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April 2025

Newsies

​Auditions for Newsies: The Musical
Step into history and take the stage in Newsies: The Musical ! Inspired by the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899, this thrilling production tells the story of the New York newsies – the boys and girls who sold newspapers on the streets – as they challenge the powerful newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst for fair treatment and a livable wage.
At the height of the Spanish-American War, booming newspaper sales made headlines a hot commodity. But when the war ended, so did the publishers' profits. To cut costs, they raised the price of papers sold to the newsies. Refusing to shoulder the burden, the newsies banded together to strike, proving their worth as a vital part of the business. The two-week strike, from July 20 to August 2, 1899, became a landmark moment in labor history, culminating in a compromise that saw the publishers buy back unsold papers. The newsies’ bravery and unity remain a powerful testament to standing up for justice.
With music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Jack Feldman, and a book by Harvey Fierstein, Newsies: The Musical is based on the beloved 1992 Disney film and brings this inspiring story to life with show-stopping choreography, unforgettable songs, and a message of resilience and hope. The show premiered at the Paper Mill Playhouse in 2011, dazzled audiences on Broadway in 2012 with over 1,000 performances, and continues to capture hearts worldwide.
This is your chance to join the revolution! Don’t miss the opportunity to be part of this high-energy, uplifting musical that celebrates courage, camaraderie, and the pursuit of dreams. Audition details below!
MBCC COMMUNITY HALL THEATER - 303 S. Peck Ave - Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Take a look at our latest shows!

October/November 2024

April 2024
The Drowsy Chaperone is a Canadian musical with music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, and a book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar.
The story concerns a middle-aged, asocial musical theater fan who, feeling "blue", decides to play for the audience an LP of his favorite musical, the fictional 1928 show The Drowsy Chaperone. As the record plays, the show - a parody of 1920s American musical comedy - comes to life onstage, as the man wryly comments on the music, story and actors.
The Drowsy Chaperone debuted in 1998 at The Rivoli in Toronto, and, after a 2005 run in Los Angeles, opened on Broadway on May 1, 2006. The show was nominated for multiple Broadway and West Endtheatre awards, winning five Tony Awards and seven Drama Desk Awards. The show has had major producten.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowsy_Chaperoneions in Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, London, Melbourne and Japan, as well as two North American tours as well as Batemans Bay in New South Wales.  

​Wikipedia Articleen.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowsy_Chaperone

October 2023

"Jazmine Ramay is Marianne, a Cambridge physicist, and James Jeffery Caldwell is Roland, a beekeeper. Caldwell is a local actor and director (this show included) whom we’ve seen on stage or behind it many times over the years. Ramay is new to me, she’s based in Los Angeles and has some impressive acting credentials to her name. Both performers are very good in this play...The play runs about 75 minutes and it will, I believe, stick with you. This is a first-rate production from top to bottom and don’t dismiss it because it’s being performed in a community hall of a local church. Together, both works make for a rewarding trip to the theater." — Easy Reader October 2023
Constellations - ​This spellbinding, romantic journey begins with a simple encounter between a man and a woman. But what happens next defies the boundaries of the world we think we know—delving into the infinite possibilities of their relationship and raising questions about the difference between choice and destiny.
Directed by James Jeffery Caldwell
The Package is a comedy about a married couple Janice and Dave, who are dealing with marital and financial problems. They find themselves unwittingly involved with the Mafia and a mysterious package.  The events that unfold on the way to Janice & Dave finding their happy ending are surprising, funny, and a little chaotic in a melodrama style.
Written and Directed by Bob Manning

Bus Stop - Fall 2019

Kismet - Spring 2019

Blithe Spirit - Fall 2018

Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Noël Coward. The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles's marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.
The play was first seen in the West End in 1941, creating a new long-run record for non-musical British plays of 1,997 performances. It also did well on Broadway later that year, running for 657 performances. Coward adapted the play for film in 1945, starring Rex Harrison, and directed a musical adaptation, High Spirits, on Broadway in 1964. It was also adapted for television in the 1950s and 1960s and for radio. The play enjoyed several West End and Broadway revivals in the 1970s and 1980s and was revived again in London in 2004, 2011 and 2014. It returned to Broadway in February 2009.
Link to Wikipedia Article

Gypsy - Spring 2018

The Rainmaker
October 13, 14, 15 & 20, 21- 2017

ALL GOOD THINGS -
More Encore! 
A Benefit Concert with All Proceeds Being Donated to The 
Henry Reed Family

​Please
Donate to The Henry Reed Family

Stephen Sondheim's 'Company' opens at Manhattan Beach Community Church

Stephen Sondheim's 'Company' opens at Manhattan Beach Community Church
 by Michael Hixon
Mar 21, 2017 Updated Mar 22, 2017

