Our 2025 Season
Las Pachuca & Splash & Bloomsday & Doc
January Events
10 Ventura Improv’s Fresh Faces Improv Show IMPROV COMEDY · Ventura Improv Company puts emerging performers in the hot seat for an evening built entirely from audience suggestions and quick ensemble instincts. No script, no rewrites, just fresh faces discovering in real time whether that idea was brilliant or a terrible mistake.
11 Water Tower BLUEGRASS / OLD-TIME / PUNK · Water Tower tears bluegrass and old-time music out of polite preservation and sends it charging through a punk-rock amplifier. Fiddle, banjo, mandolin and breakneck picking meet a fiercely DIY spirit shaped equally by Bill Monroe and Black Flag.
12 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts an acoustic open mic built around original songs, close listening and ten-minute sets from local and visiting writers. One cherished cover is welcome, but the real draw is hearing songs close to the moment somebody decided they were finished enough to play in public.
17 Halley Neal FOLK / AMERICANA / BLUEGRASS · Halley Neal pairs soaring vocals and heartfelt songwriting with warm folk-Americana arrangements and a bright current of bluegrass. Her songs circle themes of peace, positivity and finding the joyful parts hiding inside harder seasons.
24 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters take the acoustic stage with original work and just enough time to make a connection before the next name is called. The quiet-room format keeps the lyric audible and gives new songs nowhere particularly useful to hide.
26 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads a supportive working session for seasoned writers and aspiring songsmiths alike. Lyrics, melody and structure get pulled onto the workbench so promising fragments can begin behaving like finished songs.
January11 Water Tower BLUEGRASS / OLD-TIME / PUNK · Water Tower tears bluegrass and old-time music out of polite preservation and sends it charging through a punk-rock amplifier. Fiddle, banjo, mandolin and breakneck picking meet a fiercely DIY spirit shaped equally by Bill Monroe and Black Flag.
12 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts an acoustic open mic built around original songs, close listening and ten-minute sets from local and visiting writers. One cherished cover is welcome, but the real draw is hearing songs close to the moment somebody decided they were finished enough to play in public.
17 Halley Neal FOLK / AMERICANA / BLUEGRASS · Halley Neal pairs soaring vocals and heartfelt songwriting with warm folk-Americana arrangements and a bright current of bluegrass. Her songs circle themes of peace, positivity and finding the joyful parts hiding inside harder seasons.
24 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters take the acoustic stage with original work and just enough time to make a connection before the next name is called. The quiet-room format keeps the lyric audible and gives new songs nowhere particularly useful to hide.
26 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads a supportive working session for seasoned writers and aspiring songsmiths alike. Lyrics, melody and structure get pulled onto the workbench so promising fragments can begin behaving like finished songs.
February Events
09 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs move from notebooks and voice memos into a room designed to actually hear them. Ten-minute sets keep things moving while leaving enough space for a lyric, a melody and a distinctive point of view to land.
09 Too Marvelous for Words: a Johnny Mercer Tribute Concert GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK / TRIBUTE · Johnny Mercer’s extraordinary catalog gets the spotlight, from the moonlit romance of “Moon River” and “Skylark” to the snap of “That Old Black Magic,” “Dream” and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” The program celebrates a lyricist whose conversational wit and jazz-minded phrasing helped define the American songbook.
14 Singles Awareness Day – An Improvised Valentine’s Show IMPROV COMEDY / VALENTINE’S · Ventura Improv Company turns love, dating, singledom and whatever romantic damage the audience volunteers into an entirely unscripted Valentine’s show. Meet-cutes may occur; dignity is considerably less guaranteed.
15 Mary Scholz FOLK-POP / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Mary Scholz pairs a clear, expressive voice with intimate songwriting about love, loss, transition and the ways people find their footing again. Her folk-pop carries an earthy warmth with just enough atmosphere around the edges to let the songs linger.
16 Love Letters by A.R. Gurney THEATER / ROMANTIC DRAMA · Two people trace a lifetime together through the letters, cards and notes they have exchanged since childhood. A.R. Gurney’s two-character play turns decades of friendship, ambition, missed timing and affection into an unusually intimate portrait of lives connected on paper.
22 Making Room SOLO THEATER / AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE · Catherine Scott Burriss examines the stories white America tells through To Kill a Mockingbird alongside the stories her own mostly white family has handed down. Embodied storytelling moves through inheritance, grief, joy, whiteness, patriarchy and power while asking what gets omitted and what should be carried forward.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Writers bring works in progress into a collaborative session centered on craft, feedback and the stubborn journey from idea to song. Melody, structure and language get practical attention instead of waiting around for inspiration to develop a work ethic.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts an acoustic songwriter’s open mic where original work takes priority and each performer gets a compact turn in the spotlight. The arrangement is simple because a good song has surprisingly modest infrastructure requirements.
February09 Too Marvelous for Words: a Johnny Mercer Tribute Concert GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK / TRIBUTE · Johnny Mercer’s extraordinary catalog gets the spotlight, from the moonlit romance of “Moon River” and “Skylark” to the snap of “That Old Black Magic,” “Dream” and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” The program celebrates a lyricist whose conversational wit and jazz-minded phrasing helped define the American songbook.
14 Singles Awareness Day – An Improvised Valentine’s Show IMPROV COMEDY / VALENTINE’S · Ventura Improv Company turns love, dating, singledom and whatever romantic damage the audience volunteers into an entirely unscripted Valentine’s show. Meet-cutes may occur; dignity is considerably less guaranteed.
15 Mary Scholz FOLK-POP / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Mary Scholz pairs a clear, expressive voice with intimate songwriting about love, loss, transition and the ways people find their footing again. Her folk-pop carries an earthy warmth with just enough atmosphere around the edges to let the songs linger.
16 Love Letters by A.R. Gurney THEATER / ROMANTIC DRAMA · Two people trace a lifetime together through the letters, cards and notes they have exchanged since childhood. A.R. Gurney’s two-character play turns decades of friendship, ambition, missed timing and affection into an unusually intimate portrait of lives connected on paper.
22 Making Room SOLO THEATER / AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE · Catherine Scott Burriss examines the stories white America tells through To Kill a Mockingbird alongside the stories her own mostly white family has handed down. Embodied storytelling moves through inheritance, grief, joy, whiteness, patriarchy and power while asking what gets omitted and what should be carried forward.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Writers bring works in progress into a collaborative session centered on craft, feedback and the stubborn journey from idea to song. Melody, structure and language get practical attention instead of waiting around for inspiration to develop a work ethic.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts an acoustic songwriter’s open mic where original work takes priority and each performer gets a compact turn in the spotlight. The arrangement is simple because a good song has surprisingly modest infrastructure requirements.
