“Something that is fun as well as necessary” is the way that Samantha Eve describes her successful cupcake business, Violette Bakeshop — but it could also describe her other indispensable passion, the Out of the Box Theatre Company, which she founded in 2010 and that brings essential musical theatre productions to this city that we would not otherwise get the opportunity to see. I find it kismet that on her right arm there’s a colorful and striking tattoo of a whisk and a rolling pin, and on her left there’s another that says “Make Good Art.” “Theatre’s a consuming career that is competitive and challenging,” she tells me. “When baking I can do something that I’m passionate at — just as much as theater.” Since Out of the Box’s inception, Samantha has produced and directed groundbreaking productions ranging from Spring Awakening to The Wild Party. This coming Halloween, she will bring The Rocky Horror Show to Center Stage Theatre for a week.
Samantha grew up in Goleta, the daughter of Occhiali Eyewear owners Salli and Irwin Eve. Her parents still live in the same house she grew up in. She went to the Anacapa School for middle school and high school and remembers her graduating class being only eight students. “It was an intimate and creative experience to grow up in,” she recalls. She started doing children’s theater when she was 7 years old, taking dance classes at Santa Barbara Dance Arts and participating in youth programs such as Showstoppers Theatre, Santa Barbara Youth Ensemble Theatre, Stage Left, Rubicon Theatre Company, and Idyllwild Arts Academy’s summer program. “I grew up watching movie musicals like West Side Story,” she tells me with a smile. She was accepted at the prestigious New York University Tisch School of the Arts to study musical theater.
While in college, she started baking. Once theater became her calling, she needed a creative outlet. She went to Williams Sonoma and bought a cookbook called Essentials of French Baking, and baked herself through the book. She would give what she baked to her theater friends. “The first time I baked a rum cake I didn’t realize you had to burn off the alcohol first,” she says, adding, “Nobody’s more forgiving than your friends.” She was in N.Y.C. during the cupcake boom, when Magnolia Bakery got started. “I love the science of baking,” she states. “I love the accuracy.”