ARTS & CULTURE
Society805’s Art & Culture section keeps your finger on the pulse on the arts and the cultural moves inside the 805. We get around the noise and beneath the hype to give you the real issues inside the 805 arts scene and the people in them. We bring you the key events shaping the 805 cultural landscape so you do not miss out on what is important and the direction of the 805 culture in art, theater, music, and film. Remember, you can’t live in style without art and culture.
Monday, 12 March 2018 21:44
West Coast premiere of ‘What Happened When’ by Rattlestick’s Daniel Talbott
Written by
Echo Theater Company presents West Coast premiere of ‘What Happened When’ by Rattlestick’s Daniel Talbott
Following 3-week limited engagement, production will re-open this summer and again in fall, each time with a different cast
LOS ANGELES (March 12, 2018) — Brooding, compelling, funny and startling. Memories unravel and dark truths are revealed in a haunting ghost story by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s Daniel Talbott (Slipping). Chris Fields directs the West Coast premiere of What Happened When for The Echo Theater Company, opening at Atwater Village Theatre on April 12. Following the production’s three-week run through April 26, What Happened When will re-open this summer and again in the fall, each time with a different cast.
VENTURA EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP presents the 17th Annual
Festival of Talent: “WALKING ON SUNSHINE”
A Benefit Talent Show for VUSD
Festival of Talent: “WALKING ON SUNSHINE”
A Benefit Talent Show for VUSD
Ventura, CA – Ventura Education Partnership will present the 17th Annual Festival of Talent: “Walking on Sunshine” on Saturday March 24, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. The performance is open to the public and showcases the amazing talent of Ventura Unified School District students, staff and family members. ,Brian McDonald, Rubicon Theatre Company Associate Artistic Director, will direct the show for his tenth and final year.
Ashlynn Vaglica of Ventura High sings ‘I Know Where I’ve Been’ backed up by the Harmonix
Photo Credit: Loren Haar / Lore Photography
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Arts & Culture News
Review
Dance
Beyond The 805
The penultimate evening of FLAX’s The Dialectic of the Stars Bodies2 features choreographer and dancer Noé Soulier. Fabien Danesi, the curator of the series, describes LA as “both cinematographic and paradisiac, but also artificial”. His inspiration for The Dialectic of the stars draws a star in Los Angeles: a place of contradiction, hallucination and mystery, at once “political and poetic.” I keep his portrait of Los Angeles at the forefront as he introduces Soulier.
Friday, 09 March 2018 22:19
The Music Academy of the West’s 2017 Marilyn Horne Song Competition Winners National Recital Tour Begins March 22
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Soprano Hannah Rose Kidwell and pianist Christina Giuca will perform in recital on tour in March 2018 in Houston, Santa Barbara, Chicago, and New York City
Santa Barbara, CA — The Music Academy of the West proudly hosts the nation’s premiere annual competition for song recitals, the Marilyn Horne Song Competition. Academy fellows have competed annually since 1997. This year, the competitors performed for a panel of esteemed judges – Marilyn Horne, Renée Fleming, and Jake Heggie. The 2017 winners of the Competition, soprano Hannah Rose Kidwell and pianist Christina Giuca, will perform a program including the world premiere of a song cycle written by Jake Heggie, who was a guest composer at the Music Academy this summer.
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Arts & Culture News
“SELL/BUY/DATE” AT THE GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE EXTENDS THROUGH APRIL 15
SARAH JONES’ ONE-WOMAN PLAY OPENS TONIGHT; DIRECTED BY CAROLYN CANTOR
LOS ANGELES, CA – The Geffen Playhouse today announced that Sell/Buy/Date, Sarah Jones’ critically acclaimed one-woman show, will extend for one week and run through
Sunday, April 15. Written and performed by Jones and directed by Carolyn Cantor,Sell/Buy/Date opens tonight in the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse.
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Arts & Culture News
Theatre Planners Presents
West Coast Premiere of a Comedy Play in One-Act
L.O.V.E.R.
Tales of Love and Lust from a #GrownUpWomansPOV
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Accomplished actress Lois Robbins takes us on a poignant and comic journey as one woman explores her sexual history, in what ultimately becomes her coming of age story, L.O.V.E.R. Directed by Sonia Sebastian, L.O.V.E.R. opens on April 13, running through May 12 at the Zephyr Theatre on Melrose Avenue.
L.O.V.E.R. is a riff on childhood, adolescents and finally adulthood from a grown-up woman’s point of view. Robbins’ one-act comic play first workshopped in June 2017 at The Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, NY.
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Arts & Culture News
As the Choral Society turns 70 and Conductor JoAnne Wasserman takes the podium in her 25th season, she's programmed a 70th Anniversary Concert repertoire that features a work never yet performed during her tenure and spans the choral cannon from the classical to the modern, reflective of the uninterrupted journey from the venerable chorus’s inception just post WWII to today.
Rena Harms, Soprano
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Arts & Culture News
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On Wikipedia, it mentions that Ethan Bortnick has 6 occupations, they are a pianist, singer, actor, songwriter, composer, and comedian, and he is only 17 years old!! He has accomplished more things in his seventeen years than most people in a lifetime and I have a feeling that he is only just getting started.
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Film . Music
Monday, 12 February 2018 15:36
Review: ETC’s The City of Conversation
Written by Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large
Theatre
Review
Wrongs of the Righteous
Anthony Giardina’s timely play, The City of Conversation, now playing at Santa Barbara’s ETC, traces the story of a fictional Washington D.C. political doyen, Hester Ferris, pushing American politics Pamela Harriman-style, behind the scenes in her dining and drawing rooms, across four decades and many more presidential regimes. It is in many ways a difficult play to pull off, in spite of its many funny lines, and pertinent content.
This ETC production fairs better than most, in large part thanks to Sharon Lawrence’s superb rendering of Hester Ferris, its lead character. In a sense, the main reason to watch this play is to see Lawrence work her magic.
Monday, 12 February 2018 10:33
Review: This Random World
Written by Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large
Theatre
Review
Steven Dietz's This Random World at SPTC
Santa Paula Theatre Center kicks off its 2018 season with a wonderfully good production of Steven Dietz's This Random World. SPTC produced Dietz's Becky's New Car last season as well; but these are two very different plays with little in common except Dietz's genius for fascinating female parts; a beautifully controlled, understated sense of humor; terrific writing; and Dietz's particularly good-hearted, slightly off-kilter somewhat philosophical bent.
Scott Blanchard (L) and Aileen-Marie (R)
Art Review
Vonder Gray at WAV
Vonder Gray's exhibition of new work at the WAV is an important show for this artist, the WAV and the greater Ventura art community. Continuing her recent forays into improvisational abstraction, featuring large, sometimes unstretched, paintings on canvas, the new work is more open, expansive, confident, and larger in conception.