‘CURLEY McDIMPLE’ WITH HER HAPPY DANCING FEET

After World War I and the Great Depression, it would seem that America would be hard-put to resurrect for itself a new age of innocence. But as far as the movies were concerned, it did.

The fervent hearts that beat within Busby Berkeley spectaculars and elegant Fred Astaire numbers were loaded with style, but they were without cunning. They placed their bets on romantic chance. That’s why Shirley Temple became such a heroine. She represented the notion of starting here, starting now, the ever-renewable sense of American hopefulness uncontaminated by history.

The bravado of assumed innocence has certainly been a feature of the Reagan era, so it seems only natural that Shirley Temple--or a Shirley Temple type , in the Hollywood parlance--would be perking along at home while Rambo unloaded American discontent on foreign shores.

Such was the case with “Curley McDimple,” the Robert Dahdah-Mary Boylan musical that may have been ahead of its time when it played Off Broadway in 1967. If it isn’t terminally gripped with the cutes, it may have a good run at the Burbank On Stage theater, where it opens Thursday.

Lloyd Pedersen, who acts in it and co-produces, had this to say:

“Dahdah was the first director and a co-writer for ‘Dames at Sea,’ which starred Bernadette Peters, who was also in ‘Curley McDimple.’ He has a very nice feel for the period of the tap-dancing musical. ‘Curley’ is a sort of tribute to the period too, and more specifically to the Shirley Temple genre.

“The plot deals with a little girl who as an orphan is dropped at the doorstep of a song-and-dance man. A social worker is trying to get her back into the orphanage. The musician wants to put on a show to drum up money for the mortgage. Everything works out in the end, and there’s lots of music and tap-dancing. It’s a cute show.”

Twelve-year-old Juliet Miller leads the cast of 12. A number of luminaries ranging from Cary Grant to Laraine Day have been invited to the opening-night festivities (whether they show up is a different matter entirely).

The holiday season is just about on us, which means that any number of Southland theaters are getting ready to pepper us with productions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Some theater folks late to the game don’t think it wise to get on that long line. The Grove Theater company has adopted that reasoning and will put its holiday effort into a production of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”--with music added.

Actually, if the truth be told, the Grove did attempt a production of “A Christmas Carol” several years ago. “It was a real turkey,” recalls Dan Cartmel, who is director and musical director for “Child’s Christmas.” “We’d like to keep an annual tradition of the company getting together to do a show, but there’s no point in trying to compete with the South Coast Repertory, which does a very fine ‘Christmas Carol.’

“The version we’re doing was adapted by Vincent Dowling for a company at the Cleveland Playhouse. We’ve added music, consisting of Welsh folk songs and carols such as ‘All Through the Night’ and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.’ It’s unheard of if you’re a Welshman and you don’t sing.”

The show opens Friday.

“Life and Depth” is the considered title of a group of autobiographical stories told by 30-year-old Joe Kogel, who has been wending his way down the West Coast (beginning with Seattle) and will make a two-week stop at the Powerhouse starting Wednesday. The word preceding the presentation is that Kogel has survived cancer, but he doesn’t want anyone’s sentiment to lie with the dutifully heroic.

“The fact is that this is a light-hearted evening of discussion about those moments that frighten us or surprise us or otherwise jar our attention so that by necessity we have to come alive,” said Kogel, a former broadcaster and journalist.

“Cancer doesn’t get into it until at least half-way through the show. Yes, I had malignant melanoma at 25, and had to realize that curing it, so to speak, wasn’t a matter of plucking lumps off my body but of trying to realize what it was about my biological environment that set up the condition for cells to go crazy. Is cancer something you can unlearn?

“Mel Brooks struck me with the line, ‘It isn’t enough to make humanity laugh. I want to make God laugh.’ We pray to God, but who does God pray to? If it’s humanity, isn’t it possible he’s asking, ‘Please, just give me a few moments of good stuff’?