FCLO Season to Open With Cole Porter

Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” will launch the Fullerton Civic Light Opera’s 1997 season--its 25th--in February. Tickets go on sale Oct. 1.

FCLO also plans a preseason celebration in January, featuring highlights from past shows with the singers who starred in them, said Griff Duncan, the troupe’s executive director.

“We’ll be coming off our first profitable season in three years,” Duncan said Friday.

The final FCLO show of the 1996 season, “Guys and Dolls,” opens in three weeks at Plummer Auditorium, where it will run Oct. 18-Nov. 3.

Next season, “Anything Goes” (Feb. 14-Mar. 2) will be followed by Lerner and Loewe’s “Paint Your Wagon” (May 9-25), Walton Jones and Carol Lees’ “The 1940’s Radio Hour” (July 11-27) and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (Oct. 17-Nov. 2, 1997).

Duncan said his production budget will be up slightly--to $1.1 million--with each show budgeted at $275,000.

“We’re very pleased with our excellent subscription renewals,” he added, asserting that 80% of FCLO’s subscribers have signed up again for ’97. FCLO has 7,000 subscribers this season, which is down considerably from the historic high of 9,100 in 1989. (Subscription audiences at theater companies declined across the county during the recession of the early 1990s.) Duncan said he is “very optimistic” about the future “because our renewal rate.”

Information: (714) 897-1732.