Playing it safe: Theater in Santa Barbara 2014 was a chance to reconsider and regroup

he biggest news this year in the world of Santa Barbara theater was the loss of the Circle Bar B Ranch Dinner Theatre. It’s not that the small but lovable theater was in the red. In fact, by all reports it was doing well and had a hearty subscriber base. But the owners of the surrounding ranch wanted to take the location in other directions and so in October, after 44 years, the theater closed with Marc Camoletti’s “Boeing Boeing.” Directors Susan and David Couch put their heart and soul into the little space and made it a shining example of what is usually a disparaged style of theater. It was also a home to many of our town’s favorite comic actors . . . and it gave them gainful employment too. It shall be missed.

The Ensemble Theatre Company finished its first full season at the New Vic and began its second, beginning with David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People” and bringing out the big guns for Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” showing off all the stage goodies the New Vic has at its disposal, including a reflecting pool. But the stage also benefits intimate shows with small casts, like John Logan’s Mark Rothko bio play “Red” and the campy Tallulah Bankhead-led comedy “Looped.” The year ended with a standby — Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” — and a U.S. premiere, the uproarious comedy “The Best Brothers.” Executive Director Jonathan Fox has been balancing the new with the popular these two seasons and hopefully he’ll continue to do so.

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Letters home: Ensemble Theatre’s Lloyd Webber musical is a one-woman show

 Misty Cotton is alone on stage in the one-woman, Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Tell Me On A Sunday." The Ensemble Theatre Company production runs through Aug. 2 at The New Vic. Courtesy photo

Misty Cotton is alone on stage in the one-woman, Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Tell Me On A Sunday.” The Ensemble Theatre Company production runs through Aug. 2 at The New Vic.
Courtesy photo

Ensemble Theatre Company’s season may be over for now, but it has one more surprise up its sleeve. “Tell Me On a Sunday,” which opens Thursday, is a light summer aperitif of music and song from Misty Cotton. She is performing a lesser known musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, best known for Broadway juggernauts like “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

It’s a tale of a young English woman who comes to New York City to try to make it big.

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The red and the black: Ensemble’s Mark Rothko bio-play has weighty questions on its mind

Matt Gottlieb play abstract-expressionist painter Mark Rothko and Shaun Anthony his put-upon young assistant in the dramatic new play at The New Vic, "Red." John Logan's play won six Tony Awards in 2010
Matt Gottlieb play abstract-expressionist painter Mark Rothko and Shaun Anthony his put-upon young assistant in the dramatic new play at The New Vic, “Red.” John Logan’s play won six Tony Awards in 2010

“What do you see?”

That’s the first line of John Logan’s intense two-person play “Red” that just opened at The New Vic as part of Ensemble Theatre’s current season. The man asking the question is abstract painter Mark Rothko, and although he’s asking it of the man who has turned up to be his new assistant as they stand in front of one of his paintings, he’s asking it of himself. And, no surprise, he’s asking us, too, in a play that dives energetically into questions of art, history, integrity, money, and creativity. In real life, Rothko was very secretive, with very little footage or interviews available. This biographical play brings the prickly painter to life.

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Layers Upon Layers: ENSEMBLE THEATRE’S ‘RED’ BRINGS ABSTRACT PAINTER MARK ROTHKO TO PRICKLY LIFE

Matt Gottlieb, left, as Rothko and Shaun Anthony as his assistant. Ken, in "Red"
Matt Gottlieb, left, as Rothko and Shaun Anthony as his assistant. Ken, in “Red”

Director Brian Schnipper is telling us about abstract artist Mark Rothko, the subject of his upcoming play at Ensemble Theatre, “Red.”

“With Rothko’s murals, there’s so many layers and he used very thin paint. You can see the top layer and the second layer and maybe the third, but beyond that— and Rothko said he sometime painted 26 layers. Even art historians say you can’t tell where certain paints start. They can’t understand his techniques. Sometimes he’d burn the canvas with turpentine, they know that, but as to the layers, they don’t know how.”

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ON STAGE: Tales of Transformation – ENSEMBLE THEATRE’S NEW PRODUCTION REVISITS OVID’S CLASSIC MYTHS

For viewers in the front rows for Ensemble Theatre Company’s latest production, you might just get wet while watching “Metamorphoses.” But don’t worry, director Jonathan Fox has the audience covered … literally, with rain ponchos. It’s can’t be helped when a great part of the stage will be a wading pool, built per stage instructions included in Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s classic tales of myth and transformation.

