As the Bowl season stretches deep into fall this year, and the concert-going experience becomes familiar through repetition, it’s a rare artist who can draw in even the most jaded Bowl regulars and win them over completely. On Sunday, Tony Bennett made it look easy. Dressed in a traditional white dinner jacket and sounding absolutely glorious at 81, Bennett appeared with a four-piece jazz combo.
Once upon a time in a city far, far away, where people went out every night of the week and rarely came home before five o’clock in the morning, there lived a woman who embodied the nebulous but absolutely dominant concept of cool known as “downtown.” Tonight, October 4, at the Contemporary Arts Forum, Ann Magnuson and her artistic partner Kristian Hoffman will bring the strange frisson of 1980s downtown New York to Santa Barbara, linking us to a time when the East Village was the center of an avant-garde world.
Every so often, a rare flower blooms in the theatrical garden: the organic one-person show. These performances arise out of a natural storytelling situation and not from behind the proscenium arch of traditional theater. Debra Ehrhardt’s Jamaica Farewell is a prize specimen of this very glorious and special kind of theater, and we are fortunate to have Ellen Pasternack and Albert Ihde’s Santa Barbara Theatre here in town to bring it to the Lobero. I spoke with Ehrhardt last week about the show, and the prospect of playing it for a Santa Barbara audience.
Nothing excites serious stage actors more than the emergence of an important new playwright, and the 33-year-old American Sara Ruhl, author of The Clean House, which opens this week at Ensemble Theatre, appears to be just that-perhaps even in a league with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Her reputation is based on a corpus of plays-The Clean House, Passion Play, Eurydice, and Late: A Cowboy Song-distinguished by their poetic economy, lightness, and wit, as well as their sudden openings onto great depths of pathos and sublimity.
Take a fine Saturday evening on the cusp of autumn, add a dash of rain to clear the air, and set the most faithful of the currently touring bands to come out of the Grateful Dead on stage, and you have a recipe for some people’s idea of bliss. Phil Lesh’s bass guitar was the pulsing heart of the Dead for several decades, and his funky, syncopated, and melodic playing is as fresh as ever.
Pink Martini was a great choice for the season-opening concert for UCSB’s Arts & Lectures, and the group brought their idiosyncratic and crowd-pleasing take on world music to a packed Arlington last Thursday. They opened with Ravel’s “Bolero,” a decision that bandleader and pianist Thomas Lauderdale acknowledged may have broken the law. Apparently, Ravel was bothered by some early adaptations of his most famous work and took an aggressive stance toward future non-standard arrangements.
Going your own way is something a lot of artists in the music business pay lip service to, but few can really claim to have done. Vonda Shepard came up through an unusual set of circumstances and got a break-her featured role on the television hit Ally McBeal-that doesn’t fit with any formula. Today, Shepard is off television and on the mommy track with her 17-month-old son, whom she had with her husband, music producer and keyboardist Mitchell Froom.
With an exemplary career that spans nearly five decades and one of the world’s most pure, perfect, and instantly recognizable singing voices, Judy Collins could be forgiven for taking things easy, but that’s not her style-at all. With a new record of Lennon and McCartney songs out on her own label and an established second career as an author, she is as lively and perhaps more ambitious than she was in her early twenties when she took the 1960s folk movement mainstream.
Ask a drama scholar what makes the history of theater special, and she will tell you about the incredible way exceptional plays make themselves felt across time. Edward Albee, the most gifted living American playwright, won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for A Delicate Balance, the story of an odd three-person household in an affluent New York City suburb whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of familiar neighbors who have been struck by a sudden, unnamable fear.
Janice (Laurel Lyle), the protagonist of Michael Smith’s Bad Dog, is a mother, a presidential candidate, and a former terrorist. Like the ancient Greek Prometheus, Janice sins against the gods by bringing the gift of fire to the people. In her case, that gift takes the form of homemade bombs and the spirit of violent 1970s radicalism.
