Brent Parker

Ohmigod, you guys! Did you hear that PCPA is staging a musical that was on Broadway just, like, five short years ago? How totally awesome is that!? Legally Blonde is a fish-out-of-water story about Elle Woods, a UCLA sorority girl from Malibu who invades the ivy-covered walls of Harvard Law School in pursuit of love. […]

Tis the season for nostalgia. While A Christmas Carol runs at PCPA, Santa Maria Civic Theatre recalls a classic that’s a century younger than Dickens’ work, but a Christmas institution in its own right: Frank Capra’s beloved film It’s a Wonderful Life. A financial disappointment on its initial release in 1946, the now-ubiquitous film gained […]

It’s a wonder if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come let Charles Dickens in on what a holiday icon his novella, A Christmas Carol (1843), would become. Or how many times and in how many ways it would be adapted. In addition to the major film and stage versions, various cartoons, TV specials, sitcom […]

PCPA wraps up its stellar summer season with an unusual musical that premiered on Broadway just seven years ago. The story follows an African-American maid and the Jewish family she works for in 1963 Louisiana, set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. The libretto by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) was based on […]

Once upon a time, Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz and a team of incredibly creative people came together to bring the American premiere of a musical about Hans Christian Andersen to Solvang’s Festival Theater, just in time for the city’s centennial celebration. In the show, Andersen enters the world of his fairy tales and confronts his […]

The 1988 John Waters comedy film Hairspray had a nostalgic ’60s focus when it came out, and now the film itself is an object of nostalgia. That double-whammy of fond memories is apparently a huge draw, because the Marian Theatre was packed for PCPA’s presentation of a musical adaptation. This show opened on Broadway just […]

Santa Maria Civic Theatre has gone dark! (So to speak.) Their latest production is Wait Until Dark, a suspense-thriller by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder) about a blind woman who faces off against a group of deadly criminals. The well-known 1967 film version starred Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. In late 1960s Greenwich Village, […]

Comedy, a pair of one-acts by the Tony-winning Sir Peter Shaffer (Equus and Amadeus). While very different in tone, both plays deal with the deception and hypocrisy inherent in classism. Shaffer gives us drama in the first act and comedy in the second, a structure also used by such plays as Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale […]

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in English-speaking theater. Its original London production got its start in 1952 and is still going today. But you don’t have to go all the way to England to unravel the secret of its success. You need look no further than Santa Maria Civic Theatre. Many of […]

You’ll crack up laughing at Santa Maria Civic Theatre’s latest production, Wake Up, Darling. The story focuses on a young couple, Don and Polly Emerson. He’s a would-be playwright and she’s a would-be actress, both of questionable talent (unlike the actors who play them—they’re definitely talented). In the opening scene, Polly bursts onstage with the […]

Yes, the middle word in the title is sex. Do we even need some kind of catchy introduction to get your attention?   Actually, Santa Maria Civic Theatre’s latest show is mostly about over-the-top comedy. Premiering in 1979, it was the first of 23 plays written by the team of Billy Van Zandt and Jane […]

There’s no suspense like live theater suspense, when the plot is unfolding right before your eyes. And there’s no better place for that kind of suspense than an intimate space, where you can feel like you’re right in the room with the characters—a space like Santa Maria Civic Theatre’s. The group’s latest production, Deathtrap, is […]