reviews

FEB

Santa Paula Theatre Center Kicks off New Season

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Theatre

Santa Paula Theatre Center Kicks off New Season

Ventura 12February 2019 -- The Santa Paula Theatre Center kicks off a tremendously interesting 2019 theatre season with Stephen Karam’s Tony Award winning The Humans starting at the beginning of February and running until 10 March. The Humans is a multi-leveled, complex sprawl of a play constructed around a Yonkers family’s Thanksgiving dinner at a daughter’s “walk down” ground-floor apartment in contemporary lower Manhattan.

This SPTC season features five strong dramas by some of our best playwrights, including Edward Albee’s Seascape, and what some feel is Neil Simon’s greatest play, Lost in Yonkers. If there were ever a time to get a season ticket for the entire run of one of our best local community theatres, this is the time to do it.

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FEB

Superb Heisenberg at Rubicon

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Qhqg rPg

Theatre

Superb Heisenberg at Rubicon

Ventura 7 February 2019 -- Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre kicks off 2019 with a superb rendition of Simon Stephens' understated, penetrating, psychological masterpiece, Heisenberg, running from 30 January through 17 February 2019. New York Times’ Ben Brantley once called Heisenberg “one of the most emotionally complex and fulfilling plays to grace a New York stage”.

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SEP

Review: Shepard's True West at SPTC

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Theatre

Shepard's True West at SPTC

We have passed the one year anniversary of the death of one of America's greatest playwrights, Sam Shepard, and Santa Paula Theatre Company has appropriately commemorated the moment by producing one of his best plays, True West. In spite of its complexities and the murkiness of its depths, True West may be Shepard's most accessible and funniest play.

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MAY

Review: The Baby Dance Mixed

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Theatre

Review
Baby Tangle

As May seems to be the month in the 805 for plays about deluded people living in trailers, Ventura's Rubicon offers us Jane Anderson's world premier of The Baby Dance: Mixed. A two act, highly charged emotional drama involving two couples, one who cannot have a baby, and a poor couple about to have one, Baby Dance: Mixed features an extraordinary cast. One highlight of this production, and a reason in itself for going to see it, is Krystle Rose Simmons' portrayal of Wanda, the pregnant woman.

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APR

Review: American Buffalo

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Taylor Kasch, Eric Mello and Brian Robert Harris American Buffalo Santa Paula Theater Center Photo Credit: Brian Sterham

Theatre

Review

The Santa Paula Theater Center and company has launched the second play in an excellent season of tough, great theatre, with their current production of David Mamet’s legendary play, American Buffalo.

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APR

Review: MacBeth

By Erik ReeL - Arts and Culture Contributing Editor at Large

in Theatre

Lady Macbeth and the King dancing cropped

Lady Macbeth and the King dancing. Ojai Art Center Theater in conjunction with the Ojai Performing Arts Theater's Macbeth

Theatre

Review

When it rains, it pours, they say. While we don’t get a lot of professional Shakespeare in our regional theatre, and thus one would expect there to not be much of a pool of Shakespearean actors locally, the 805 currently has two major Shakespeare plays on offer: Rubicon’s fine King Lear, and The Ojai Art Center Theater’s Macbeth. Not only that, but both productions are trying to do something new and interesting with their productions.

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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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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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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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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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