“It think the audience getting wet is part of the experience,” says Mr. Fox. “It’s the kind of piece that doesn’t work if you’re watching on video. You need to be surrounded by people.”
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IN CONCERT: Ensemble’s Composer John Zalewski on bringing sound to ‘Metamorphoses’

Sound designer John Zalewski
Sound designer John Zalewski

When “Metamorphoses” opens this weekend, one of the stars behind the scenes is its composer, John Zalewski. It’s not often that the Ensemble Theatre Company has such an element in their plays — there’s been music in between scenes and in intermissions, and sometimes music has been used very sparingly to accentuate moods and such, but bringing in Mr. Zalewski is something new.

The Los Angeles composer came to the attention of Ensemble Executive Artistic Director Jonathan Fox through set designer Francois-Pierre Couture. After some email exchanges, the two set to work.
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The End of the Beginning – ENSEMBLE CLOSES DOORS ON AN ERA WITH ‘FRANKIE AND JOHNNY’

Dee Ann Newkirkplays Frankieand RickGifford makes his Ensemble Theatre debut in the roleofJohnny. David Bazemore photos
Dee Ann Newkirkplays Frankieand RickGifford makes his Ensemble Theatre debut in the roleofJohnny.
David Bazemore photos

In 1987, director Saundra McClain was living in New York City in Manhattan Plaza, the “Miracle of 42nd Street,” the 45-floor artist housing complex. Across the street was a small theater where a two-person play, “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” opened. “I have no recollection of it. I just remember two people on stage.” (Those two people, by the way, were Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham). She’s not being glib, just a statement of fact and a life filled with playgoing.

And it helps to not remember anything particular when you wind up directing your own version, set to premiere Thursday at the Alhecama Theatre.

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The Merry Wives of Brooklyn – Ensemble’s season opener is straight outta New York City

David Bazemore Photos
David Bazemore Photos

Theater is a living, evolving art, and that is aptly demonstrated this weekend when Ensemble Theatre Company opens its 2010 – 11 season with Alan Brody’s “The Housewives of Mannheim.” Brody’s play made it out of the 2007 writers workshops to the desk of director SuzAnne Barabas, whose New Jersey Repertory Company has since been living with the play, molding, creating and claiming the characters as its own.

In a rare move for Ensemble, the director and cast have come to Santa Barbara to mount this West Coast premiere.

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Getting away with it : ‘Loot’ returns to Swinging London for a tale of murder and robbery … and laughs

From left, Ned Schmidtke as Truscott and Wyatt Fenner as Dennis. DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS
From left, Ned Schmidtke as Truscott and Wyatt Fenner as Dennis.
DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” said L.P. Hartley in his opening lines to “The Go-Between.” Joe Orton’s “Loot,” which opened this past weekend at the Alhecama Theatre, is very foreign indeed. The farce makes traveling back to the Swinging London of the mid-1960s feel as long a trip as one to Oscar Wilde’s 19th-century Britain. As they say about traveling in new cars, your mileage may vary.

Orton was the enfant terrible of the new playwrights of his time, busting genres like Tom Stoppard but poking the establishment where it irritated them most. With his life cut short at age 34, we wonder where Orton might have gone — more political like Stoppard or Harold Pinter? Would he have been an ambassador of bad taste, like our filmmaker John Waters? Or just petered out?

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Life Imitates Farce – Joe Orton’s ‘Loot’ comes to Ensemble Theatre

Clockwise from top left: Julian Rubel plays policeman Bobby Meadows, Heather Prete is Fay, Kerby Joe Grubb plays Hal and Wyatt Fenner is Dennis in Ensemble's "Loot." David Bazemore Photo
Clockwise from top left: Julian Rubel plays policeman Bobby Meadows, Heather Prete is Fay, Kerby Joe Grubb plays Hal and Wyatt Fenner is Dennis in Ensemble’s “Loot.”
David Bazemore Photo

During the original stage run of Joe Orton’s “Loot,” which features a dead mother as a plot device that spurs the action, the playwright’s mother died.

Orton went to Leicester for the funeral, then returned to London and the production. There is a scene where the dead mother’s false teeth are played like castanets. Backstage, Orton handed his mother’s real set to the actor Kenneth Cranham, who blanched.

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