THEATER PREVIEW:Reprise season for Civic Playhouse

If at first you do succeed, why not try again? That appears to be the philosophy of the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse.

The 41-year old community theater group is reaching back into its own past for most of the productions in its upcoming 2006-07 season. Of its four new offerings, the first three were staged by the Civic Playhouse in the past.

However, this may come as news to the current administration, since all three were presented eons ago ? two of them back in the pre-1985 days when the theater was headquartered in an ancient building on the Orange County Fairgrounds.

The playhouse’s 2006-07 season will be book-ended by Stephen Sondheim musicals, certainly a prime selling point since Sondheim has long been the patron saint of American musical theater.

Opening the season Aug. 25 will be “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which the playhouse mounted in the late 1980s when my son, who played one of the proteans, was a student at Estancia High School. He’s now 33, teaching high school English and occasionally pinch-hitting in this column.

The closing production, arriving next May 4, is Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” the lone nonreprise show on the slate, and one that is rarely produced locally.

In-between are Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” opening Oct. 27, and Paul Zindel’s “The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild,” arriving Feb. 23. Both were presented under the Civic Playhouse banner at the old Fairgrounds theater back in the 1970s ? probably before some of the theater’s current movers-and-shakers were born.

“Forum” promises to get the theater off to a rousing start. Set in ancient Rome with a heavy accent on slapstick comedy, it’s the tale of a slave manipulating all those around him to secure his freedom. It was the first show in which Sondheim wrote the music as well as the lyrics, with Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (who would go on to write much of TV’s “MASH”) providing the book.

Brick, Maggie, Big Daddy and the no-neck monsters will return for the steamy drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and we’ll miss the late playhouse founding director Pati Tambellini, who played Big Mama 30 years ago. Pati also directed “Mildred Wild,” the story of an over-the-top movie nut whose fantasies overcome her reality.

“A Little Night Music” borrows its plot from Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” with its focus on a lawyer and his young, still-virginal bride. One of Sondheim’s best songs, “Send in the Clowns,” highlights this fanciful musical.

The new season will unfold at the playhouse’s theater, 611 Hamilton St., Costa Mesa, and for those old-timers among the Civic Playhouse faithful, the 2006-07 season will be one of fond memories. For the relative newcomers, these are four shows worthy of rediscovery.