March Events
01 Jodi Farrell Masterclass PERFORMANCE / MUSIC MASTERCLASS · Vocal coach and performer Jodi Farrell works directly with artists on interpretation, technique and the choices that turn singing a song into performing one. Personalized feedback lets participants adjust the work while the lesson is still warm.
02 Making Room SOLO THEATER / AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE · Catherine Scott Burriss uses family history and To Kill a Mockingbird to investigate what inherited stories reveal, conceal and pass quietly from one generation to another. The solo work mixes embodied storytelling with difficult questions about whiteness, patriarchy, grief and inequitable legacies of power.
09 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get ten minutes apiece in an acoustic room built for attentive ears. Writers can test something new, return to an old favorite or discover precisely which verse would benefit from another afternoon.
14 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience suggestions become characters, scenes and games with no script available to restore order. The company has been doing this long enough to make reckless spontaneity look suspiciously like a craft.
15 Ventura County Dance Showcase DANCE / COMMUNITY SHOWCASE · Dancers from across Ventura County bring a range of movement traditions, generations and artistic approaches into one performance. The showcase treats local dance as a living ecosystem rather than a single style with better public relations.
22 An Evening of Oscar-Winning Songs FILM MUSIC / GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK · A cast of local singers revisits Academy Award-winning songs including “Moon River,” “Over the Rainbow” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Jodi Farrell, Michael Henszey, Lauren Brown, Kerri Climer, Julie Hamann and others bring decades of movie music off the screen and back to the human voice.
23 Caroline Cotter FOLK / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Caroline Cotter brings a honeyed voice and disarmingly direct songwriting to songs about connection, nostalgia, gratitude, loss and wanderlust. More than a thousand shows across 46 states and 19 countries have given her folk music the easy warmth of somebody who has learned how many different places can feel like home.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Songwriters bring half-finished ideas, difficult verses and melodic loose ends into a collaborative session on craft. The work is less glamorous than waiting for lightning, but it has the advantage of being available on schedule.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original music gets a stripped-down acoustic stage where words, melody and performer remain close together. The evening is equal parts showcase, proving ground and public notebook.
March02 Making Room SOLO THEATER / AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE · Catherine Scott Burriss uses family history and To Kill a Mockingbird to investigate what inherited stories reveal, conceal and pass quietly from one generation to another. The solo work mixes embodied storytelling with difficult questions about whiteness, patriarchy, grief and inequitable legacies of power.
09 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get ten minutes apiece in an acoustic room built for attentive ears. Writers can test something new, return to an old favorite or discover precisely which verse would benefit from another afternoon.
14 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience suggestions become characters, scenes and games with no script available to restore order. The company has been doing this long enough to make reckless spontaneity look suspiciously like a craft.
15 Ventura County Dance Showcase DANCE / COMMUNITY SHOWCASE · Dancers from across Ventura County bring a range of movement traditions, generations and artistic approaches into one performance. The showcase treats local dance as a living ecosystem rather than a single style with better public relations.
22 An Evening of Oscar-Winning Songs FILM MUSIC / GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK · A cast of local singers revisits Academy Award-winning songs including “Moon River,” “Over the Rainbow” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Jodi Farrell, Michael Henszey, Lauren Brown, Kerri Climer, Julie Hamann and others bring decades of movie music off the screen and back to the human voice.
23 Caroline Cotter FOLK / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Caroline Cotter brings a honeyed voice and disarmingly direct songwriting to songs about connection, nostalgia, gratitude, loss and wanderlust. More than a thousand shows across 46 states and 19 countries have given her folk music the easy warmth of somebody who has learned how many different places can feel like home.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Songwriters bring half-finished ideas, difficult verses and melodic loose ends into a collaborative session on craft. The work is less glamorous than waiting for lightning, but it has the advantage of being available on schedule.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original music gets a stripped-down acoustic stage where words, melody and performer remain close together. The evening is equal parts showcase, proving ground and public notebook.
April Events
11 Clash of the Laughs: Ventura vs. L.A. IMPROV COMEDY / COMEDY COMPETITION · Ventura Improv Company goes head-to-head with a team of Los Angeles improvisers in a scored, judged battle for comedy supremacy and possession of the belt. Everything is improvised on the spot, because apparently inventing comedy in real time was not stressful enough without adding competitive sports logic.
12 Aaron Burch Collective YOUTH MUSIC / ACOUSTIC ROCK / SHOWCASE · Aaron Burch’s Teen Collective goes unplugged, bringing young musicians out of the rehearsal room and into a stripped-back live setting. The focus shifts from amplification to ensemble chemistry, songwriting and the useful terror of hearing exactly what everyone is playing.
13 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Local and visiting writers share original songs in compact acoustic sets built around close listening. The song gets to arrive before the marketing department, which is generally a healthier order of operations.
13 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads writers through lyrics, melody, structure and the choices that help a song find its strongest form. Unfinished work is welcome; permanent unfinishedness receives somewhat less encouragement.
18 Scottish Fish CELTIC / SCOTTISH & CAPE BRETON TRADITIONAL · Boston-based quintet Scottish Fish sends a wall of fiddles, cello and piano through traditional Scottish and Cape Breton music alongside its own compositions. Years of friendship give the five young women the kind of ensemble precision that can sound like one instrument one moment and a small orchestra the next.
25 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters put original work in front of an attentive audience with little more than voice and instrument between them. Ten minutes is enough time for a song to connect, misbehave or politely request another rewrite.
27 Shawn Jones & Mary Scholz ROOTS / AMERICANA / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Shawn Jones brings three decades of blues-rooted Americana, soulful vocals and serious guitar work alongside Mary Scholz’s intimate, emotionally observant folk songwriting. One leans into road-tested roots muscle, the other into luminous introspection, and both know how to build a night around the song rather than the machinery.
April12 Aaron Burch Collective YOUTH MUSIC / ACOUSTIC ROCK / SHOWCASE · Aaron Burch’s Teen Collective goes unplugged, bringing young musicians out of the rehearsal room and into a stripped-back live setting. The focus shifts from amplification to ensemble chemistry, songwriting and the useful terror of hearing exactly what everyone is playing.
13 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Local and visiting writers share original songs in compact acoustic sets built around close listening. The song gets to arrive before the marketing department, which is generally a healthier order of operations.
13 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads writers through lyrics, melody, structure and the choices that help a song find its strongest form. Unfinished work is welcome; permanent unfinishedness receives somewhat less encouragement.
