Arts & Culture in Salinas

City Lights is an innovative, intimate (100 seats), nonprofit theater company that produces six main-stage plays per year. Each play runs for a five-week period with four shows per week. Coming up in the current season is a production of Billy Aronson's First Day of School, a farcical look at the behavior of suburbanites in autumn (September 23–October 24); an irreverent, interactive, and totally historically accurate play titled Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party (November 24–December 19); and the horseplay of the drama Equus (March 17–April 17), the winner of the 1975 Tony for Best Play and a favorite of horse whisperers and hoarse whisperers everywhere.

When The Retro Dome first opened its doors three years ago, it was with the knowledge that its life would be brief and yet explosive. From the start, the owners of the building planned to demolish it at some point in the future. Yet that didn’t stop the staff from making use of the former Century 25 Theater’s stadium-style seating, refurbished chairs, and massive dome. They decked out the interior with vintage, retro-modern décor, complete with a candy counter slinging Pop Rocks and JujuBees. The foreseeable, yet fuzzy ending has recently come into sharp focus, though. The Retro Dome will go dark on January 31, 2013, bringing to an end nearly four years of live music and sing-along cinema.

San Jose Stage Company has been producing and premiering works of explosive power and social resonance since 1983. Professional actors fill the stage with new and classic works by the likes of David Mamet and Neil LaBute every year, but the company’s work extends beyond its intimate theater space—whose capacity of 200 ensures that no one gets a bad seat or, probably, runs into the evil twin they haven’t met yet. Programming spills out into the streets of San Jose in events that have included indie hip-hop concerts, art-walk performances, and partnerships with smaller theater groups and high-school drama classes.

Peninsula Symphony, founded in 1949 with the goal of enriching communities with affordable musical productions, grew from a grassroots ensemble to a 90-plus-member orchestra of well-trained local musicians. Music Director Mitchell Sardou Klein leads the ensemble with a steady baton, a sharp ear, and the stamina to carry on through the inevitable triple encore.

Since it opened in 1946, the 800-seat Historic Bal Theatre has continually hosted a wide array of film screenings, comedy shows, and musical acts on its stage, remaining one of the few American theatres of its era never to have shut down. Despite the building's vintage art-deco vibe, the theater boasts a concert-series sound system, digital projection, and three-dimensional seats, immersing audiences in a heightened sensory experience.

Using audience suggestions as a creative springboard, Made Up Theatre’s quartet of resident performers conjures chortles with fully improvised scenes, games, and musical numbers every Saturday night at 8 p.m. Free two-hour classes grant guests of varying performance backgrounds an opportunity to sample the art of improv before climbing through three ranks of classes that emphasize quick responses and structuring longer-form scenes. Made Up Theatre also totes its trick bag to the corporate world with team-building seminars that draw upon improv’s communicative foundation to improve group interactions and send stress off to take up residence in rant-fueled standup comics.