Lagunatics back to mock

Laguna will be shaken, not stirred, by this year’s Lagunatics 007 (Uh-Oh-Seven) — the 15th annual “roast of the coast” — on Sept. 7, 8 and 9 at the Artists’ Theatre.

Tap-dancing goats, the Pageant of Disasters and a bombastic en-pointe tribute to a giant moth are de rigueur at this annual revue, where no city manager or construction project is left untouched.

“Live and Let Die” becomes “Your Tree’s Too Damn High,” complete with chainsaws. And local newspaper publisher Stu Saffer will be sereneded as the “Muckraker,” to the tune of “Goldfinger.”

Yet despite all its complaints and grumbles, the cast realizes — true to form — that moving to Irvine simply is not an option.

Lagunatics creator Bree Burgess Rosen co-wrote this year’s show with Chris Quilter. Eric Steinman, the founding director of the Opera Company of the State of Sinaloa in Mexico, returned to the U.S. recently and became the Lagunatics musical director, his No Square debut.

Vanessa Schneller, daughter of Lagunatics’ own Linda Haylett, is choreographing this year’s show, which her mother will perform in.

This year’s show features 50 singing and dancing cast members, including three city councilpersons, Arts Commissioner Pat Kollenda, City Treasurer Laura Parisi and City Clerk Martha Anderson in her Lagunatics debut.

Daniella Crivello, an incoming freshman at Laguna Beach High School, is another Lagunatics “virgin;” she joins her mother, Danita, a three-year veteran of the show.

“We’re in it together,” Daniella said at Monday’s rehearsal. “We help each other.”

Daniella and her friends will start their high school careers two days before their Lagunatics debut; teens must be entering ninth grade in order to be in the show, she said.

She wants to be an actress, and sees the show as an addition to her repertoire.

Other cast members had more simple reasons for auditioning.

“I had a fear of performing in front of people,” Seana Brief said. When she tried out for Lagunatics for the first time, she said, she almost left the audition several times.

“But it’s been so fun, and I’ve made so many friends,” she said.

And she’s in law school.

Burgess Rosen gives more than the chance to be in a show when she casts Lagunatics; she offers her cast a full dance, musical and topical education.

Many of the first-timer teens said they had no idea what many of the songs were about when they first started rehearsals, but the show has been a crash-course in the maze of Laguna politics and society.

Traditional sources of mockery — traffic, tourists and view issues — come back this year with specific newsworthy examples, including the city’s decision to repave downtown at the peak of the holiday shopping season, detailed in Christmas carol form; endless school fundraising efforts; and the apparent demise of the Boom Boom Room.

Not all of the songs this year are acerbic, however. The cast pays self-deprecating reverence to the new sound system at the Artists’ Theatre to the tune of a classic Les Miserables melody.

“Don’t make it sound any less wonderful than it is,” Burgess Rosen warned the cast, as they sang “Do you hear the people sing?/Singing the songs that barely rhyme.”

The gospel hymn “Down To The River To Pray” becomes “As I Looked ‘Round at Laguna Today,” detailing the grief of residents over traffic, tourists and the ill fate of the El Morro trailer park.

“Not a dry eye in the house,” Anderson said after the singers finished.