Lagunatics cracks up community, invites feedback from patrons
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The passions and people of Laguna Beach make the seaside community unique and, for decades, No Square Theatre has been keeping watch.
Since 1992, those observations have been turned into laughter through the advent of Lagunatics, a community musical parody that promises that no two shows have ever been the same.
“There is nothing made up in Lagunatics,” Bree Burgess Rosen, president and founding artistic director of No Square Theatre, said during an audience talkback session following Saturday’s performance. “[We] do not have to make up any of this weird [expletive] in this town. This ZIP code has been providing an abundance of wildly crazy stuff for our 34 years.”
The shows take place inside the American Legion Post 222 building, which has just enough space to fit three small bleachers facing the performance area. In a venue of its size, the stage mostly belongs to the live musicians, including Roxanna Ward, the music director, on the keys.
Once being staged in larger venues like the Irvine Bowl and the high school, the current accommodations leave no room to be bashful.
“When we were in those larger venues, the joke was we had a third row,” Burgess Rosen said. “So people who weren’t really capable of singing or dancing, we could put them in the third row. When we moved into this little baby space, that we love so much, it’s a tiny venue. There’s no hiding. If you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, you’re really busted.”
Some topics remain timeless, whether they be community favorites like the fire mitigation goats, or long-lasting issues such as parking shortages and heavy traffic.
An assortment of actors dressed as cars — moving bumper-to-bumper — and pumps featuring high gas prices for Saturday’s show.
New to the program this year, Lagunatics took on turmoil in the Laguna Beach Unified School District, with a narration joking that the school board had “lost its principles,” before a cast member — playing off a pun — responds that the loss was, in fact, “superintendents.”
The Laguna Beach Community Land Trust received attention with a number called “Give Us Your Home.” Cast members also donned eucalyptus costumes for a song that addressed the cutting down of trees during construction of the Promenade on Forest.
Lagunatics has clearly earned its fandom, as Burgess Rosen said the night after the trees were removed for public safety and liability purposes, she received five unsolicited songs from different people for the show. It wasn’t the first time.
No Square Theatre, offering audience talkback events for the first time, hosted the first of three following Saturday’s performance, giving insights into what the viewing public wants to know, as well as access to decades of anecdotes from veterans of the cast.
Asked by an attendee what the funniest topic considered that hadn’t been produced (a question that drew “ooh’s” from the crowd), Burgess Rosen danced around the question, recalling a conversation with co-writer Chris Quilter that led to a number about a sewage spill to the melody of “Mamma Mia.”
Lagunatics, the roast-of-the-coast musical, is celebrating 30 years of making fun of Laguna Beach history.
“Chris came over with this idea, and I said, ‘So what do you got?’” Burgess Rosen reminisced. “We started to write, and he starts laughing, and he can’t tell me. He’s laughing. He’s tearing up, and I’m like, ‘What? What is so funny?’
“And it was ‘Diarrhea,’ which was of course about the sewage spill,” she said in a sing-song voice as she repeated the title. “We were like, ‘We can’t go there.’ Six weeks later, we were still laughing till we cried every time we said it out loud, and we finally went, ‘Resistance is futile. This is going in.’”
On the same issue, Burgess Rosen recalled fielding an early-morning phone call from former mayor Toni Iseman, who began the call by saying, “I’ve got a subject for Lagunatics.”
Audience queries included the decision-making process for what goes in the show, how the volunteer actors commit to community theater outside of their regular jobs, and what numbers cast members liked or wished they could be a part of.
Geo Herrera, who debuted for No Square Theatre this summer in its production of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” expressed astonishment at how the crowd responded to the community theater group’s parody of all things in town.
“I’ve only lived in Laguna two years, but performing tonight — because this was my first performance here in Lagunatics, and with locals — it blew me away how everybody came together and was cracking up over the same stuff,” Herrera told those in attendance. “I wanted to give [a round of] applause to the audience.”
Stage talks will return for the remaining Friday performances: Oct. 2 and Oct. 9. Lagunatics performances are scheduled Friday through Sunday, Oct. 2-11. For more information, visit nosquare.org.
No Square Theatre’s 2026-27 season also includes “Baby with the Bathwater” (Nov. 6-22), “Quilters: The Musical” (Feb. 19-March 7), “Merrily We Roll Along” (May 7-23), and “Grease” (July 23-Aug. 8).