18 Scottish Fish CELTIC / SCOTTISH & CAPE BRETON TRADITIONAL · Boston-based quintet Scottish Fish sends a wall of fiddles, cello and piano through traditional Scottish and Cape Breton music alongside its own compositions. Years of friendship give the five young women the kind of ensemble precision that can sound like one instrument one moment and a small orchestra the next.
25 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters put original work in front of an attentive audience with little more than voice and instrument between them. Ten minutes is enough time for a song to connect, misbehave or politely request another rewrite.
27 Shawn Jones & Mary Scholz ROOTS / AMERICANA / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Shawn Jones brings three decades of blues-rooted Americana, soulful vocals and serious guitar work alongside Mary Scholz’s intimate, emotionally observant folk songwriting. One leans into road-tested roots muscle, the other into luminous introspection, and both know how to build a night around the song rather than the machinery.
May Events
03 Midtown Modern x Eaton Young INDIE ROCK / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Ventura-grown Midtown Modern pairs poetic songwriting with layered keyboards, guitars and rhythms that move from haunting ballads to groove-driven meditations on distance and longing. Henry Stewart, Michelle Bird, Erin Kim and Michael Fink share the bill with Eaton Young for a night tilted toward the raw, wistful and emotionally unresolved.
09 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience suggestions become scenes, games and characters before anyone can submit them for adult supervision. Quick thinking and ensemble trust keep the whole contraption moving.
10 Songs for Mothers and Those They Love GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK / POP / MUSICAL THEATER · American Songbook Today celebrates mothers through songs by writers ranging from Stephen Sondheim and Janis Ian to David Crosby and Simon & Garfunkel. The repertoire crosses Broadway, folk and pop while keeping the complicated, funny and deeply human idea of motherhood at the center.
11 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Writers share original songs in an acoustic format where melody and lyric are given room to do their own persuading. It is a welcoming place for finished work, new work and work that believed it was finished until about halfway through the second verse.
17 Jodi Farrell Masterclass PERFORMANCE / MUSIC MASTERCLASS · Jodi Farrell gives performers individualized coaching designed to sharpen technique, interpretation and live presentation. Artists learn from their own work and from watching one another tackle the thousand tiny decisions hidden inside a convincing performance.
18 Mary Scholz FOLK-POP / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Mary Scholz’s clear voice and evocative songwriting turn love, loss and life’s transitions into thoughtful folk-pop with an atmospheric edge. Her songs carry the steady warmth of someone more interested in connection than grandstanding.
23 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs step out of private notebooks and into an acoustic room where people have agreed to listen. That modest arrangement can be surprisingly dangerous to a weak bridge and wonderful for everything else.
25 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart works with songwriters on the practical architecture of lyric, melody and form. Writers bring the pieces; collaboration and revision help figure out what belongs where.
31 Donna Lynn Caskey: Tiny Victories FOLK / OLD-TIME / CLAWHAMMER BANJO · Donna Lynn Caskey celebrates her third album, Tiny Victories, pairing clawhammer banjo and a bittersweet voice with original songs rooted firmly in the complicated present. Vintage mountain-music textures meet modern stories about healing, persistence and those small wins that begin to look larger when life gets difficult.
May09 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience suggestions become scenes, games and characters before anyone can submit them for adult supervision. Quick thinking and ensemble trust keep the whole contraption moving.
10 Songs for Mothers and Those They Love GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK / POP / MUSICAL THEATER · American Songbook Today celebrates mothers through songs by writers ranging from Stephen Sondheim and Janis Ian to David Crosby and Simon & Garfunkel. The repertoire crosses Broadway, folk and pop while keeping the complicated, funny and deeply human idea of motherhood at the center.
11 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Writers share original songs in an acoustic format where melody and lyric are given room to do their own persuading. It is a welcoming place for finished work, new work and work that believed it was finished until about halfway through the second verse.
17 Jodi Farrell Masterclass PERFORMANCE / MUSIC MASTERCLASS · Jodi Farrell gives performers individualized coaching designed to sharpen technique, interpretation and live presentation. Artists learn from their own work and from watching one another tackle the thousand tiny decisions hidden inside a convincing performance.
18 Mary Scholz FOLK-POP / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Mary Scholz’s clear voice and evocative songwriting turn love, loss and life’s transitions into thoughtful folk-pop with an atmospheric edge. Her songs carry the steady warmth of someone more interested in connection than grandstanding.
23 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs step out of private notebooks and into an acoustic room where people have agreed to listen. That modest arrangement can be surprisingly dangerous to a weak bridge and wonderful for everything else.
25 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart works with songwriters on the practical architecture of lyric, melody and form. Writers bring the pieces; collaboration and revision help figure out what belongs where.
31 Donna Lynn Caskey: Tiny Victories FOLK / OLD-TIME / CLAWHAMMER BANJO · Donna Lynn Caskey celebrates her third album, Tiny Victories, pairing clawhammer banjo and a bittersweet voice with original songs rooted firmly in the complicated present. Vintage mountain-music textures meet modern stories about healing, persistence and those small wins that begin to look larger when life gets difficult.
June Events
07 Ode to Las Pachuca DANCE THEATER / CHICANA STORYTELLING · A young Chicana sent into her grandmother’s attic opens an old suitcase and begins uncovering the revolutionary history carried inside her abuelita’s belongings. Colibríes Collective uses multigenerational movement and storytelling to connect family memory, resilience and the cultural legacy of Las Pachucas.
08 Ode to Las Pachuca DANCE THEATER / CHICANA STORYTELLING · An attic errand becomes a journey into family history when a young Chicana discovers what her grandmother’s old suitcase has been holding. Colibríes Collective turns those objects into movement, memory and a multigenerational story of identity, healing and resistance.
08 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts another acoustic gathering for songwriters with original material and ten minutes to make it matter. The emphasis stays on attentive listening, honest songs and the useful courage of putting unfinished artistic thinking into finished public air.
13 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · The audience supplies prompts and Ventura Improv Company immediately turns them into scenes, characters and comic detours. Everything is made up on the spot, including whatever explanation might later be offered for how things got there.
14 Ventura’s Singer-Songwriter’s Showcase SINGER-SONGWRITER / ACOUSTIC · Ventura-area songwriters take turns putting original music front and center in a showcase built around individual voices and stories. Acoustic arrangements keep the distance short between the person who wrote the song and the people hearing it.
20 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · The Decameron Project compresses theater to its volatile essentials with a rapid-fire program of plays lasting just sixty seconds apiece. Writers, directors and actors have almost no time to establish a world, break it and leave an impression, which is precisely the fun.
