Event

Red Scare on Sunset

The Costa Mesa Playhouse continues its 52nd season with Charles Buschs Red Scare on Sunset, a campy spoof of the 1950s Hollywood Blacklist and the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy era. Performances are Sept. 9 through Oct. 2, 2016.

The time: the fifties; the place: Hollywood, where film star Mary Dale finds the Red Menace invading her own Beverly Hills backyard. When she discovers that her husband has been lured into the local Communist party by way of a method acting class and that there is a left wing plot afoot to abolish the star system, Mary wages a private war to save her husband, her country and billing over the title. The McCarthy era is turned on its head in this novel take on a serious subject.

Although Red Scare on Sunset premiered in 1991, it contains clear parallels to todays political climate. Charles Busch, who wrote the female lead for himself to perform in drag, tells his tale in the style of such red-baiting propaganda films of the late Forties and early Fifties as The Red Menace, I Married a Communist and My Son John.

Red Scare on Sunset is directed by playhouse president Michael Dale Brown, and stars Jon Sparks as Mary Dale, with Julia Boese, Bill Carson, Angel Correa, Drew Fitzsimmons, Alexandra Moniz, Robert Moniz, Michelle Pedersen, and John Sturgeon.

The playhouse is located at 661 Hamilton Street in Costa Mesa.