GOINGS ON: SANTA BARBARA : West Meets East : A Champion of community theater has a new challenge as The Reciter in City College musical.

George Champion has been performing in community theater musicals for the last 17 years. He has about 45 of them under his belt. Yet the Los Angeles actor said he has never had a role quite like the one he has with the Santa Barbara City College Theatre Group beginning tonight.

Champion will play the part of The Reciter, the lead role in the company’s version of the 1976 Stephen Sondheim hit “Pacific Overtures.” As The Reciter, Champion narrates the entire production.

“Pacific Overtures” is based on the real-life story of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853, which ended 250 years of Japanese isolation, and it is told from the Japanese point of view. As West meets East in the story, so it does in the production of the show, combining American musical theater and Japanese theater styles, including Kabuki, with actors costumed in white makeup and black wigs.

“It’s how the Japanese felt about the Westerners being there,” Champion said. “The Japanese viewed us as barbarians coming to their land to eat them up. They’d never seen Americans or battleships. They thought we were going to strike them blind.”

Though Champion has always been interested in Kabuki, he’d never had any exposure to it before the rehearsals. “I’m still learning it,” he said. “Kabuki is very stylized, very presentational, straight to the audience. In most theater, there is a wall between the actor and the audience. This play goes past that wall.”

Champion’s role, in particular, is directed at the crowd. The Reciter’s presence on stage throughout the entire two-hour-plus production is similar to Kabuki, in which the performers never leave the stage.

“Every page--or within a page or two--he says something,” Champion said. “It’s almost all monologue. I have to memorize huge blocks rather than in dialogue, where there is constantly a back-and-forth. There is no one to really work off of; it’s just me and the audience.”

Japanese influences can also be seen in the scenery and music. The sets are similar to the Kabuki style with flat, parallel screens that are a far cry from the three-dimensional sets common in American musicals. A five-piece orchestra uses a synthesizer to make sounds typical of Japanese music.

“These elements of Kabuki are implied, not full out,” Champion said, because the audience is not used to Japanese theater.

This will be Champion’s first performance with the City College company. He is performing at the invitation of director Adrianne Harrop, with whom he has worked before. The rest of the company consists of community actors and students.

WHERE AND WHEN: “Pacific Overtures” will run through Aug. 4 at Garvin Theater, located on the college’s west campus (on the 800 block of Cliff Drive). Show times are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. General admission tickets are $10 and $12. There is a preview tonight at 8 p.m., with tickets $7. Call the box office at 965-5935.