Thousand Oaks Becomes Never-Never Land for Cabrillo’s ‘Peter Pan’

Just in time for the season when youths are getting restless and in need of diversion, the Cabrillo Music Theater brings the musical “Peter Pan” to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, ending its 2001-02 season with a blast of whimsy and piracy. The stuff of “lost boys” and “never-never land” will grace--and sometimes fly over--the stage in a production directed by Gary Gardner, with music direction by Nick DeGregorio.

Melissa Lyons stars as Peter, Steve Vinovich plays Captain Hook and Kelly Stables is Wendy, the voice of reason in a world gone deliciously tipsy.

* “Peter Pan,” Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Kavli Theatre, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. Today through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. $15-$35. (805) 449-2787.

Sublime Light: It’s always good news when the widely acclaimed Ojai-based painter Michael Dvortcsak has a show in the area. After exhibitions at the Carnegie Art Museum in recent years, he has moved south to the idyllic compound of Camarillo’s Studio Channel Islands Art Center.

Dvortcsak’s paintings look great in the large main gallery of the center. Two huge, enveloping works are “Anamenhis” and “Great Stone,” whose monumentality is tempered by his typical gracefulness of brushwork. Also included are his familiar light-bathed vessels, nearly life-size portraits of female subjects and rocks that split the difference between painting and sculpture.

He calls the show “Painting: Noun and Then,” a pun relating to his interests in the dualities of material and ephemeral in life and in art. This translates into art that can be at once forceful and vaporous. He shows unusual still-life studies of vegetables against mysterious dark backgrounds and “Vessel for a Nocturne,” with its delicately gradated light illuminating the form and, at its brightest point, with paint built up into a tactile, almost ceramic state.

An older painting, “Stone for a Prayer,” finds a large stone, beatifically lighted and ritualistic, and irrationally situated in some mystery ocean. Its beauty can’t quite be explained away, and that’s precisely the point.

* Michael Dvortcsak’s “Painting: Noun and Then,” Studio Channel Islands Art Center at Cal State University Channel Islands, Camarillo, ends Aug. 31. Thursdays-Saturdays, noon-3 p.m. (805) 383-1368.