21 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · One-minute plays from a global pool of writers turn brevity into the evening’s creative constraint. Comedy, drama and stranger little theatrical creatures arrive in quick succession, each getting exactly sixty seconds to earn its existence.
21 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · The festival returns with another barrage of miniature plays where every entrance, line and silence has to work at unreasonable speed. It is theatrical storytelling stripped of the luxury of wandering toward the point.
22 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Songwriters gather around works in progress and the less romantic tools of structure, revision and useful feedback. Inspiration may start the song, but somebody still has to finish it.
27 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Local and visiting writers take ten-minute turns sharing original songs in an acoustic listening-room format. One cherished cover can sneak in, but the evening belongs to work made by the people standing at the microphone.
28 Bad Ass Boots AMERICANA / COUNTRY-SOUL / ROCKABILLY · Oakland’s Bad Ass Boots mixes Americana, country-rock, blues and rockabilly around Billie Burnor’s soulful vocals, fiery harmonica and electric slide guitar. The original songs come built for dancing, with enough grit in the groove to keep the boots properly scuffed.
29 The Best of the American Songbook GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK ·
June08 Ode to Las Pachuca DANCE THEATER / CHICANA STORYTELLING · An attic errand becomes a journey into family history when a young Chicana discovers what her grandmother’s old suitcase has been holding. Colibríes Collective turns those objects into movement, memory and a multigenerational story of identity, healing and resistance.
08 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Henry Stewart hosts another acoustic gathering for songwriters with original material and ten minutes to make it matter. The emphasis stays on attentive listening, honest songs and the useful courage of putting unfinished artistic thinking into finished public air.
13 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · The audience supplies prompts and Ventura Improv Company immediately turns them into scenes, characters and comic detours. Everything is made up on the spot, including whatever explanation might later be offered for how things got there.
14 Ventura’s Singer-Songwriter’s Showcase SINGER-SONGWRITER / ACOUSTIC · Ventura-area songwriters take turns putting original music front and center in a showcase built around individual voices and stories. Acoustic arrangements keep the distance short between the person who wrote the song and the people hearing it.
20 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · The Decameron Project compresses theater to its volatile essentials with a rapid-fire program of plays lasting just sixty seconds apiece. Writers, directors and actors have almost no time to establish a world, break it and leave an impression, which is precisely the fun.
21 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · One-minute plays from a global pool of writers turn brevity into the evening’s creative constraint. Comedy, drama and stranger little theatrical creatures arrive in quick succession, each getting exactly sixty seconds to earn its existence.
21 1 Minute Play Festival SHORT-FORM THEATER / PLAY FESTIVAL · The festival returns with another barrage of miniature plays where every entrance, line and silence has to work at unreasonable speed. It is theatrical storytelling stripped of the luxury of wandering toward the point.
22 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Songwriters gather around works in progress and the less romantic tools of structure, revision and useful feedback. Inspiration may start the song, but somebody still has to finish it.
27 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Local and visiting writers take ten-minute turns sharing original songs in an acoustic listening-room format. One cherished cover can sneak in, but the evening belongs to work made by the people standing at the microphone.
28 Bad Ass Boots AMERICANA / COUNTRY-SOUL / ROCKABILLY · Oakland’s Bad Ass Boots mixes Americana, country-rock, blues and rockabilly around Billie Burnor’s soulful vocals, fiery harmonica and electric slide guitar. The original songs come built for dancing, with enough grit in the groove to keep the boots properly scuffed.
29 The Best of the American Songbook GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK ·
July Events
11 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY / MUSICAL IMPROV · Ventura Improv Company’s July outing, billed elsewhere as Gotta Sing!, pushes spontaneous comedy into musical territory. Audience ideas become scenes with the additional hazard of performers discovering that sometimes the only reasonable response is apparently a song.
12 Saturday Night Jive ROOTS / BLUES / ROCK / SOUL · Steve Apperson, Nick Jay and Emma Hamilton lead a loose-limbed summer revue joined by Dr. Blues, Shirly Yunome and Miles Better. Roots, blues, rock, soul and funk share the bill as the singers trade riffs, stories and the sort of musical chemistry that improves when nobody worries too much about filing it under one genre.
13 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get the microphone in a room where listening is treated as part of the performance. Writers have ten minutes to introduce a small corner of their musical world before passing the light to somebody else.
20 John Zipperer & The Current Band AMERICANA / ROOTS / BLUES · John Zipperer and The Current Band bring the road-tested songs of Devil Rail alongside material from Full Circle, roaming through blues, gospel, gypsy jazz, reggae, bluegrass and straight-ahead rock. Producer-guitarist Nick Kirgo, Leslie Barker and Tara Sitser help build the rich four-part harmonies around Zipperer’s restless Americana.
25 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original work in compact acoustic sets where the words remain close enough to catch. The room rewards songs with something to say and politely informs the others where more work may be required.
26 Skyrie CELTIC / FOLK / ROCK-FUNK FUSION · Scottish trio Skyrie drives traditional Scottish and Irish tunes into modern rock and funk grooves with blazing fiddle, pipes, vocal harmony and original songs. Their ceilidh energy can shift from haunting soundscape to full dance-floor ignition before anyone has time to locate the border between old and new.
July12 Saturday Night Jive ROOTS / BLUES / ROCK / SOUL · Steve Apperson, Nick Jay and Emma Hamilton lead a loose-limbed summer revue joined by Dr. Blues, Shirly Yunome and Miles Better. Roots, blues, rock, soul and funk share the bill as the singers trade riffs, stories and the sort of musical chemistry that improves when nobody worries too much about filing it under one genre.
13 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get the microphone in a room where listening is treated as part of the performance. Writers have ten minutes to introduce a small corner of their musical world before passing the light to somebody else.
20 John Zipperer & The Current Band AMERICANA / ROOTS / BLUES · John Zipperer and The Current Band bring the road-tested songs of Devil Rail alongside material from Full Circle, roaming through blues, gospel, gypsy jazz, reggae, bluegrass and straight-ahead rock. Producer-guitarist Nick Kirgo, Leslie Barker and Tara Sitser help build the rich four-part harmonies around Zipperer’s restless Americana.
25 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original work in compact acoustic sets where the words remain close enough to catch. The room rewards songs with something to say and politely informs the others where more work may be required.
26 Skyrie CELTIC / FOLK / ROCK-FUNK FUSION · Scottish trio Skyrie drives traditional Scottish and Irish tunes into modern rock and funk grooves with blazing fiddle, pipes, vocal harmony and original songs. Their ceilidh energy can shift from haunting soundscape to full dance-floor ignition before anyone has time to locate the border between old and new.
