Music review: Marimba along the Camerata Pacifica

The egg scare is apparently over. As yet, we’ve heard of nothing avian to worry about in the upcoming flu season. So what’s a hypochondriac to do? Well, there is always marimba madness, a new contagion.

Camerata Pacifica is among those spreading it. The chamber music series opened its 21st season over the weekend with a marimba-based program featuring an exceptional young player, Ji Hye Jung.

The condition first seemed serious the summer before last, when the Colburn School hosted a two-week marimba festival. That led to more marimba festivals and a series of new short solo works by Louis Andriessen, Steven Stucky, Chinary Ung and 21 other composers recorded on Bridge Classics.

In Japan, there is the high-wire jazz marimbist Mika Yoshida. A recently released DVD, “Mika Marimba Madness” (what else?), of her in concert last year reveals an amazing, energetic performer ready for major exposure.

Jung is another discovery. Born in Korea, based in Kansas, where she teaches, she was a guest with the Camerata last season. The series immediately commissioned Bright Sheng to write a piece for her and violinist Catherine Leonard, which had its premiere Friday in Santa Barbara.

Opera review: 'Don Giovanni' among the revelers in Santa Barbara

The Fiesta on State Street on Friday, during Santa Barbara's annual Old Spanish Days, was mostly Mexican. Revelers sported sombreros. Mariachi bands serenaded on street corners. Restaurants were serving margaritas in humongous glasses suitable for recycling into bird baths for nearby Montecito mansions.

Even so, Santa Barbara's tallest building downtown represents Spain, and the historic Granada was the site Friday for Mozart's "Don Giovanni," the sorry, splendid tale of a Spanish nobleman and legendary rake. Another summer ritual in Santa Barbara is the opera produced by Music Academy of the West.

Countless important singers over the decades have come from its voice program, including Marilyn Horne, who now heads it. Friday's cast was no exception. Each of the eight leading singers tackling one of the most admired and meaningful operas in the repertory was expertly prepared and a pleasure to hear. The orchestra and chorus were very fine.

This year, the production, which repeats Sunday afternoon, has moved from the 680-seat Lobero Theatre to the Granada. The 1,555-seat theater underwent a major renovation two years ago and is now a popular multi-use facility that readily serves as an opera house. This means that the program's students, who are professionals in their 20s, have the advantage of a larger stage and pit, along with more modern facilities. The move is clearly a success. The theater looked full Friday, and opera here can now be grand -- Champagne is served in the boxes.

Dance review: Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at Granada Theatre

One of the more semi-ironically radical aspects of Christopher Wheeldon’s celebrated and adventurous young dance company Morphoses may be its willingness to soften the very edges of radicalism, to make peace between modernity and traditionalism. Wheeldon’s background as a soloist with the New York City Ballet and his measured strides as an iconoclast make for a mostly happy stylistic marriage here.

Or at least that was the impression from evidence laid out lavishly and athletically at Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre on Friday in the company’s Southern California debut, presented as part of UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures’ 50th anniversary.

Morphoses nudges outward toward the edges while heeding a cultural gravitational pull toward the center, and Wheeldon and company seem to be seeking fresh ideas and creative energies in the process. If not everything works out in this push-pull scenario, the sum effect can be dazzling and reassuring for the cause of making the modern accessible, and vice versa.

Theater review: 'Tea at Five' at Alhecama Theatre

"If I could have an alternate reel, want to know what I’d change about my life?" warbles actress Stephanie Zimbalist, channeling Katharine Hepburn in pitch-perfect setup for a classic Kate retort: "Not a ... thing."

Feisty, aristocratic and unrepentant, Hepburn's star has been sincerely flattered by countless imitators, but playwright Matthew Lombardo attempted to dig a bit deeper into the biography behind the icon with "Tea at Five," his 2002 full-length monologue.

 Of course, the acid test of any solo celebrity portrait is whether we feel we've spent time in the presence of its subject. In director Jenny Sullivan's impeccably staged revival for Santa Barbara's Ensemble Theatre Company, Zimbalist is at the top of her game, spanning 45 years to convincingly depict Hepburn engaging us over afternoon tea at two turning points in her life.

Review: 'The Scene' at Alhecama Theatre

Ostensibly a sharp-edged satiric portrait of a marriage ripped apart by infidelity, Theresa Rebeck's savvy if sometimes formulaic comedy, "The Scene," cuts a broader swath through layers of betrayal in contemporary show business.

Art Manke's smart, sexy staging for Santa Barbara's Ensemble Theatre Company pulls no punches with Rebeck's four-character immorality tale. Its focal point is Charlie (David Nevell) a bright, arrogant and naturally unemployed New York actor whose disdain for artistic compromise comes cheap -- he's been living off the income of his wife, Stella (Colette Kilroy), a talent booker for a TV talk show. The deceptions on which Charlie's comfortable cocoon is built unravel in the course of the play.

Detonating this downward spiral is Clea (Annie Abrams), a blond heat-seeking missile in a miniskirt and stilettos, whom Charlie and his best friend, Lewis (Daniel Blinkoff), first encounter on the balcony at a swank loft party. A recent arrival from Ohio, Clea is the embodiment of vapid stream-of-consciousness -- "I'm like from, you know, the middle of nowhere" -- hilariously rendered by Abrams in pitch-perfect bimbo-ese.

Beneath Clea's vacuous persona, however, is a master manipulator who parlays her physical assets first into a date with Lewis, and then into a torrid affair with Charlie. Her unsettling combination of inanity and truthfulness prompts Charlie to marvel, "How can you know so much and so little at the same time?"

With Stella's inevitable discovery of Charlie's philandering, the play seems poised to take a predictable turn, but Rebeck turns the tables with Charlie's unrepentant, searing dissection of Stella's artificial mask of competence and coherence. "Even your neurosis is perfect!" he screams in frustration. Not that it justifies his behavior, but there are enough unpleasant truths here to go around, and all four performers negotiate them masterfully.

Playwright Rebeck's experience writing for television cuts both ways here. At times the dialogue teeters on amusing but glib sitcomy banter. On the other hand, Rebeck knows her territory and charts its hypocrisies with the assurance of an insider. Charlie may be a self-absorbed jerk, but that doesn't make his insights any less valid, especially when he complains that our entire culture has devolved to the point that what we desire isn’t love or passion or sex or money -- it’s meaningless. "And that’s what I’m supposed to sell myself for," he acknowledges as he faces the necessity of trying to beg for a pilot role from a former schoolmate he despises.

Once one's own integrity is lost, the merciless economy of showbiz kicks in: the shallower the project, the more it's worth groveling for.

-- Philip Brandes

 "The Scene," Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 21. $29-42. (805) 956-5400. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Caption: David Nevell, Daniel Blinkoff and Annie Abrams in "The Scene." Credit: David Bazemore