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FEB
12
2

Santa Paula Theatre Center Kicks off New Season

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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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2755 Hits
FEB
06
0

Superb Heisenberg at Rubicon

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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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10
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Review: Shepard's True West at SPTC

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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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4613 Hits
MAY
16
0

Review: The Baby Dance Mixed

 
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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.
 
  2962 Hits
2962 Hits
APR
20
0

Review: American Buffalo

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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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3957 Hits
APR
20
0

Review: MacBeth

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Lady Macbeth and the King dancingOjai 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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  2628 Hits
2628 Hits
MAR
27
1

Review:King Lear

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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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2566 Hits
FEB
12
0

Review: ETC’s The City of Conversation

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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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2712 Hits
FEB
12
0

Review: This Random World

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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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2228 Hits
NOV
13
0

Review: Perlmutter’s Directing Hamlet

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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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  1561 Hits
1561 Hits