August Events
08 VIC Family Show FAMILY IMPROV COMEDY · Ventura Improv Company brings its made-on-the-spot comedy into a family-friendly format built from audience suggestions. Kids and grown-ups help supply the ideas, leaving the performers with the considerably more dangerous responsibility of doing something funny with them.
10 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get an acoustic stage where writers can trade polish for direct connection. Ten-minute sets keep the night moving while giving each song enough air to reveal what it actually is.
15 Splash Fest Opening Night: 15th Century Ballerina & Reservoir Dolls SOLO COMEDY / PHYSICAL THEATER · Caroline O’Meara’s 15th Century Ballerina sends a medieval orphan from the French Royal Court toward a 21st-century ballet audition in a whirl of absurd comedy, dance and live cello. Lani Harms’ Reservoir Dolls follows a barefoot call girl who realizes she has landed inside Quentin Tarantino’s next movie and must navigate the femme fatales who got there before her.
17 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart gives writers a collaborative place to examine lyrics, melody, structure and whatever stubborn bit has kept a promising song from becoming a finished one. Everybody brings a different problem; craft remains annoyingly reusable.
22 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original material in short acoustic sets built around attention rather than volume. The simplicity is deceptive: there is very little scenery available to distract from an excellent line or a questionable rhyme.
23 Songs We’ve Always Dreamed of Singing VOCAL SHOWCASE / GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK · A cast of singers steps into songs they have long wanted the chance to perform, turning personal wish lists into a shared concert. The premise opens the repertoire wide enough for performers to choose music for love rather than typecasting.
23 Beto Hale Band LATIN ROCK / POP / ALTERNATIVE · Mexico City-born multi-instrumentalist Beto Hale brings a catalog shaped by rock, pop, Latin music and years of studio exploration, backed by a full band. His recent work includes collaborations with Ozomatli and Colombian alternative-rock icons Aterciopelados, carrying a bilingual sensibility between Mexico City and Los Angeles.
24 A Conversation with Jennifer Wolf ARTIST TALK / VISUAL ART · Artist and scholar Jennifer Wolf follows color all the way back to the earth, working with hand-ground natural pigments and dyes collected through years of research and travel. The conversation traces a path from archaeology and art history through alternative galleries to a Ventura studio where landscape, material and color meet.
29 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Robert returns to Dublin hoping to find Cait, the woman who captured his heart during a James Joyce tour decades earlier, only for the past to arrive in the form of their younger selves. Steven Dietz’s time-bending love story moves backward through missed chances, wit and heartache while asking what might happen if memory could speak directly to regret.
30 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · An older Robert and Cait retrace the one brief encounter that changed them, sharing the stage with young Robbie and Caithleen as past and present begin talking to each other. James Joyce hovers over a romantic story about time, memory and realizing rather late that the present has terrible manners about becoming the past.
31 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Steven Dietz sends a middle-aged American back to Dublin and into a conversation with the love he left behind 35 years earlier. The play folds younger and older versions of the couple together in a funny, aching meditation on missed timing and the dangerous seduction of “what if.”
August10 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get an acoustic stage where writers can trade polish for direct connection. Ten-minute sets keep the night moving while giving each song enough air to reveal what it actually is.
15 Splash Fest Opening Night: 15th Century Ballerina & Reservoir Dolls SOLO COMEDY / PHYSICAL THEATER · Caroline O’Meara’s 15th Century Ballerina sends a medieval orphan from the French Royal Court toward a 21st-century ballet audition in a whirl of absurd comedy, dance and live cello. Lani Harms’ Reservoir Dolls follows a barefoot call girl who realizes she has landed inside Quentin Tarantino’s next movie and must navigate the femme fatales who got there before her.
17 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart gives writers a collaborative place to examine lyrics, melody, structure and whatever stubborn bit has kept a promising song from becoming a finished one. Everybody brings a different problem; craft remains annoyingly reusable.
22 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original material in short acoustic sets built around attention rather than volume. The simplicity is deceptive: there is very little scenery available to distract from an excellent line or a questionable rhyme.
23 Songs We’ve Always Dreamed of Singing VOCAL SHOWCASE / GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK · A cast of singers steps into songs they have long wanted the chance to perform, turning personal wish lists into a shared concert. The premise opens the repertoire wide enough for performers to choose music for love rather than typecasting.
23 Beto Hale Band LATIN ROCK / POP / ALTERNATIVE · Mexico City-born multi-instrumentalist Beto Hale brings a catalog shaped by rock, pop, Latin music and years of studio exploration, backed by a full band. His recent work includes collaborations with Ozomatli and Colombian alternative-rock icons Aterciopelados, carrying a bilingual sensibility between Mexico City and Los Angeles.
24 A Conversation with Jennifer Wolf ARTIST TALK / VISUAL ART · Artist and scholar Jennifer Wolf follows color all the way back to the earth, working with hand-ground natural pigments and dyes collected through years of research and travel. The conversation traces a path from archaeology and art history through alternative galleries to a Ventura studio where landscape, material and color meet.
29 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Robert returns to Dublin hoping to find Cait, the woman who captured his heart during a James Joyce tour decades earlier, only for the past to arrive in the form of their younger selves. Steven Dietz’s time-bending love story moves backward through missed chances, wit and heartache while asking what might happen if memory could speak directly to regret.
30 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · An older Robert and Cait retrace the one brief encounter that changed them, sharing the stage with young Robbie and Caithleen as past and present begin talking to each other. James Joyce hovers over a romantic story about time, memory and realizing rather late that the present has terrible manners about becoming the past.
31 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Steven Dietz sends a middle-aged American back to Dublin and into a conversation with the love he left behind 35 years earlier. The play folds younger and older versions of the couple together in a funny, aching meditation on missed timing and the dangerous seduction of “what if.”
September Events
05 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Robert’s return to Dublin becomes a journey backward through the single day when he and Cait nearly became something more. Their younger selves step into the same theatrical present, turning a James Joyce-inflected romance into a conversation between memory and possibility.
06 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Older Robert and Cait revisit the beginning of a love story that lasted only a day but refused to disappear for decades. Younger Robbie and Caithleen walk beside them as time bends, regrets surface and Dublin proves unusually hospitable to unfinished emotional business.
07 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Steven Dietz mixes James Joyce, time travel and a love affair interrupted for 35 years into a play about the strange persistence of memory. The older couple confronts their younger selves and the possibility that knowing what comes next may not be enough to change it.
12 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience prompts turn into scenes and characters without rehearsal, rewriting or responsible adult oversight. Ventura Improv Company keeps the structure tight enough for the spontaneity to run loose.
