Art imitates life, and for Santa Barbara musician Kenny Sultan, the new Broadway play Pictures from Home achieves an authenticity beyond metaphor: The production will actually feature pictures of the Sultan family, pictures taken by Kenny’s brother, Larry Sultan. Pictures from Home, which opened this month at Studio 54, is inspired by Larry Sultan’s pivotal photographic memoir of the same name — and features Tony winner Nathan Lane as the father figure; Olivier award winner Zoë Wanamaker as the Sultan matriarch; and Tony winner Danny Burstein as Larry Sultan himself. “It’s my mom, dad, and brother onstage,” says Kenny Sultan. “It’s surreal. I’m going to need a stiff drink before that one!”
Larry Sultan, a famed photographer (and UCSB graduate, class of ’68) who passed away more than a decade ago, has left a legacy in the arts that exists in multiple forms. He created photographs but was also a prolific writer, publishing books of photography collections and penning associated musings that captured a mood. In Pictures from Home, a book that features pictures of the Sultan family, Sultan defies the mythology of the “American dream” by showing photographs behind the posed shots of everyone smiling and looking their best. The shots in the collection are of his family caught at odd and awkward moments and are sometimes staged to create a tone that conveyed the true experiences of an American family in California.
After his death, Larry Sultan’s work lived on in museums and galleries, including a lengthy showing at the L.A. County Museum of Art. One person inspired by Larry’s work was screenwriter Sharr White, who turned Pictures from Home into a play. He presented a reading of the work on Zoom during the pandemic, which Kenny enjoyed but then forgot about completely … until months later, when Larry’s widow called to share the good news: Pictures from Home was being mounted on Broadway!