Celebrity Theatre

As if to underline her growth from the 13-year-old child star of old into a 31-year-old adult, Tanya Tucker announced from the Celebrity Theatre stage on Friday that her tastes nowadays range "from Mozart to Kitty Wells." Unfortunately, much of what Tucker sang during the Anaheim concert was a slick, country-pop hybrid delivered with too much regard for the show-biz conventions she grew up with, and not enough simplicity and heart.

Southern California's biggest theater company was the biggest winner at the 2012 Ovation Awards, which were handed out Monday evening at a ceremony at the Los Angeles Theatre in downtown. Center Theatre Group scooped 13 trophies for its productions of "Waiting for Godot," "The Convert" and "War Horse. " The company also received the evening's biggest honor as having the best season. The Ovations, organized by the L.A. Stage Alliance, honor excellence in stage productions throughout the L.A. area.

Because rap music was born on the broken sidewalks of New York, West Coast hip-hop acts seldom get the respect that their Eastern brethren claim as a birthright. "Try harder" seemed to be the watchword for two California rap groups that held their own with Bronx-based Boogie Down Productions in an East-meets-West bill Saturday at Anaheim's Celebrity Theatre.

With both the recession and holiday season now official, "A Christmas Carol" returns to Celebration Theatre. What a difference a year makes. First seen in 2007, Jason Moyer's newly revised gay take on the immortal Dickens tale improves on itself considerably. It still concerns fashion mogul Ebenezer "Ben" Scrooge, whom returning Michael Taylor Gray plays as Miranda Priestly from "The Devil Wears Prada" possessed by Mr. Burns of "The Simpsons." Since partner Jacob Marley's death, Scrooge has abandoned goodwill, spurning charity solicitors, saying "pshaw!"

True, they did do the wave to fill time during a pre-concert delay, but if you were to chalk up the outpouring of affection that greeted Debbie Gibson at Anaheim's Celebrity Theatre on Sunday night to fans that are easily amused, you'd be selling this performer short. In a show that ran a full two hours of singing, dancing and jamming through 21 musical numbers, the former teen-pop queen (she's now nearly 21) gave back at least as much as she got.

For her next act, Sam Phillips intends to elicit chuckles. The music business, says this singer of catchy pop-with-brains, needs to loosen up and laugh a bit. "There's so much money involved that people take things so seriously," said Phillips, who opens for Bruce Cockburn tonight at the Celebrity Theatre, in a recent phone interview. "There needs to be levity."

Usually, when it comes to evaluating the artistic integrity of country bands, one has to consider Waylon Jennings' question: "Are you sure Hank done it this way?" With the Kentucky HeadHunters, who stray far from country convention, the answer might lie with an old line from Martin Mull: "I hate to disillusion ya, honey, but it's just licks off of records that I learned." At least the HeadHunters deserve some credit for having a wide-ranging record collection from which to swipe their licks.

Dormant for nearly two years, the former Celebrity Theatre is expected to reopen in December with a new name and new management. According to Ellis Stern, an official of the charitable foundation that owns the 2,800-capacity theater-in-the-round, a 10-year lease has been signed with new operators. "It's my understanding they will open the theater with some shows early in December," Stern said.

The operator of the Celebrity Theatre must surrender control of the Anaheim concert venue by Monday, under a court order issued Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. California Celebrity Theatre Inc. had been struggling to continue operating the 2,800-seat theater since mid-December, when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

Let the record show that 20 years, eight months, three weeks and a day after "Oh! Calcutta!" first opened off-Broadway, a bus-and-truck version will bow here Sunday for two performances at the Celebrity Theatre in what is being billed as "a farewell tour." Let the record also show that this naughty musical revue is coming to bid adieu by way of one-nighters in Orono, Me.; Stamford, Conn.; Middletown, N.Y.; Burlington, Vt.; Greensboro, N.C.; Pensacola, Fla.

The Celebration Theatre is housing "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," and it has seldom made a wiser call. John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's Plato's Symposium-as-rock concert watershed receives an electrifying, in-your-face reading, the venue's surest bet since "Pinafore!" "Hedwig's" global cult following (comparable to that of "Rocky Horror") dates from Manhattan's celebrated 1998 Jane Street Theatre production starring creator Mitchell, the template against which all others are measured.

Robert Schrock, producing artistic director of the Celebration Theatre since 1993, is leaving the company to take the musical revue "Naked Boys Singing!" to the Big Apple and beyond. "Naked Boys" has become the longest-running hit ever for the Celebration, L.A.'s primary gay-oriented theater.

Showtixx, a Sherman Oaks-based company that handled telephone reservations and credit card sales for many of L.A.'s sub-100-seat theatrical productions, has gone out of business, still owing an estimated $25,000 worth of ticket receipts to Hollywood's small, nonprofit Celebration Theatre and smaller sums to several other companies or producers.

To mark the anticipated turnaround of a well-known stretch of Sherman Way, the city has scheduled the Madrid Theatre Performing Arts Festival after Monday's Canoga Park Memorial Day Parade. The $3.1-million performing arts complex is scheduled to open in 1998. Funds for the project came from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The facility will be built on the earthquake-damaged location of the former X-rated Pussycat Theatre.

The concert theater that went out with a whimper two years ago returned Saturday night--not exactly with a bang, but with new managers who are confident the venue will have its share of bang-up evenings at the box office while attracting a steady stream of high-profile pop and rock talent. The Freedman Forum Concert Theatre is the new incarnation of the Celebrity Theatre, which expired early in 1994 when its former operators fell into bankruptcy and lost their lease.

Plans to reopen the former Celebrity Theatre, which officials say is key to revitalizing the downtown, received enthusiastic support this week from the City Council. The 2,500-seat theater, vacant for nearly two years, will reopen in January as the Freedman Forum Concert Theater. Theater officials already booked recording artist Kenny Rogers for Jan. 24-26, and plan to bring other nationally recognized performers in coming months.

Sunday night's concert at the Celebrity Theatre confirmed what many critics have probably long suspected about Debbie Gibson fans: These wholesome legions are more at home at a baseball game than at a rock concert.

There's something a bit unsettling about Patti LaBelle hawking Big Macs on the tube. Folks are worried enough about hair in their food without having to contend with the notion of LaBelle's spiky hairdos shedding ("Excuse me, waiter, but I believe there's a porcupine quill in my cheeseburger"). But, while the wares she's advertising in the commercials are at least all beef, there seemed to be more than a little bull to the R & B diva's early show at the Celebrity Theatre Friday evening.

Dormant for nearly two years, the former Celebrity Theatre is expected to reopen in December with a new name and new management. According to Ellis Stern, an official of the charitable foundation that owns the 2,800-capacity theater-in-the-round, a 10-year lease has been signed with new operators. "It's my understanding they will open the theater with some shows early in December," Stern said.

Jan Breslauer's coverage of Celebration Theatre ("Visibility. Stability. Now, the Next Step," Sept. 11) is an overdue look at L.A.'s oldest lesbian and gay theater. But her conclusions are quite different from those I made as a reviewer of Celebration's plays for much of the 1980s. The piece suggested that Celebration had only recently staged socially relevant productions, and contrasted its "stunted" fare to East Coast AIDS dramas staged in 1985. But in 1983, Celebration offered Bob Hagedorn's "One."