BEST BETS Thursday 7/20

ANAHEIM

8pm

Pop Music

He’s nominated for record of the year (his Spanish-language version of “Livin’ La Vida Loca”) and for best male vocalist in the new Latin Grammy Awards to be handed out Sept. 13. Catch Ricky Martin on his return appearance to Orange County tonight at the Arrowhead Pond.

* Ricky Martin, Arrowhead Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 8 p.m. $35 to $95. (714) 704-2500.

IRVINE

8:30pm

Comedy

When he does stand-up, Mark Curry--the 6-foot-6 comedian who starred as a basketball player-turned-teacher in the ABC sitcom “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper”--is nothing like the character he played on TV. His observational act is more edgy and adult. His comedy idol while growing up in Oakland: Richard Pryor.

* Mark Curry, Irvine Improv, 71 Fortune Drive, 8:30 p.m. Also Friday, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 7, 9 and 11 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. $17 to $20. (949) 854-5455.

BREA

8:30pm

Comedy

Pablo Francisco, a 1998 American Comedy Awards nominee for top male stand-up, has a natural ability to create vividly funny living pictures, thanks to his off-the-wall sound effects and impressions. Take his send-up of action movies, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a tortilla vendor targeted by the mob. Or his spoof of those melodramatic Spanish-language soap operas.

Pablo Francisco, Brea Improv, 945 E. Birch St., 8:30 p.m. Also Friday, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 8 and 10:30 p.m.; Sunday, 8 p.m. $12 to $15. (714) 529-7878.

FULLERTON

8:15pm

Theater

The ghostly monkey business of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” enlivened the winter at the Gem Theater in Garden Grove; now it returns in an outdoor production in Fullerton featuring the same cast. Patricia Boyette was grippingly dead-serious in two strange, short Samuel Beckett plays this season at the Gem. In Coward’s romp, she cuts it up as Elvira, the upper-crust English ghost who returns to comically complicate the life of her remarried husband.

* “Blithe Spirit,” by Noel Coward, at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Thursdays through Sundays, 8:15 p.m. Ends Aug. 5. $20.50 to $24.50. (714) 741-9555.