Society 805 - Page 2

MAR

Review:King Lear

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Theatre

Review

King Lear at Rubicon

King Lear is one of Shakspeare’s greatest plays, some say greatest. People usually do Lear because they want to do something with it. Like Wagner’s Ring, Shakespeare’s Lear has, in modern times, become a formidable vehicle for taking a production to the limits. This usually means something in terms of either its direction, staging, or acting, or some combination or all three. Rubicon accordingly tries a lot of different things with this ambitious production in a well-worth seeing Lear.

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FEB

Review: ETC’s The City of Conversation

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

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.

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stage performance arts reviews theatre

FEB

Review: This Random World

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

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)

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theatre reviews performance arts stage Review

FEB

Art Review: Vonder Gray at WAV

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Visual Arts

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.

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artistsinthe805 Artist Interviews Art Review

NOV

Review: Perlmutter’s Directing Hamlet

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Review-

First, let us hear it for doing new theatre, new scripts, producing local playwrights’ new plays, or more courageously yet, workshopping new plays. Plays do not bloom, full-grown, out of the head of Zeus. As they say in Silicon Valley, if you are not doing something new, you have no future.

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stage performance arts reviews theatre

NOV

Review: Taking Sides

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Performing Arts

Review-

Rubicon Theatre in Ventura’s downtown cultural district is doing Sir Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides through 12 November 2017. Harwood did The Pianist and has repeatedly shown interest in World War II-related moral dilemmas. Taking Sides fits right in. It’s basically a military tribunal “trial” by the American occupation command in Berlin of Wilhelm Furtwangler, the great German conductor who stayed in Nazi Germany throughout the Nazi era and World War II.

Patrick Vest as Major Arnold, Tara Donovan as Emmi Straube and Peter Van Norden as German composer Wilhelm Furtwängler in Taking Sides by Academy Award-Winner Sir Ronald Harwood and directed by Ovation Award-winner Stephanie Coltrin.
Photo Credit: Josh and Veronica Slavin

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Rubicon Theatre Company reviews

NOV

Art Review: Chagall at LACMA

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Visual Arts

BEYOND THE 805

Art, Theatre, and Costume Design

Chagall at LACMA

The exhibition Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA] on view until 7 January 2018 is a special kind of exhibition. It deals with Chagall’s involvement with specific dance performances during his mature years when he was at the height of his powers drawing from long-held connections to music, stage, and dance. Due to the difficulty of exhibiting this type of material, it is probably, unfortunately, a once-in-a-lifetime experience and may never be repeated.

Installation view, Marc Chagall designed costume for the Magic Flute opera, Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through 7 January 2018, copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society [ARS] New York / ADAGP Paris. photo: Copyright Fredrik Nilsen.

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Chagall Art Review Beyond the 805

OCT

Preview: Flying H Does Blackbird

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Performing Arts

Theatre

Preview

Flying H Does Blackbird

Ventura is getting a special treat: Two of the 805’s best acting talents, Jessi May Stevenson and Taylor Kasch, are teaming up to do David Harrower’s Blackbird, one of the most remarkable plays written in decades.

SEP

Dance: Anaїs by Mixed eMotion Theatrix

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Dance

Dance

Anaїs by Mixed eMotion Theatrix

9 September 2017 -- The greatest strengths of Anaїs, a Dance Opera, other than the conception and timing of doing this work at this time to begin with, is, first, the work of both the lead dancer, Kate Coleman, and the voice, Holly Sedillos, at its center. Second, the choice of doing it with a minimal set backed by a projection scrim and using live and recorded sound, in short, a multi-media piece.

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Dance Anaїs by Mixed eMotion Theatrix 9 September 2017 -- Anaїs Dance Opera

SEP

Review: Incognito

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Performing Arts

Theatre

Review

Incognito

Rubicon theatre presents a fabulous West Coast premiere of Nick Payne’s Incognito. Runnng 90 minutes without intermission, the play was originally commissioned and performed by Nabokov and Live Theatre, in Newcastle, UK in 2014 and opened in the US 3 May, 2016 at the Manhattan Theatre Club.