O.C. THEATER : Waiting in the Wings : The new Irvine Civic Light Opera will get a chance to prove itself Thursday with its first production, ‘Evita.’

The birth of a light opera company, particularly in Orange County, may elicit one of two opposite reactions: “Wow!” as in “That’s fabulous!” or “So?” as in “Who cares?” Neither would be surprising. Both would be legitimate.

Die-hard theatergoers tend to be optimists who believe in the possibility of magic, regardless of how many times they’ve been disillusioned. Their anticipatory pleasure testifies to the notion that when it comes to musical offerings, no buck and wing is too flimsy to dismiss.

On the other hand, the cynics have good reason to scoff. Not a few theater troupes have sprung up here in recent years, only to fade just as quickly. Some have made news on the strength of little more than a press release. I recall one would-be operetta company that turned out to be a culture salesman who knew how to dial a phone. His dreamy plans never came to pass, yet he got lots of ink.

When a theatrical organization is born with a reasonable potential to mount large shows, however, and when it seems able to draw an audience in the thousands, there may be room for believers and scoffers to unite on common ground. That possibility is about to take shape at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, where on Thursday the Irvine Civic Light Opera’s production of “Evita” begins a nine-performance run (through Feb. 23).

This celebrated show by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, winner of the 1980 Tony Award for best musical, already sounds like a success at the box office, even before it has opened. Light Opera financial director Ronald P. Kennihan says ticket requests have been “overwhelming.” In fact, one performance had to be added at the 750-seat Barclay to accommodate demand.

“We’ve sold 4,600 tickets so far,” Kennihan said in a recent interview. “That’s 70% of the seats for the entire run, including the extra date. And we’re expecting complete sellouts for some of the evenings. People wouldn’t be buying if we weren’t filling a need.”

He pointed out that by the middle of last week, with seven days to go before the “Evita” opening, subscribers also had purchased about 1,800 tickets for Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” which in July will be the Light Opera’s second and final offering of its maiden season at the Barclay.

Most buyers of the modestly priced tickets ($15 to $22) are from South County, Kennihan said, chiefly from Irvine, Newport Beach, Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach. But many come from Huntington Beach and Anaheim and as far away as the San Fernando Valley, Oceanside and San Diego.

What will they get for their money? Certainly an expensive-looking spectacle, whatever else the production turns out to be in terms of staging, execution of performances and the overall conception.

This “Evita,” which has been budgeted at slightly less than $150,000, will have a cast of 40 players--among them five professionals actors in the starring roles--and 22 musicians in the orchestra pit. The sets and costumes, rented from the San Jose Civic Light Opera (the nation’s largest CLO), are so lavish they would cost more than $200,000 to re-create. Evita’s gown alone has $1,000 worth of fabric in it.

But spectacle will go just so far. And nobody is more mindful of that than Irvine CLO artistic director Dan Trevino, a theatrical veteran with a perfectionist reputation.

“After we announced the show in the trades, we had 250 people audition for the five leads,” he said the other day during a rehearsal at the company’s newly leased quarters near John Wayne Airport. “It took us 3 1/2 weeks just to see them all.”

Begun months ago, the process was so lengthy that the star of the show--Catherine Fries, who plays Evita--at first believed that she hadn’t landed the role. “When I didn’t hear right away, I thought somebody else probably got it,” she said. “I knew they had seen some wonderful people.” She only learned the news around Christmas, “in the middle of a terrible blizzard in Wyoming” on a cross-country car trip.

A petite Los Angeles-born actress with a big voice and sharp features, Fries has played Evita twice before--for the Santa Barbara Light Opera in 1987 and the San Gabriel Light Opera in 1989. She also has appeared briefly on Broadway, in “Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?” and for four months she understudied the role of Grizabella in the national touring version of “Cats” at the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles.

Trevino has teamed Fries with four other guest artists under Actors Equity contracts: Kurt Hansen as Che; Doug Carfree as Peron; Karen Gedissman as the Mistress, and Samuel Bernstein as Migaldi. All have been in previous productions of “Evita,” but Hansen and Bernstein are playing their roles for the first time. Carfree has played Peron before, for the Music Theatre of Ventura County, and Gedissman has played the Mistress before, for the San Gabriel production with Fries.

“I know ‘Evita’ is a popular show,” said Trevino, who cut an impeccable figure (not a strand of his jet-black hair out of place) while conducting the rehearsal from a score on a music stand beside an upright piano. “But its popularity isn’t what attracts me to it. I like it dramatically, and I like it musically. It’s an intense show, very dark, very haunting and very passionate.”

The leads agree that Trevino’s conception of the characters and his overall vision of the production have been a source of excitement for them.

“He’s very creative,” said Carfree, who has appeared in Opera Pacific’s “Kismet,” “My Fair Lady” and “She Loves Me” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. “He knows what he’s doing. At the same time he’s letting us explore our roles. He’s not interested in simply having us repeat what we’ve done before or what others have done.”

Bernstein couldn’t agree more: “It’s very rare that a light opera director allows the creative process to go as far as he has. A lot of them are interested in re-creating the original production. They’ll even tell you where to breathe. He’s not like that at all. And his ideas are different. My character, Migaldi, is often taken for a comic buffoon. That’s not how he sees him.”

Trevino, a brisk man in his 40s who declines to give his precise age, is chairman of the performing arts department at Irvine’s University High School and has been producing musicals in the county for years but never on the scale he is attempting now.

He started out in the 1970s with a summer theater program in Irvine featuring high school and college performers. In 1983, he founded South Coast Musical Theatre, also in Irvine. It operated on an annual budget of less than $100,000 and produced several shows a year in school auditoriums.

Both Trevino and his chief associate, resident choreographer Ellen Prince, say they expect to build on that experience. Their small base of 14 volunteer staffers from South Coast is already expanding and working feverishly to make the Light Opera more than an ambitious dream.

As a nonprofit corporation with an annual budget projected at $350,000, the Light Opera needs to raise funds through public grants and private contributions in addition to box office income. Over the past few months a total of $21,000 has been donated in small contributions, Kennihan said (not the $35,000 previously reported by the troupe).

“I think we will do well in that area once people know what we’re about,” Kennihan said. “People want to support us. But they haven’t seen our product yet. Like with anything else, they want to know just what they’re supporting. Now we have a product to show them.”

In the meantime, the cost of staging “Evita” is being covered largely by income from ticket sales, which is expected to top $125,000. That is already a level of achievement most new theater companies rarely approach.

* “Evita” opens Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Performances continue Friday at 8 p.m; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.; Feb. 21 and 22 at 8 p.m; Feb. 23 at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $15 to $22. Information: (714) 854-4646 or 263-1900.