​Bobby, a confirmed bachelor celebrating his 35th birthday, faces a series of separate events with five married couples who are his best friends and past three girlfriends that force him to contemplate his bachelorhood in the comedic Stephen Sondheim musical, “Company,” which opens at the Manhattan Beach Community Church Friday, March 24.
Director Bob Manning said “Company,” which debuted on Broadway in 1970 and was nominated for 14 Tony Awards, is filled with challenging songs and choreography, which can be difficult for a non-professional group.
“We wanted to do something that was a little more edgy … even though it's in the 70s, there's a lot of current day attitudes about relationships and it was still very current,” Manning said.
Even though “Company” has gone through small or major changes in different productions over the decades, Manning said MBCC is staying with the original book by George Furth.
“I watched all the ones I could find … and try and pick what flavor I was interested in,” Manning said.
Manning's first show with MBCC was “You Can't Take it With You” in 2010. His parents were stage actors so he grew up in theater.
“When they needed a kid it was me, no lines,” recalled Manning. “It wasn't a lot, but enough to introduce me to live theater. They used to take me to the cast party because it was easier than hiring a babysitter. I looked around and I'm thinking, 'How come there's nobody my age here?' Everybody’s getting drunk, smoking cigarettes and jumping in the pool and I have to go to bed early.”
Manning said this cast has put in an extraordinary amount of time to make this production of "Company" work. He said even though rehearsals can get stressful, everyone is working hard.
“You can tell people are giving their heart and soul ... that brings tears to my eyes,” Manning said.
Performances of “Company” take place Friday, March 24, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, March 25, at 8 p.m.; Sunday March 26, at 2 p.m.; Friday, March 31, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, April 1, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, April 2, at 2 p.m.; Friday, April 7, at 8 p.m.; and closing night, Saturday, April 8, at 8 p.m.
The MBCC is located at 303 S. Peck Ave.
For more information, visit mbcctheater.com.

Sondheim’s “Company” in Manhattan Beach

COMES THAT DAY OF RECKONING
A local church theater presents “Company,” Sondheim’s acclaimed musical
by Bondo Wyszpolski
Musicals, by and large, are uplifting, and the ones performed under the auspices of your local church perhaps doubly so. But sitting down with Bob Manning, who’s directing Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” for the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater, it’s the word edgy, not the word uplifting, that comes up in conversation.
“Company,” which premiered in 1970, is about a freewheeling bachelor named Robert, or Bobby, who is about to turn 35, and he’s thrown a surprise birthday party by his friends, who happen to be five married couples. All his friends married? Naturally he wonders whether he, too, should think of settling down.
As Meryle Secrest put it in her biography of Sondheim, “To create a musical that simply explored an issue, the state of marriage in modern urban society, was an avant-garde idea in tune with the times.” In Sondheim’s own words, “‘Company’ says very clearly that to be emotionally committed to somebody is very difficult, but to be alone is impossible.”
In other words, “Company” is a thoughtful, mature, and yet tensely graceful work, a must-see work, and it’s commendable for a church theater group to be staging it in the South Bay.

“DEFINITELY EDGY”
Bob Manning has been involved in local theater (the former Palos Verdes Players, etc.) for many years. He recently became president of the church’s theater board, which presumably helped when he pitched “Company” for their spring production.
The board could easily have said no, and opted for lighter fare. So how did Manning succeed?
“I just kept pushing for it,” he says. “I think I just ramrodded everybody into it where they thought, ‘Fine, fine!’”
Victoria Bailer Alfvin, who plays April in the show but also assisted Manning in the pre-production, clarifies her director’s response: “I’ve been on the board a little longer than Bob, and it’s whomever comes with a passion for the project.”
“That makes sense,” Manning agrees. “If you have a real strong passion for it.”
Pitching a certain play or musical, Bailer Alfvin says, someone may come in with a soundtrack, script, etc., “but it really is about, ‘Oh, this person really wants to do this, they’ve made it interesting to us.’ And so then it’s like, Well, now I want to see it, because of the way you presented it. So that’s really what happened.” That, and also “bringing something interesting that we think would do well on our stage.”
“It’s a black box musical for the most part,” Manning says. “Which I think is edgy.”
“Definitely edgy,” Bailer Alfvin says.
That’s to say there’s a minimum of props, black walls, flat floor, and for the first time that I can remember in this theater, an orchestra crammed together at the rear of the stage, a stage that isn’t so large to begin with.
So what’s on stage? A piano on one side, a full bar on the other. The characters consume a lot of alcohol, and, as usual, alcohol can sometimes open verbal doors that might not otherwise be opened in public.
Manning had certain actors in mind from the get-go, such as Kevin Paul, who plays Bobby, and Jeannine Barba, who plays Joanne. Paul was the standout lead in the theater’s production of “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
“So some of it was pre-cast,” Bailer Alfvin says, “because it’s such a difficult show, with difficult Sondheim music. (Bob) was already thinking about how to place people before auditions.”
The rehearsals started a while back, in January.
“It may be monotonous for some actors,” Manning says, “but I think repetition is the key. You get at the point now where you know your lines well enough that you don’t have to think about it, then you can start putting your heart and soul and subtext into it. And I think in many cases a short rehearsal doesn’t get you to that point. They get you to know the lines, but you’re just talking heads in some sense.”
“Company” director Bob Manning. Photo by Bondo Wyszpolski
The cast in the shows at the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater has usually been a mix of outside actors and people (some with little or no acting experience) associated with the church. Is that the case here as well?
“That is basically why the theater is here, for the church,” Manning replies. “It’s like an outreach to bring people in who don’t necessarily know about the church, that like theater. And then hopefully they become a member and get more involved with the church itself.”
In the early days, apparently (and the church theater has now been active for over 60 years), the cast pretty much consisted solely of church members. Some of those folks, however, have either left the church, left the planet, or gotten too old to dance, and “we’ve had to bring in people that are from around the community,” Manning says. “So it’s evolved into a real theater.”

