Actor Robert Lesser, who plays the male lead in the upcoming Genesis West production of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, laid it all on the line when he spoke with me recently about the production. “Maury [director Maurice Lord] felt like he won the lottery when he got the rights to produce this play,” Lesser said.
HOMEY, NOT HOMELY: Explaining his new project as “the kind of entertainment people used to make before radio and TV,” Bill Nershi seems proud to be playing the Americana music of his band Honkytonk Homeslice.
Jamie Stewart was on the road from Ohio to Kentucky when I finally got him by phone for our interview-he sounded groggy, but sleeplessness begets candor and he began to talk about “the slow deterioration” that all hard-touring bands face.
If Bob Dylan is roots music’s king (and he is), and Lucinda Williams is the queen (and she may be), then John Prine is the royal court’s jester. He’s the funny-looking, croak-voiced joker whose job it is to entertain, moralize, and satirize all at the same time.
With no more gay bars in town, it’s easy for the straight folks to figure there’s no longer a place for alternative lifestyles in Santa Barbara. But that’s simply not true: In addition to club nights specially for gays and lesbians, there are also a couple of annual events that bring out everyone under the rainbow.
Ten years ago, New York dancer/choreographer Carrie Diamond and her composer husband, Eric Valinsky, started talking about leaving Manhattan. In 2002, they finally took the plunge and moved west, relocating their family to Santa Barbara, where Valinsky, founded an Internet consulting company and Diamond began teaching ballet.
The audience members were not the only ones riveted to the action, the movement, and the stage when the Lyon Opera Ballet performed to a packed Campbell Hall last week. As two dancers gazed into each other’s eyes for longer than two beats, they provided a moment of aching intimacy amid the evening’s first piece, William Forsythe’s “Steptext.”
Chamber music players usually wear sensible shoes-the kind that say, “You might have to do a lot of walking or standing, you never know, better safe than sorry.” Wu Han’s bright red four-inch heels said it all.
When virtuosic Irish fiddler Kevin Burke began touring the U.S. in the 1980s, he found that most Americans thought of Irish music as men with red beards singing sentimental songs about their mothers.
From the sparkling, light fanfare that opens the Cos fan Tutte overture to the triumphant, tumbling “Presto” of the Symphony No. 35 in D Major, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra played with such exquisite freshness that it was like hearing Mozart for the first time.
