Accent Is on the Non-Traditional for O.C. Center’s Broadway Series

Non-traditional productions will highlight the 1989-90 Broadway series at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express,” which features singing roller-skaters, and Tim Rice’s “Chess,” with a score by members of the pop group ABBA, will be among the five Center offerings. “Starlight Express” will run April 3 through 8; the dates for “Chess,” in June, will be announced.

The series will open Nov. 7 with “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber: A Concert,” a program of excerpts from eight of the composer’s hits, which will give Southland audiences their “first look at ‘Aspects of Love,’ ” Lloyd Webber’s latest London success, according to Center President Thomas R. Kendrick. The program will feature Sarah Brightman, Lloyd Webber’s wife, for whom he wrote the part of Christine Daae in “Phantom of the Opera.”

Kendrick acknowledged that “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” is “not a musical but rather a theatrical concert. This is not musical theater in the traditional sense, but Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of the leading composers of musicals of our time. He is the most prolific and most successful of our time. He redefined the kinds of musicals being presented. He is a man of enormous stature.”

There’ll be at least one show for the traditionalists, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I.” Still, the casting for it will be something other than ordinary, with ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev venturing a singing role, his first, as the King.

And for sentimentalists, there will be a revival of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s 1963 romantic comedy “She Loves Me” in a new staging by Paul Drake, the original director. Bock and Harnick later created “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“The range of the series, we feel, is very good,” Kendrick said Friday. “Musicals are in very short supply. This is an effort to get what there is of value up and going.”

For “Starlight Express,” in which the skaters will crisscross tracks and bridges, a platform will have to be built out into the theater, Kendrick said. “We will lose some seats,” he noted. The Center is considering extending the run into a second week, “but that’s not at all nailed down,” he said.

The Broadway series is the Center’s most popular, usually attracting between 17,000 and 20,000 subscribers, Kendrick said. The Center is producing the series in partnership with PACE Theatrical Group, a producer of nationally touring shows.

“We have the highest subscriptions on the PACE national circuit,” Kendrick said.

Series ticket prices will range from $90.50 to $195; tickets will go on sale in mid September. Tickets to the individual shows will be available four to six weeks before the start of each engagement. Information is available at (714) 556-2787.

The series:

* Nov. 7 through 12: “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber: A Concert,” starring Sarah Brightman.

* Dec. 5 through 10: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” with Rudolf Nureyev as the King and Liz Robertson as Anna. Robertson played Eliza Doolittle in Cameron Mackintosh’s London production of “My Fair Lady.”

* Jan. 23 through 28, 1990: Jerry Bock and Sheldon’s Harnick’s “She Loves Me,” with Pam Dawber of the television shows “Mork and Mindy” and “My Sister Sam,” and Joel Higgins of TV’s “Silver Spoons.”

* April 3 through 8: “Starlight Express.”

* June, 1990 (dates to be announced): “Chess,” with lyrics by Tim Rice, who did “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” and music by Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of the Swedish pop group ABBA.