PUSHING IT, A LITTLE
Manning has done his homework having seen other productions of “Company.” He points out that “It’s up to the actor to do whatever you can to make your role work,” which in his own case would mean observing how other people portray the character. However, he adds, “There are actors that say, I don’t want any outside reference; I just want to be able to do this to your direction and have it evolve.”
Manning is of the opinion that seeing a Broadway-caliber show can only be a good thing, because by the time a big show hits New York everyone has–as noted above–found the heart and soul and subtext of their character.
Now, whether an actor does lots of research beforehand or not, everyone has to be on the same page when the curtain goes up. In this instance, Manning says, he gave his actors a pattern, one they’d start with and adapt as rehearsals continued and they got the lay of the land as it were, or in other words accommodated the action to the confines of the stage. For example, Manning wanted the music stands to be upfront, as you see with big bands. But then where would the cast be? So one compromises and makes adjustments until it feels right.
Kevin Paul as Bobby and Victoria Bailer Alfvin as April. Will she be going to Barcelona? Photo by Stephan Cooper
Manning hopes the theater will back away from too many community theater staples, “Arsenic and Old Lace” being an example of a play that’s so safe you can sanitize your hands with it before dinner. What’s unfortunate is that some theater companies, to appease their core or presumed core audiences, will opt for pablum over substance. At times it seems as if we can’t entrust adults with “adult” or mature-themed work.
“There’s a line you can cross,” Manning says. “I think any time you have profanity in a play, if it comes with anger, that’s crossing the line. For me, anyway. We have some lines where they say, ‘Kiss my ass’ and ‘“You son of a bitch,’ but in context I think it’s safe.”
“If it’s in humor,” adds Bailer Alfvin.
“Yeah, if it’s in humor, not anger.”
“Also,” Bailer Alfvin continues, “our minister knows the show, and his wife in fact was in ‘Company’ in college. So they’re very familiar (with it), and no one has said that they wanted to censor anything. They’ve just let us run with it, which is great.”
Besides, Manning says, it’s a Sondheim piece, a name-getter, and people want to see it. For that matter, Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” is about to open at the Ahmanson at the Music Center downtown.
Directing “Company” is one thing, getting an actor to walk from here to there, and so on, but choreography is another matter altogether. Manning tried his hand at one of the opening numbers. “I had it down on paper, but trying to get it across to a bunch of cats is amazing.” He then praises Jeannine Barba and Larry Moreno, and remarks on how well they worked together in choreographing key scenes. And we’re not forgetting the vital element of music director David Boyer and his orchestra.
“A regular straight play is relatively easy,” Manning notes. “You can pretty much hand them a script and say, ‘Follow the blocking in the book,’ and not a lot can go wrong except for the individual personalities. But a musical, man, you need good people.”
COMPANY, presented by the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater, opens at 8 p.m. on Friday. Additional performances Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m. Also March 31 and April 1 at 8 p.m., April 2 at 2 p.m., plus April 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. The church theater is located at 303 S. Peck Ave., Manhattan Beach, and the box office opens one-half hour before each show. Tickets, $25, with open seating. Go to mbcctheater.com. ER
photos by Bondo Wyszpolski
This Spring in March 24, 25, 26 & 31 -
​and April 1, 2, 7, & 8
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Company
Company is a 1970 musical comedy based on a book by George Furth with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The original production was nominated for a record-setting fourteen Tony Awards and won six.
Originally titled Threes, its plot revolves around Bobby (a single man unable to commit fully to a steady relationship, let alone marriage), the five married couples who are his best friends, and his three girlfriends. Unlike most book musicals, which follow a clearly delineated plot, Company is a concept musical composed of short vignettes, presented in no particular chronological order, linked by a celebration for Bobby's 35th birthday.
Company was among the first musicals to deal with adult themes and relationships. As Sondheim puts it, "Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems. These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we're going to bring it right back in their faces."