13 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Robert returns to Dublin to seek Cait and finds the ghosts of youth considerably more talkative than expected. Past and present overlap as the four versions of two people replay the day that might have changed everything.
13 Jodi Farrell Masterclass PERFORMANCE / MUSIC MASTERCLASS · Jodi Farrell coaches singers and performers through the details that separate knowing the material from communicating it. Technique, interpretation and stage presence get immediate practical attention rather than waiting for the next gig to expose the problem.
14 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · The final performance follows Robert and Cait through an Irish love story where 35 years can disappear in the space between one line and the next. Steven Dietz gives regret a sense of humor and lets the younger couple challenge what their older selves think they know about how the story ends.
20 Brick by Brick SOLO THEATER / COMEDY-DRAMA · Actor and comedian Nina Rancel literally builds a road toward her artistic dreams while singing, acting, tap dancing, playing guitar and doing stand-up along the way. The immigrant performer’s wildly physical solo show is about getting thrown off that road, meeting monsters both real and imagined, and deciding to keep building anyway.
25 Every Body, Every Mind: Art & Life Without Limits ART / ACCESSIBILITY ·
26 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original work in a close acoustic format where every voice gets a short stretch of undivided attention. Songs arrive at different stages of life, much like their writers, but generally with fewer tax obligations.
27 Black and Blue SOLO THEATER / DRAMA · Writer-performer Jamar Gilbert becomes four men wrestling with different answers to the question of how to survive, live and love in Black skin in America. A bitter elder, fiery radical, weary Black cop and wide-eyed child collide in a raw examination of identity, racism, resistance, guilt and hope.
28 Honey Honey Moon Moon MUSICAL COMEDY / FOLK / DRAMEDY · Real-life couple Marnina Schon and Micah O’Konis turn their own spectacularly troubled wedding preparations into musical comedy with folk songs, sketches and theatrical chaos. Bed bugs, couples therapy and a wedding venue burning down somehow become material for a show about romance surviving contact with reality.
September06 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Older Robert and Cait revisit the beginning of a love story that lasted only a day but refused to disappear for decades. Younger Robbie and Caithleen walk beside them as time bends, regrets surface and Dublin proves unusually hospitable to unfinished emotional business.
07 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Steven Dietz mixes James Joyce, time travel and a love affair interrupted for 35 years into a play about the strange persistence of memory. The older couple confronts their younger selves and the possibility that knowing what comes next may not be enough to change it.
12 Ventura Improv Company IMPROV COMEDY · Audience prompts turn into scenes and characters without rehearsal, rewriting or responsible adult oversight. Ventura Improv Company keeps the structure tight enough for the spontaneity to run loose.
13 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · Robert returns to Dublin to seek Cait and finds the ghosts of youth considerably more talkative than expected. Past and present overlap as the four versions of two people replay the day that might have changed everything.
13 Jodi Farrell Masterclass PERFORMANCE / MUSIC MASTERCLASS · Jodi Farrell coaches singers and performers through the details that separate knowing the material from communicating it. Technique, interpretation and stage presence get immediate practical attention rather than waiting for the next gig to expose the problem.
14 Bloomsday THEATER / ROMANTIC COMEDY-DRAMA · The final performance follows Robert and Cait through an Irish love story where 35 years can disappear in the space between one line and the next. Steven Dietz gives regret a sense of humor and lets the younger couple challenge what their older selves think they know about how the story ends.
20 Brick by Brick SOLO THEATER / COMEDY-DRAMA · Actor and comedian Nina Rancel literally builds a road toward her artistic dreams while singing, acting, tap dancing, playing guitar and doing stand-up along the way. The immigrant performer’s wildly physical solo show is about getting thrown off that road, meeting monsters both real and imagined, and deciding to keep building anyway.
25 Every Body, Every Mind: Art & Life Without Limits ART / ACCESSIBILITY ·
26 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters share original work in a close acoustic format where every voice gets a short stretch of undivided attention. Songs arrive at different stages of life, much like their writers, but generally with fewer tax obligations.
27 Black and Blue SOLO THEATER / DRAMA · Writer-performer Jamar Gilbert becomes four men wrestling with different answers to the question of how to survive, live and love in Black skin in America. A bitter elder, fiery radical, weary Black cop and wide-eyed child collide in a raw examination of identity, racism, resistance, guilt and hope.
28 Honey Honey Moon Moon MUSICAL COMEDY / FOLK / DRAMEDY · Real-life couple Marnina Schon and Micah O’Konis turn their own spectacularly troubled wedding preparations into musical comedy with folk songs, sketches and theatrical chaos. Bed bugs, couples therapy and a wedding venue burning down somehow become material for a show about romance surviving contact with reality.
October Events
03 The B-Sides INDIE ROCK / SOUL / POP · Four lifelong Ojai friends who have played together since they were 12 pull from a record shelf running from The Beatles and Sinatra to Al Green and Green Day. Beckett McDowell, Cosmo Penny, Dylan Petrucci and Lucca Kun turn those far-flung influences into original music with one foot in classic songcraft and another somewhere considerably louder.
04 Mine for the Tribe SOLO THEATER / COMEDY · Writer-performer Chris Smith turns the artist’s struggle with mental health, ambition and creative identity into a deeply personal solo “sermon” about healing yourself before trying to save the tribe. Character work, clowning and theatrical storytelling follow a life spent chasing art through setbacks, losses and the monsters artists have an irritating habit of carrying with them.
11 Me, Myself, and Other SOLO THEATER / COMEDY-DRAMA · Diana Romero follows a first-generation American woman balancing cultural identities and a lifelong sense of otherness before a life-changing diagnosis makes disability impossible for the outside world to ignore. Humor, character work and painful honesty turn the journey toward self-acceptance into a story about belonging in a culture, a body and eventually yourself.
12 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs take their turn without excessive production or unnecessary ceremony. An attentive room gives each writer enough time to find out whether the song can stand where they left it.
18 Syncopated Debauchery RAGTIME / VAUDEVILLE / SOLO THEATER · Pianist Eve Elliot dives into the unruly birth of ragtime, when blues, southern dance music and European classical forms collided in the barrooms and bordellos of turn-of-the-century America. Virtuosic live piano, vaudevillian antics and big characters summon Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and the complicated world that made their music possible.
24 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Writers take the acoustic stage with songs of their own making and ten minutes to introduce them properly. The setting leaves enough quiet around the music for a good lyric to do something dangerous.
26 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads another collaborative afternoon of lyrics, melodies, structure and revision. The workshop gives writers a place to discover whether the song needs more, less or the difficult third option: something entirely different.
