Copious Notes

WVLK's Jack Pattie, who has been playing Santa Claus the last few years. He will return to his roots, Lexington Children's Theatre, for a benefit peformance April 25. Photo by Matt Goins | LexGo.com.

A 70th-anniversary party calls for more than one ­celebration, and in reality, the Lexington Children’s Theatre wanted to have two anyway.

So the celebrations will commence with an 18-cake birthday party on Saturday, ­followed by a celebrity  retrospective of LCT’s past seven decades on April 25.

“It just makes me feel old,” Children’s Theatre director Larry Snipes jokes, when asked about the anniversary. Then, looking at the Celebrity Curtain Call show that he is directing, he says, “We wanted to look at what this theater has produced over the last 70 years, and we wanted to have some fun with it.”

The April 25 show will feature excerpts from many of the theater’s past plays over the theater’s seven decades, starting with Noah’s Flood in 1939 up to How I Became a Pirate, which will close out the current season.

It helps that numerous local celebrities are LCT veterans, including WVLK-590 AM radio personality Jack Pattie, actor and attorney Pam Perlman, WLAP-630 AM reporter Karyn Czar and Lexington Center director Bill Owen among others.

“Jack Pattie and I always had supporting roles, and Jim Varney got all the good parts,” says Owen, whose job has him in charge of Rupp Arena and the Lexington Opera House among other facilities.

Varney, who grew up in Lexington, went on to worldwide fame as the goofball character Ernest P. Worrell in television commercials and movies. He died in 2000.

Owen will actually reprise one of his roles, from a play called The Goblin’s Goblin.

Among the other celebs in the show will be Lexington Legends president Alan Stein and his wife, state Sen. Kathy Stein, D-Lexington, who will perform the scene from Tom Sawyer wherein which Tom asks Becky to marry him.

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