In the latest of the ongoing departures from the staff of the Santa Barbara News-Press, Tom Jacobs, the paper’s highest-profile full-time arts writer, announced his resignation last week. Jacobs, who has written about theater, classical music, jazz, popular music, opera, and books, will be assuming the role of communications director for the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura.
Phillip M. Johnston announced this week that he is leaving his position as director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, although he will stay on until his successor is named. A renowned scholar of American art and antiques and an influential figure in the museum world, Johnston has left a powerful legacy at the SBMA, and he will be missed.
The Presidio Chapel, with its bright Mexican altar and candlelight, is one of the most romantic spaces in Santa Barbara and it made a great setting for this female singer/songwriters concert. If there were technical difficulties-and there were-chalk that up to the experience, as this was the first of what is said to be a series of musical evenings produced by Brett Leigh Dicks and sponsored by KCRW.
Patty Look Lewis portrays the California landscape with the soul and jazzy grace of a laidback Santa Barbara Zen master. Under the skillful nurture of her hand, eye, and consciousness, the Gaviota ranchlands find expression as harmoniously elongated horizontal and vertical modernist pastels. I
Danish-Icelandic artist Jacob Boeskov belongs to the ever-expanding, mostly boys’ club of autobiographical artists for whom irony, social commentary, and sexuality are interchangeable tools in a mad scramble to get ahead in art. The centerpiece of this sort-of retrospective is “My Doomsday Weapon” (2002/2004), a performance piece in which Boeskov attended China Police 2002, a weapons and police equipment trade fair held in Beijing.
Early on in Stephen Sachs’s masterful adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, John, played by Chuma Gault, tells a cunningly childlike riddle. “What’s got four eyes and can’t see? Mississippi.” The play, which is set on July 4, 1964, makes the point of this riddle abundantly clear in 90 rapid and tumultuous minutes. The State of Mississippi has blinded itself not only to the social change sweeping the nation, but also to the tortured conflicts that lie at its own heart.
On May 11 in New York City, HBO announced that the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (CAF) will not take place in Aspen, Colorado next year. Immediately following the announcement, an HBO spokeswoman (who requested that her name not be used even though she was on the record) confirmed that Santa Barbara was being considered as the 2008 location for the festival, which has attracted thousands of HBO stars, independent comedians, and entertainment industry executives to Aspen annually for 13 years.
Forgotten by all but a handful of his closest friends and relations, the weary traveler Odysseus makes his way homeward to an uncertain fate. His house has been all but taken over by a horde of ill-mannered suitors who seek to replace him not only as lord of the manor, but also as husband to his wife Penelope.
If playing classical music in the talent-saturated Southern California market is a high-wire act of sorts, then composing original contemporary classical music for that same market is the ultimate thrill, a little like one of the side activities Camerata Pacifica Artistic Director Adrian Spence enjoys in the off-season-skydiving. On Friday, for the second time in three years, Camerata Pacifica will be premiering a major work commissioned by Montecito philanthropists and music aficionados Luci and Richard Janssen.
With Miss Julie, August Strindberg made one of the most exciting and volatile contributions to the repertoire in the long history of the theater. In the manifesto with which he prefaced the play, Strindberg set out some extraordinary requirements for the new theater of “naturalism” he had in mind: no footlights, no stage makeup, events happening in real time, absolute candor about such socially awkward subjects as blasphemy, lust, and various bodily functions, and, finally, the creation and depiction of the naturalist character-a kind of amalgam of the tragic hero and the protagonist of the 19th-century novel-a complex person with even more complex motives.