October04 Mine for the Tribe SOLO THEATER / COMEDY · Writer-performer Chris Smith turns the artist’s struggle with mental health, ambition and creative identity into a deeply personal solo “sermon” about healing yourself before trying to save the tribe. Character work, clowning and theatrical storytelling follow a life spent chasing art through setbacks, losses and the monsters artists have an irritating habit of carrying with them.
11 Me, Myself, and Other SOLO THEATER / COMEDY-DRAMA · Diana Romero follows a first-generation American woman balancing cultural identities and a lifelong sense of otherness before a life-changing diagnosis makes disability impossible for the outside world to ignore. Humor, character work and painful honesty turn the journey toward self-acceptance into a story about belonging in a culture, a body and eventually yourself.
12 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs take their turn without excessive production or unnecessary ceremony. An attentive room gives each writer enough time to find out whether the song can stand where they left it.
18 Syncopated Debauchery RAGTIME / VAUDEVILLE / SOLO THEATER · Pianist Eve Elliot dives into the unruly birth of ragtime, when blues, southern dance music and European classical forms collided in the barrooms and bordellos of turn-of-the-century America. Virtuosic live piano, vaudevillian antics and big characters summon Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and the complicated world that made their music possible.
24 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Writers take the acoustic stage with songs of their own making and ten minutes to introduce them properly. The setting leaves enough quiet around the music for a good lyric to do something dangerous.
26 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Henry Stewart leads another collaborative afternoon of lyrics, melodies, structure and revision. The workshop gives writers a place to discover whether the song needs more, less or the difficult third option: something entirely different.
November Events
02 A Tribute to Irving Berlin: America’s Greatest Songwriter. (Period.) GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK / TRIBUTE · Ten Southern California musical-theater singers celebrate the astonishing Irving Berlin catalog, from “Blue Skies” and “Cheek to Cheek” to “White Christmas,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Michael Estwanik supplies stories from Berlin’s 101-year life while David Watkins leads the music through one of American popular song’s deepest wells.
02 Shadow Country POETRY / VIOLIN / PIANO · Tim Pompey, Sharon Cooper-Crandall and Alex Curry combine poetry, violin and piano in a meditation on life, love, memory and perception. Pompey’s writing moves from lakes and mountains to aging, dry humor and the distant possibility of peace, with music carrying the atmosphere between the words.
08 Spirit Mending POETRY / MUSIC / DANCE THEATER · Poetry and music by Ron Fullerton, poetry by Joelle Hannah and movement by Megill & Company meet in a work that sits somewhere between ritual, concert and dance theater. Words, sound and bodies share the job of tracing how a damaged spirit might begin putting itself back together.
09 Spirit Mending POETRY / MUSIC / DANCE THEATER · Ron Fullerton’s poetry and music joins Joelle Hannah’s writing and Megill & Company’s movement in an interdisciplinary work built around repair and connection. Rather than separate disciplines taking turns, poetry, sound and dance move through the same emotional current.
09 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs return to their most revealing form: somebody wrote this, somebody is playing it and everybody else has agreed to listen. The machinery stays minimal so the stories do not have to compete with it.
10 Ventura Improv Company: The Spooky Show IMPROV COMEDY / HALLOWEEN · Ventura Improv Company gives its audience suggestions a spooky turn, building eerie characters, strange scenes and comic horrors completely on the spot. Nothing is scripted, including whatever questionable supernatural logic holds the evening together.
14 No-Net November IMPROV COMEDY · No scripts, no safety nets and no chance to quietly edit the decision later: Ventura Improv Company builds the entire show in real time. Quick thinking and sharp instincts turn the thrill of the unknown into what the company bills as the greatest improv show on Earth.
15 Except Myself COMEDIC THEATER / ENSEMBLE · Drew Petriello’s high-concept comedy disguises itself as a five-person solo show, sending several conflicting versions of one writer’s identity into the same theatrical headspace. Absurdity, poetry and emotional honesty collide as those selves argue over creativity, resistance and which one gets to call itself “me.”
16 The Final Patriot FILM / SCI-FI / ACTION THRILLER · Gina Nemo’s dystopian short follows the last soldier in a world where humanity has traded freedom for control. The independent sci-fi action thriller pushes a lone holdout against a system that has already convinced everyone else that surrender is simply another word for order.
16 NambaHood 10 year Celebration COMMUNITY CELEBRATION ·
22 Ms. Tucker Will See You Now CABARET / VAUDEVILLE / MUSICAL THEATER · Laural Meade channels vaudeville powerhouse Sophie Tucker with Fred Cassidy at the piano, mixing Tucker’s risqué songs with raucous comedy and stories from an extraordinary nightclub life. Bawdy, musical and unexpectedly tender, the 2025 Hollywood Fringe cabaret winner brings one of the twentieth century’s great adult entertainers swaggering back into the spotlight.
23 Ecstatic Dance Ventura with Desert Jesus! ECSTATIC DANCE / ELECTRONIC / DJ · Boulder sound-weaver Desert Jesus builds a journey from deep bass, electronic textures and shifting sonic landscapes while the dance floor supplies its own choreography. There are no prescribed steps: the event is designed around free movement, physical expression and following whatever the music manages to shake loose.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Writers gather with songs in progress and work through the craft choices hiding inside lyric, melody and form. A supportive room makes experimentation easier, though regrettably it cannot make every rhyme legal.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · After the holiday tables clear, original songs get an evening of their own in the acoustic listening-room format. Writers bring the work close enough for the audience to hear the fingerprints.
November02 Shadow Country POETRY / VIOLIN / PIANO · Tim Pompey, Sharon Cooper-Crandall and Alex Curry combine poetry, violin and piano in a meditation on life, love, memory and perception. Pompey’s writing moves from lakes and mountains to aging, dry humor and the distant possibility of peace, with music carrying the atmosphere between the words.
08 Spirit Mending POETRY / MUSIC / DANCE THEATER · Poetry and music by Ron Fullerton, poetry by Joelle Hannah and movement by Megill & Company meet in a work that sits somewhere between ritual, concert and dance theater. Words, sound and bodies share the job of tracing how a damaged spirit might begin putting itself back together.
09 Spirit Mending POETRY / MUSIC / DANCE THEATER · Ron Fullerton’s poetry and music joins Joelle Hannah’s writing and Megill & Company’s movement in an interdisciplinary work built around repair and connection. Rather than separate disciplines taking turns, poetry, sound and dance move through the same emotional current.
09 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs return to their most revealing form: somebody wrote this, somebody is playing it and everybody else has agreed to listen. The machinery stays minimal so the stories do not have to compete with it.