ENCORE!
A celebration of 60 Years of Love and Theater at MBCC
​Febraury 24, 25, 26 

Past President Jeff Caldwell Prayer Sunday February 5,2017

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord. It all has to do with it. Thank you God. Peace. There is none other. God is, It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all. Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses. Thank you God. In You all things are possible. We know. God made us so. Keep your eye on God. God is. He always was. He always will be. No matter what…it is God. He is gracious and merciful. It is most important that I know Thee. Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts, fears and emotions – time – all related…all made from one…all made in one. Blessed be His name. Thought waves – heat waves – all vibrations – all paths lead to God. Thank you God. His way…it is so lovely…it is gracious. It is merciful – thank you God. His way…it is so lovely…it is gracious. It is merciful – thank you God. One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all go back to God…everything does. Thank you God. Have no fear…believe…thank you God.

The universe has many wonders. God is all. His way…it is so wonderful. Thoughts – deeds – vibrations, etc. They all go back to God and He cleanses all. He is gracious and merciful…thank you God. Glory to God…God is so alive. God is. God loves. May I be acceptable in Thy sight. We are all one in His grace. The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement of Thee of Lord. Thank you God. God will wash away all our tears…He always has…He always will. Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday. Let us sing all songs to God To whom all praise is due…praise God. No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God. With all we share God. It is all with God. It is all with Thee. Obey the Lord. Blessed is He. We are from one thing…the will of God…thank you God.

I have seen God – I have seen ungodly – none can be greater – none can compare to God. Thank you God. He will remake us…He always has and He always will. It is true – blessed be His name – thank you God. God breathes through us so completely…so gently we hardly feel it…yet, it is our everything. Thank you God.
ELATION – ELEGANCE – EXALTATION –
All from God. Thank you God.
Amen.

​John Coltrane – December, 1964

Wikipedia Article
In the final movement, Coltrane performs what he calls a "musical narration" (Lewis Porter describes it as a "wordless 'recitation'")[4] of a devotional poem he included in the liner notes. That is, Coltrane "plays" the words of the poem on saxophone, but does not actually speak them. Some scholars have suggested that this performance is a homage to the sermons of African-American preachers.[5] The poem (and, in his own way, Coltrane's solo) ends with the cry "Elation. Elegance. Exaltation. All from God. Thank you God. Amen."[6]


An Evening with Poe
October 2016

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This biographical play highlights the career of one of Americas most beloved writers and delves into 'One Act Plays' of Poe's most famous works. Different individual directors helm each of these vignette's based on the authors best known writings - including: The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart, and the Pit and the Pendulum. 


 Holiday Charity Show with The COLLABORATORY!

​o celebrate the holidays, The Collaboratory would like to invite you to a special performance of their original family show, Unexpected Holiday. In this interactive hour long performance, we follow George and his niece Bailey, twelve days away from Christmas Eve wanting very different things. With the help of George's neighbors, they learn to let go of expectations and reconcile their differences, discovering that the most important part of the holidays is being together.

In lieu of an admission fee, please bring a used men's coat. We are partnering with the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theatre to collect used men's coats for Infinite Ways Foundation. The coats will be distributed along with hot meals and toiletries to those living on the streets of LA on Christmas morning. 

The performance will be held in the Community Hall of the Manhattan Beach Community church at 7pm on Saturday, December 19th. 

DRACULA
#MBCCDRACULA

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October 16, 17, 18 & 23, 24
Lucy Seward, whose father is the doctor in charge of an English sanitorium, has been attacked by some mysterious illness. Dr. Van Helsing, a specialist, believes that the girl is the victim of a vampire, a sort of ghost that goes about at night sucking blood from its victims. The vampire is at last found to be a certain Count Dracula, whose ghost is at last laid to rest in a striking and novel manner. The play is intended for all who love thrills in the theater, and is appropriate for all groups.
"Pure escape and great fun." - New York Post"An evening of high class fun." - Newsweek


Dracula was first presented on Broadway by Horace Liveright at the Fulton Theatre in New York City on October 5, 1927. It was directed by Ira Hards.

Lovers and Other Strangers
#MBCCLOVERS