Dean Lesher Center

Covering The San Francisco Bay Area & Sacramento Valley Since 2001

Dean Lesher Center for the Arts • 1601 Civic Dr, Walnut Creek, CA 94596

Plays • Musicals • Opera • Dance

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Current Production

• MAY 31 - JUN 28, 2026 •

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill: The Musical / Musical

For Tickets & Info:

A polished suburban family starts the evening looking like a glossy holiday card, but the shine does not last long. Beneath the neat house, dinner-table smiles, college dreams, and carefully managed appearances, old hurts begin rattling the windows. A mother wrestles with pain she keeps hidden in plain sight. A father tries to hold the room together without understanding how far the walls have already cracked. Their children are pushing against expectations, identity, love, anger, and the kind of loneliness that can fill a crowded house. Around them, a community asks hard questions about truth, privilege, belonging, and what happens when silence becomes too heavy to carry. The music surges like a match tossed into dry grass, turning private frustration into a full-throated release. It is messy, bruised, funny when it needs to breathe, and emotionally direct without wrapping everything in a tidy bow.

Coming Soon

• OPENS JUL 14, 2026 • Our Town / Play A small New Hampshire community wakes, works, gossips, falls in love, eats breakfast, grows older, and somehow turns ordinary life into something quietly enormous. There are no explosions, no cheap tricks, no theatrical cartwheels begging for applause. Instead, the drama lives in milk deliveries, schoolbooks, kitchen tables, shy romance, family routines, and the ticking clock nobody hears until it is too late. The beauty comes from how gently the story asks audiences to look at what they usually overlook. A neighbor calling across the yard becomes a kind of music. A parent fussing over a child becomes a memory before anyone realizes it. Young love blooms with awkward grace, while time keeps moving with the calm indifference of sunrise. It is simple only in the way bread, rain, and a familiar voice are simple. Underneath that quiet surface is a tender reminder that life’s smallest moments are often the ones people would give anything to hold again.
• OPENS SEP 6, 2026 • The Glass Menagerie / Play A cramped St. Louis apartment becomes a memory chamber where guilt, longing, and disappointment press against the walls. At the center is a family trying to survive on dreams that are too fragile, too old, or too desperate to hold much weight. A restless son narrates the past like a man reopening a wound he never learned how to close. His mother clings to manners, faded gentility, and the hope that charm can somehow outrun poverty. His sister lives more quietly, retreating into a private world of delicate objects and unspoken fears. When the possibility of romance enters the room, the air changes, but not in any simple fairy-tale way. The play’s power comes from its tenderness and its refusal to lie. It understands that people can love each other deeply and still fail each other terribly. Soft, poetic, and emotionally bruising, it turns family memory into something that glimmers, cuts, and refuses to disappear.
• OPENS OCT 25, 2026 • Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors / Comedy Gothic horror gets tossed into a blender with camp, farce, quick changes, and shamelessly silly theatrical chaos. A famous vampire tale becomes less about brooding in the shadows and more about watching a tiny cast sprint through a ridiculous parade of characters, accents, seductions, scares, and stage tricks. The result is a fast, cheeky comedy that knows exactly how absurd the whole bloodsucking business can be when handled with the right amount of swagger. There are dark castles, mysterious visitors, nervous victims, dramatic entrances, and enough theatrical overstatement to make a thunderclap feel underdressed. What keeps it moving is the physical comedy: doors, disguises, glances, gasps, and actors clearly having a wicked amount of fun with the material. It does not treat the classic monster with reverence so much as invite him to loosen the cape and enjoy the joke. Expect spooky atmosphere, bawdy energy, and a gleeful reminder that sometimes the best way to face the dark is to laugh at it.
• OPENS DEC 17, 2026 • The Biggest Gift / Play Christmas is suddenly in real trouble, and not the “we forgot the wrapping paper” kind. The North Pole discovers that children’s letters have vanished, leaving Santa heartbroken and the season’s magic flickering like a tired string of lights. Into that crisis steps a loyal elf, a band of adventurous toys, and a familiar red-nosed helper, all determined to find the missing wishes before holiday cheer runs out of gas. The story has the cozy architecture of traditional family theatre: a clear mission, colorful characters, gentle laughs, and a warm message tucked inside the adventure. Its appeal comes from the way it treats Christmas spirit as something active, not automatic. Kindness has to be protected. Hope has to be carried. Belief has to be shared. The journey is playful enough for young audiences, but it also lands with adults who understand how easily wonder can fade. Expect a cheerful, heart-forward holiday tale about generosity, loyalty, and the joy of keeping beloved traditions alive.
• OPENS FEB 14, 2026 • You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! / Play A family gathering becomes a pressure cooker when the biggest possible deadline hangs over the room: the world may be ending. That sounds bleak, and it is, but the play appears to approach catastrophe with humor, tenderness, and the awkward social electricity of people trying to behave normally while reality taps them on the shoulder. The setup has the delicious discomfort of a party where everyone knows something is wrong but nobody agrees on how loudly to say it. Under the jokes and uneasy hospitality sits a bigger question: when time feels short, what do people owe each other? Regret, grief, love, denial, panic, and stubborn hope all crowd the table. The story is not about spectacle in the disaster-movie sense. It is more intimate than that, interested in how ordinary people make meaning when the future stops feeling guaranteed. Expect a funny, aching, human piece about family, mortality, connection, and the strange ways people keep reaching for one another even when the horizon looks impossible.
• OPENS JUN 6, 2026 • Bat Boy: The Musical / Musical A strange creature discovered in a rural cave is taken in by a veterinarian’s family and given a chance to live among ordinary people, which goes about as smoothly as one might expect when fangs, fear, gossip, and small-town panic are involved. The premise sounds like tabloid nonsense, and that is part of the fun, but underneath the gothic weirdness is a surprisingly sharp story about prejudice, belonging, and the ugly things communities reveal when they feel threatened. The musical mixes horror-comedy, rock energy, satire, and genuine emotion, creating a world where absurdity and heartbreak keep bumping elbows. As the outsider tries to become acceptable, the town around him grows more suspicious, more chaotic, and more revealing. Dead livestock, buried secrets, and social judgment all stir the pot without giving away where the madness leads. It is funny, strange, darkly theatrical, and oddly tender, the kind of cult musical that can make audiences laugh at the ridiculous setup while still feeling the sting underneath.