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Robert Shields, the most famous mime in America, protege of Marcel Marceau, inspiration to Michael Jackson, and star of The Shields and Yarnell Show, appeared in Santa Barbara last weekend as part of the Festival of Fools, a celebration of the legacy of Marceau, who died last month in Paris. Preceded by a film of Shields’s early improvisational street mime days in San Francisco, he entered the theater in whiteface, wearing a striped shirt and suspenders.
The opener for the 2007-08 Broadway at the Arlington series, Movin’ Out is an unusual jukebox musical that unfolds without dialogue, relying on song and dance to tell a familiar story of 1960s high school sweethearts ripped apart by the Vietnam War. The songs, in this case, are classic Billy Joel numbers delivered by a vocalist and a 10-piece band on a platform above the stage; the dances are the work of New York choreographer Twyla Tharp.
Director Sara Martinovich and her Loose Affiliation of Artists (LAA) have accomplished a lot in a little over a year. The company has developed a signature style and established itself as a theatrical team, complete with stars, ingenues, and a growing coterie of fans. LAA delivers much of what Santa Barbara theatergoers want: excitement, accomplished acting, sophisticated dialogue, and a healthy dose of sex appeal.
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.
Photo gallery of George Carlin at the Arlington.
Eric Bogosian’s play Humpty Dumpty starts out like any cliched horror film would: A group of vacationers go to an abandoned cabin in the woods only to find themselves locked in, with no electricity or means of communication with the outside world. However, the audience quickly finds this play contains something mostly absent from scary movies like Saw and Scream-a profound message.
Circle Bar B Theatre ends this season on a high note with a hilarious production of I Hate Hamlet. The play is set in a New York apartment that was previously inhabited by the legendary actor John Barrymore. Andrew, a young TV actor, has just moved into Barrymore’s apartment. Although he achieved fame on the fictional television show L.A. Medical, Andrew feels woefully inadequate for the lead role in Hamlet at the Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.
When Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance premiered, critics were divided. Some hailed it as great American theater, while others were less than enthusiastic. It’s easy to see why. Despite flashes of sharp wit and moments of emotional truth, Rubicon’s current production of Balance seemed unable to find its center.
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.