10 Ventura Improv Company: The Spooky Show IMPROV COMEDY / HALLOWEEN · Ventura Improv Company gives its audience suggestions a spooky turn, building eerie characters, strange scenes and comic horrors completely on the spot. Nothing is scripted, including whatever questionable supernatural logic holds the evening together.
14 No-Net November IMPROV COMEDY · No scripts, no safety nets and no chance to quietly edit the decision later: Ventura Improv Company builds the entire show in real time. Quick thinking and sharp instincts turn the thrill of the unknown into what the company bills as the greatest improv show on Earth.
15 Except Myself COMEDIC THEATER / ENSEMBLE · Drew Petriello’s high-concept comedy disguises itself as a five-person solo show, sending several conflicting versions of one writer’s identity into the same theatrical headspace. Absurdity, poetry and emotional honesty collide as those selves argue over creativity, resistance and which one gets to call itself “me.”
16 The Final Patriot FILM / SCI-FI / ACTION THRILLER · Gina Nemo’s dystopian short follows the last soldier in a world where humanity has traded freedom for control. The independent sci-fi action thriller pushes a lone holdout against a system that has already convinced everyone else that surrender is simply another word for order.
16 NambaHood 10 year Celebration COMMUNITY CELEBRATION ·
22 Ms. Tucker Will See You Now CABARET / VAUDEVILLE / MUSICAL THEATER · Laural Meade channels vaudeville powerhouse Sophie Tucker with Fred Cassidy at the piano, mixing Tucker’s risqué songs with raucous comedy and stories from an extraordinary nightclub life. Bawdy, musical and unexpectedly tender, the 2025 Hollywood Fringe cabaret winner brings one of the twentieth century’s great adult entertainers swaggering back into the spotlight.
23 Ecstatic Dance Ventura with Desert Jesus! ECSTATIC DANCE / ELECTRONIC / DJ · Boulder sound-weaver Desert Jesus builds a journey from deep bass, electronic textures and shifting sonic landscapes while the dance floor supplies its own choreography. There are no prescribed steps: the event is designed around free movement, physical expression and following whatever the music manages to shake loose.
23 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · Writers gather with songs in progress and work through the craft choices hiding inside lyric, melody and form. A supportive room makes experimentation easier, though regrettably it cannot make every rhyme legal.
28 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · After the holiday tables clear, original songs get an evening of their own in the acoustic listening-room format. Writers bring the work close enough for the audience to hear the fingerprints.
December Events
06 Doc the Halls: Holiday Blues with Doc Ventura HOLIDAY BLUES / ROOTS / SOUL · The eighth annual holiday blues revue gathers Donna Lynn Caskey, Fito de la Parra, R.J. Mischo, Debbie Davies, Lucious Spiller, Monte Montgomery, Tom Collins, Hank Van Sickle and Doc Ventura with Delta by the Beach. Holiday songs pick up Delta grit, Chicago harp, folk banjo, jazz swing and enough electric guitar to keep December from becoming entirely dependent on sleigh bells.
07 Doc the Halls: Holiday Blues with Doc Ventura HOLIDAY BLUES / ROOTS / SOUL · Doc Ventura and an all-star cast send familiar holiday music through blues, folk, jazz and roots traditions instead of leaving it under fluorescent department-store lighting. With guests ranging from Canned Heat drummer Fito de la Parra to R.J. Mischo, Debbie Davies and Donna Lynn Caskey, the season gets considerably more groove than tinsel.
12 Ventura Improv Company: Deck the Hallmarks! IMPROV COMEDY / HOLIDAY ROM-COM · Audience suggestions become an entirely improvised holiday “movie” stuffed with snow, cookies, meet-cutes and postcard-perfect romantic complications. Ventura Improv Company takes the cozy Hallmark formula apart in real time and then tries very hard to get everyone under the mistletoe before the credits roll.
14 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters reclaim a little December real estate from the seasonal standards with original music in an acoustic setting. Voice, instrument and somebody willing to listen remain all the equipment strictly necessary.
21 Clara Cries Nuts DANCE / HOLIDAY PARODY / SCREENING · The Nutcracker-inspired parody created by Pamela Pilkenton and Cathy Butter returns through a curated look across all eight incarnations, culminating in the complete 2015 Nocturnal Episode #8. Colleen O’Callaghan’s Clara, the comic “wise men” and Ebony Payne’s Sugar Plum revive a holiday tradition that spent years cheerfully taking a nutcracker to The Nutcracker.
26 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get a quiet landing place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when nobody is entirely certain what day it is anyway. The songwriter’s open mic restores a little chronological order with ten-minute sets and music made by the person performing it.
28 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · The final workshop of the year gives unfinished songs one last productive encounter with structure, lyrics, melody and other writers. It is cheaper than carrying the same unresolved second verse into another calendar year.
December07 Doc the Halls: Holiday Blues with Doc Ventura HOLIDAY BLUES / ROOTS / SOUL · Doc Ventura and an all-star cast send familiar holiday music through blues, folk, jazz and roots traditions instead of leaving it under fluorescent department-store lighting. With guests ranging from Canned Heat drummer Fito de la Parra to R.J. Mischo, Debbie Davies and Donna Lynn Caskey, the season gets considerably more groove than tinsel.
12 Ventura Improv Company: Deck the Hallmarks! IMPROV COMEDY / HOLIDAY ROM-COM · Audience suggestions become an entirely improvised holiday “movie” stuffed with snow, cookies, meet-cutes and postcard-perfect romantic complications. Ventura Improv Company takes the cozy Hallmark formula apart in real time and then tries very hard to get everyone under the mistletoe before the credits roll.
14 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Songwriters reclaim a little December real estate from the seasonal standards with original music in an acoustic setting. Voice, instrument and somebody willing to listen remain all the equipment strictly necessary.
21 Clara Cries Nuts DANCE / HOLIDAY PARODY / SCREENING · The Nutcracker-inspired parody created by Pamela Pilkenton and Cathy Butter returns through a curated look across all eight incarnations, culminating in the complete 2015 Nocturnal Episode #8. Colleen O’Callaghan’s Clara, the comic “wise men” and Ebony Payne’s Sugar Plum revive a holiday tradition that spent years cheerfully taking a nutcracker to The Nutcracker.
26 The Listening Room OPEN MIC / SINGER-SONGWRITER · Original songs get a quiet landing place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when nobody is entirely certain what day it is anyway. The songwriter’s open mic restores a little chronological order with ten-minute sets and music made by the person performing it.
28 Songwriter’s Workshop with Henry Stewart SONGWRITING / WORKSHOP · The final workshop of the year gives unfinished songs one last productive encounter with structure, lyrics, melody and other writers. It is cheaper than carrying the same unresolved second verse into another calendar year.