Putting on a youthful face 

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The 2009-2010 season marks Steve Lerian’s first full season as director of Cal Poly Arts. With many people clinging all the more protectively to their pocketbooks, the challenges and demands of putting together the PAC’s most recent season grew.

“I think we went into this [season] with the idea that we wanted to expand our audience, broaden the piece of the pie we were appealing to,” he explained. “We delved a little more into popular culture.”

There may be fewer showy Broadway musicals on the season agenda, but the schedule is more than full with the puppet production Avenue Q, the PAC’s first New Year’s Eve comedy show, even a Cirque du Soleil-like dance company called MOMIX. In particular, Lerian’s intent was to draw younger audiences to the PAC, always a challenge in SLO where the average audience member, across the performance-arts board, seems to hover somewhere around 60. Few phenomena suggest youth as resoundingly as a puppet show, particularly one with such song titles as “It Sucks to Be Me” and “The Internet is for Porn.”

Arts Editor Ashley Schwellenbach is in Morocco. Send messages she won’t receive until July to [email protected].