.”