At the Santa Barbara Bowl, Friday, July 21.
To open his set, Michael Buble came out swinging from behind a corny but effective silhouette screen with “Feeling Good,” a Nina Simone song that has a jazzier, more spiritual feeling than one would expect from someone who clearly venerates Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Dean Martin.
It’s Tuesday morning, and Frank Goss has invited a thousand people to the Saturday night opening of his big new contemporary-art exhibition space on East Anapamu Street. That’s just five days away, and the cavernous former home of the Odd Fellows and the Book Den is still literally roaring with the sounds of multiple power tools and teams of men at work. As we enter, stepping over orange extension cords snaking this way and that, scores of electricians, carpenters, and painters swarm around us, and a fragrant polish shimmers on the expansive, raw stone floors. Goss could be concerned about his impending deadline, but you would never know it from his manner.
At the UCSB University Art Museum, through August 27.
This exhibition, which brings together works of art that reference clothing, includes many remarkable and interesting pieces, but its presentation gets bogged down in jargon-ridden intellectual pretentiousness. The main title of the exhibit, Pattern Language, has been hijacked from Christopher Alexander’s 1977 treatise on architecture, which is nowhere to be found in the show’s published bibliography. Stenciled sentences on the gallery walls bristle with abstractions and the occasional subject-verb agreement problem. The works themselves fall into a few relatively predictable categories, such as pieces that make clothing out of alternative materials, pieces that add unnecessary but symbolic features to standard designs, and pieces that poke fun at social conventions.
At Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, through August 2.
Shiba Ward paints big things in small pictures. The freight trains, factories, train stations, and urban scenes Ward finds chiefly in downtown Los Angeles are cropped and focused to their essence in his panels, which typically measure less than 8½ by 11 inches. The best of them are jewel-like – intense and multi-faceted. In “The Original” (2006), a lone figure stands outlined in bright white beneath the awning of an aging Los Angeles coffee shop. The vertical slice of red signage just above his head spells out the establishment’s name, “Philippe,” in white neon, and it is repeated in yellow and red neon script on another sign running horizontally even farther above.
At Center Stage Theater, Sunday, July 2.
Some time early in Sunday night’s performance, Jim Connolly took responsibility for announcing the program from the stage. “We didn’t do a program,” he said. “I am the program.” And so he was.
An Ensemble Theatre Co. production; at Alhecama Theatre, Friday, June 30. Shows through July 23.
Summer brings out a populist impulse in all the arts, and theater is no exception. Judging from the audience’s enthusiastic response opening night, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, intended as a crowd-pleaser, ought to be a hit. Director Robert Grande Weiss and Dance‘s two stars, Mary Jo Catlett and Joseph Fuqua, have transformed a potentially maudlin story about people who need people into two different but equally powerful acts of very satisfying theater. The first half is nearly all comedy, and, although there are some moments of anger and a few not-so-dark shadows indicating what is to come, the laughs are steady, consistent, and well-earned. Act two plumbs the depths of these feisty combatants, revealing backstories full of trauma, regret, and unresolved love. The ending is bittersweet, but the overall impression is of laughing out loud, again and again, at clever things said by people you actually like.
People in Santa Barbara generally know quite a lot about making themselves more attractive. For our skin, we have spas. For our hair, salons. For our bodies? There’s every exercise regime and clothing option imaginable available here. But what to do about our minds? Even for those already blessed with outward beauty, the mind matters, because it’s where we can all become still more attractive – not only to others but also to ourselves. An exciting convergence of these two approaches to beauty is happening at Nights, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s monthly summer event, which continues tonight with a tribute to the human form in art. In keeping with this theme, it would be safe to assume that, at Nights tonight, the human form will be on generous display. And so will the art.
At the Santa Barbara Bowl, Monday, June 5.
Lounging on a riser at the front edge of the stage in head-to-toe blonde rockstar white, Ashlee Simpson looked every bit the pop princess as she told the audience “I love you guys!” before launching into “Autobiography,” just one of the hits from the first of her two albums. The Santa Barbara Bowl made an ideal opening-night venue for the big national tour that Ashlee is on, and she has every reason to be happy. She’s as interesting musically as anyone in the pop mainstream right now, and she still sells like crazy.
At an Opera on the Go panel discussion last Wednesday at Victoria Hall, composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell) announced his agreement with Opera Santa Barbara to write a new opera to be premiered here at the refurbished Granada in February 2009. Based on the book and film Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the project will be directed by Schwartz’s son, Scott, who was just awarded an Indy for his direction of the Jonathan Larson musical Tick : Tick : Boom! at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura.
Stephen Schwartz was joined in Wednesday’s panel discussion by Peter Frisch, Daniel Cat¡n, and Jake Heggie.
At the Rockwood Woman’s Club, Sunday, May 21.
Mark O’Connor clearly leads a charmed life. His early musical education in Seattle brought him into contact with some of the greatest and most unorthodox fiddlers of all time, including Texas master Benny Thomasson and French swing giant Stephane Grappelli. Lately, he has taken to hanging out with other string virtuosos such as Edgar Meyer, Joshua Bell, and Yo-Yo Ma. For the latest incarnation of his classical music crossover tendency, O’Connor enlisted two wonderful musicians: violist Carol Cook from Edinburgh and cellist Natalie Haas from California. Both have extensive experience as classical soloists and traditional fiddle music performers.
