Characters

Tom Titus Three days before the Huntington Beach Playhouse opened its production of William Inge's play "Bus Stop" two years ago, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon riveted the play's cast and crew -- including my daughter Mindy, who was playing the young counter girl. Terri Miller Schmidt, who directed that production, is crossing her fingers that no such tragedy happens during her next run at the playhouse. She's back at the Huntington Beach Playhouse and putting another Inge drama, the modern classic "Picnic," together for an opening night of Sept.

No one in the theater watching "Lucky Number Slevin" nodded off or sneaked out for popcorn. The quirky characters and mysterious plot forced viewers to pay attention. After being mistaken for a friend who owes money to gangsters, Slevin (Josh Hartnett) has run out of luck. The loan sharks tell him that even if he's the wrong guy, it's his debt now. By the time Slevin decides what he's going to do and acts on it, his friends, enemies and the situation take a number of twists.

Allen MacDonald With the release of "The Royal Tenenbaums," director Wes Anderson has once again created a truly unique world to inhabit his idiosyncratic characters. The Tenenbaums reside in a fable-like New York City, where not a single recognizable landmark is within sight. Anderson remains very much in touch with his inner-child. He possesses an uncanny ability to uncover intimate moments between his characters by contrasting their forlorn personalities with nostalgic pop music and brightly colored wardrobe and production design.

PEGGY ROGERS To get the audience laughing, comedies rely on putting extreme characters into extreme situations. The Coen brothers, the writers/directors of "The Ladykillers," fill their black comedy with unexpected extreme surprises of people in unusual circumstances. Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, PhD (Tom Hanks) is a smooth-talking Southern gentleman, a professed musicologist, who is actually a thief by trade. His landlady, Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall)

When Don Rand was 8, his parents sent him across the country to live with an aunt in Idaho. It was during the long bus ride from his home in Brooklyn that he noticed something strange about the state he would soon call home. Somewhere along the borders of Idaho, young Rand noticed a sign that read: "Don't be a Guberif." Guberif, or firebug spelled backward, was part of the anti-forest fire campaign in Idaho that still marks roadways and signs to this day, although they are harder to spot than in Rand's childhood.

If you're bummed because the TV drama "ER" hasn't been shown the past few Thursday evenings, you could check into it next weekend in Huntington Beach. A live version of "E.R.: Emergency Room" will be presented at the Huntington Beach Art Center on March 22-25, following its opening weekend in Irvine, under the auspices of the Newport Beach Repertory Theater. Just don't look for Abby, Luca, Neela or any of the other characters from the TV show. This "E.R." is a project hatched by the Organic Theater Company of Chicago (where the TV version also is fictionally headquartered)

If you are having difficulty growing flowers in your garden, my suggestion is you purchase a copy of the movie "Freddy vs. Jason" and bury it about a foot beneath what you are trying to grow. Based on its content, this movie should make good fertilizer. The premise of "Freddy vs. Jason" is a sort of cool idea that sounds like something from a comic book. Both Freddy and Jason are horror movie legends. You can't really kill either of them. No matter what happens, they just keep coming for you. So who would win if they fought each other?

Some of the best films ever made have one thing in common: rich source material. When a screenplay is based on a novel, biography, stage play or historical event, it can often be quite challenging to do justice to the original material within the confines of an almost two-hour format. As the studios grasp at straws in the high-stakes world of feature films, they have increasingly come to rely on concepts that were never intended to sustain an entertainment vehicle costing hundreds of millions of dollars with a running time of 90 minutes or more.

The Huntington Beach Youth Character Awards will honor youths whose achievements demonstrate a commitment to qualities associated with good character. The ceremony, sponsored by the local Children's Needs Task Force and the city, will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at Bella Terra. The task force encourages local leaders to work with schools, outside agencies and the police to effectively identify the needs of children and develop an approach through which to meet these needs, according to its website.

A trio of monkeys, one with a pierced lip, kicking up a storm. Big-voiced Sour Kangaroo testing her moves. Styrofoam-headgear-toting Whos gallivanting with instruments made from PVC pipe, toilet plungers and badminton birdies. It's high school, so the hoopla continues. Pretzels, hugs and mismatched socks have all played a part in "Seussical the Musical. " Edison High School's annual production will debut Friday evening, with two performances slated for Saturday. After rehearsing at least three times a week since January, the 34-person cast will take the stage at Huntington Beach High School Auditorium, with the help of almost as many parent volunteers.

The Huntington Beach City Council on Monday overturned a Planning Commission recommendation and approved an expansion of Pierside Pavilion, a retail, restaurant and office center on Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway. The expansion of the four-story building will add nearly 30,000 square feet to Pierside, more retail space on the first floor, an additional restaurant to the second floor and office space to the third and fourth floors. Developers hope to draw new tenants and offset a decline that began when a movie theater left the space in 2007.

The Huntington Beach Pier traveled back in time Saturday morning to Missouri of the mid-1800s, the Midwest that Mark Twain immortalized in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. " About a dozen boys stood around in overalls, plaid shirts and straw hats looking like they just finished playing along the shores of the Mississippi for the 47th annual Huck Finn Fishing Derby. Among the barefooted boys, two girls dressed as the protagonist, forgoing Becky Thatcher's flower-print dresses for Huck's blue jeans.

Standout students across Huntington Beach were honored Monday at the City Council meeting for being inducted in the Youth Character Awards Wall of Fame. The Huntington Beach Children's Task Force recognized 68 students and inducted 20 of them into the Wall of Fame on May 15 at the 10th annual awards event at Bella Terra. The Children's Task Force is a City Council-appointed committee that works to identify the needs of children and make recommendations to the City Council on how to address those needs.

Some of the best films ever made have one thing in common: rich source material. When a screenplay is based on a novel, biography, stage play or historical event, it can often be quite challenging to do justice to the original material within the confines of an almost two-hour format. As the studios grasp at straws in the high-stakes world of feature films, they have increasingly come to rely on concepts that were never intended to sustain an entertainment vehicle costing hundreds of millions of dollars with a running time of 90 minutes or more.

In the age of the Cineplex and big-budget films, it is sometimes difficult to find a “small” movie that is character- and story-driven rather than simply a vehicle for special effects. Fortunately, there is such a film in “City Island,” starring Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies. Garcia and Margulies star as Vince and Joyce Rizzo, a long-married couple with two children living in an area of the Bronx known as City Island. The locale is very interesting, as City Island is an old fishing village turned suburb in Long Island Sound, where waterfront homes have distant views of the New York City skyline.

Take equal parts of Cole Porter and Agatha Christie, mix them in with TV’s “Love Boat,” stir vigorously for nearly two decades and you have the Rose Center Theater production of “Murder on the High C’s.” Tim Nelson, director of Huntington Beach High School’s Academy for the Performing Arts (who brings several members of his troupe and orchestra to the production), and Scott K. Ratner, an inventive comic/playwright, are two veteran showmen each with his own following.