A &E RTS
Rubicon (Continued from 40 40)) Lewis will star in the 90-minute two-character play (plus narrator) that will be read at 6 pm Saturday, April 30, at the library’s Fireplace Room followed by a talkback with the playwright. Slaff will also lead a free playwriting workshop at 10:30 am that same morning, featuring a series of individual and group writing experiments to help participants explore and deepen their playwriting skills and begin to create a short written theatrical work. No experience is necessary for the workshop in the library’s Technology Lab. Visit facebook.com/layFestSantaBarba ra for details and reservations.
Oddities in Ojai All in the Timing, David Ives’s hilarious collection of one-act comic plays, has had several performances in town, including at least twice at SBCC Theater (‘07 and ‘16), and further back in 2006 with Ensemble Theatre Company directed by founder Robert Grande-Weiss. The short pieces include one that demonstrates the theory that three monkeys typing randomly will eventually produce Hamlet; a bit where minimalist classical composer Philip Glass visits a bakery, and another a blind date-cafe encounter between strangers where a cautionary bell rings each time one of them says the wrong thing so they can rewind and try again. Starting this weekend, five actors working out of Ojai will take on the collective 15 roles at the Ojai Art Center Theater, with performances continuing through May 15. Any chance to see Ives’ words in action up close is worth the drive. Visit ojaiact.org for more details.
Classical Corner Still pivoting due to the pandemic, the Santa Barbara Symphony is squeezing in the pair of postponed performances featuring violin superstar Anne Akiko Meyers as guest soloist beginning just a week after the ensemble offered the world premiere of Concerto for Piano Four Hands and String Orchestra by composer Richard Dünser via Brahms and Schumann. Meyers – the sister of Sansum ophthalmologist Dr. Toni Meyers, who was honored by the symphony last year with a special COVID tribute concert to local healthcare workers that featured the eye doctor performing on the Granada stage – will perform a program of Mexican and Spanish-inspired music anchored by Fandango, a violin concerto written for her by Mexican composer Arturo Márquez. The symphony will also play selections from Bizet’s Carmen Suite, Márquez’s popular “Danzón No. 2,” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. Performances of the “Fandango Picante”
42 Montecito JOURNAL
NTERTAINMENT program originally slated for January are 4 pm on Sunday, May 1, and an evening concert the following Thursday, May 5. Met Opera’s first-ever production of the original five-act French version of Verdi’s Don Carlos boasting a monumental new staging by David McVicar gets a Live in HD encore screening at 2 pm on Sunday, May 1, at Hahn Hall. Yannick NézetSéguin conducts an all-star cast featuring tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, with Sonya Yoncheva, Jamie Barton, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens, and John Relyea. Visit musicacademy.org.
Focus on film The Carsey-Wolf Center’s Pollock Theater hosts three special screenings followed by Q&A sessions this week, starting with Timbuktu, which was Nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and features a series of scenes where residents’ lives are upturned by the militant occupiers. Co-writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako joins Richard Watts of University of Washington for a discussion after the Thursday, April 28 screening. Watts and Sissako, who is also writer-director of Life on Earth (1999), Waiting for Happiness (2002), and Bamako (2006) will also participate in a roundtable discussion the following morning at 10:30 am. On Saturday afternoon, Pollock’s Script to Screen series projects the original Jurassic Park movie followed by a talk with screenwriter David Koepp, also the scribe of the sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Panic Room (2002), Spider-Man (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and Inferno (2016), among others. Tuesday evening brings a showing of an episode from HBO’s Scenes from a Marriage, the English-language remake of Ingmar Bergman’s highly influential 1973 Swedish miniseries that traces a couple’s crumbling marriage over the course of a decade. The post-screening chat boasts Rick Rosen, who is a Carsey-Wolf Center advisory board member as well as the co-founder of WME Agency and the agent/representative for Hagai Levi, the writer-director of the 2021 series that stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. Visit carseywolf.ucsb.edu for details and reservations for the free, in-person events.
Miscellany (Continued from 8)
Todd Aldrich, Marylove Thralls, and Dick and Marilyn Mazess (photo by Alma Rose Middleton)
100 Woodstock-garbed guests raising around $50,000. Co-chairs Margo Callis and Debra Stewart gushed: “It’s so wonderful to be back. Music pulls everyone’s soul like nothing else!” Veteran music director JoAnne Wasserman, with David Potter at piano, directed a groovy concert tiedye with the singers, many in go-go boots and Ban the Bomb memorabilia, singing “Love, Love, Love,” a medley of Beatles songs arranged by Stephen Dombek with Will Breman, who performed as a semifinalist on season 17 of NBC’s The Voice, as a soloist. The talented vocalists, including Naomi Merer, James Kirkland, Matt Latta, Suzannah Ruth, and Steve Thomson also threw in “Tonight” from the Leonard Bernstein musical West Side Story for good measure. Auctioneer Jim Robbins put his gavel talents to good effect when he sold off items including a Monterey golf experience, a getaway to Napa Valley, and the chance to Take the Baton, conducting the chorus in Handel’s Messiah at the Lobero in December. Among the musical mavens noshing on fare from Via Maestra 42 and dancing the night away to the delightfully named Captain Cardiac and the Coronaries, were Todd Aldrich, John and Hazel Blankenship, Barbara Burger, Marylove Thralls, Robert and Kay Chambers, Brooks and Kate Firestone, Fred and Nancy Golden, Dick and Marilyn Mazess, Sandy Knox-Johnston, Scott Reed, and Jonathan Bishop.
Clearly their get up and go had not got up and gone...
Clapping to the Sound of Four Hands
It was certainly a hands-on performance when Berlin-based piano twosome Sivan Silver and Gil Garburg sharing the keyboard performed the world premiere of 62-year-old Austrian Richard Dunser’s composition derived from the work of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms with the Santa Barbara Symphony for Romance in a New Key at the Granada. Dunser dedicated his composition to the Israeli keyboard duo and the symphony’s veteran maestro Nir Kabaretti. Accompanying the four hands work “Interpretation of Schumann’s ‘Piano Quartet in E flat major,’” the orchestra performed Mendelssohn’s “Scottish Symphony No.3 in A minor,” another classic of the romantic repertoire. An enchanting afternoon....
Fun Over Yonder Ridge Cowboy hats proliferated when Riviera Ridge School hosted a Westernthemed fundraiser with 200 guests raising a hefty $300,000 for school activities and faculty. The boffo Home on the Ridge! bash, co-chaired by Tina Wood and Andrea McFarling, kicked off with a champagne-fueled VIP reception at the home of head of school Christina Broderick,
Steven Libowitz has covered a plethora of topics for the Journal since 1997, and now leads our extensive arts and entertainment coverage
Guests at the Riviera Ridge bash (photo by Priscilla) “To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” – Alfred Austin
28 April – 5 May 2022