Segerstrom Center Announces Return of Its Popular Movie Mondays; Starts 7/7

Orange County movie fans can look forward to another great summer of free and fun film screenings at Segerstrom Center for the Arts as Movie Mondays returns for its eighth season on the Arts Plaza. Movie Mondays 2014 kicks off with the heartwarming 1935 classic The Little Colonel, starring Shirley Temple. From post Civil War America we head to 1990s London with the sparkling Spice Girls starring in the jet set musical, Spice World. Then it is off to turn-of-the-20th century Paris with the Academy Award®-winning musical Gigi, directed by Vincente Minnelli and featuring some of the most memorable Lerner & Loewe tunes. Continuing with the winner of this year's Audience Favorite Fan Poll, Cabaret, starring Oscar winners Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. Shirley MacLaine as the eternal optimist in Sweet Charity wraps up the summer film series. Center audiences will have a chance to see MacLaine live when she makes her Center debut on September 20 in her one-woman show.

The annual alfresco Movie Mondays is part of Segerstrom Center's Free for All Series, and is held on the Center's inviting 46,000-square-foot Arts Plaza. During the last seven summers, Movie Mondays has grown to attract thousands of families and movie fans from all over the Southland. Additionally, as part of the Center's continuing partnership with the Newport Beach Film Festival, a selection of the best animated short films from this year's festival will be shown prior to each week's main feature. These popular films are projected on the side of Segerstrom Hall. Guests are encouraged to bring beach chairs or other easily portable seating items. Set-up begins at 5:30 p.m., with the movie starting at dusk (approximately 8 p.m.). Guests may bring their own snacks and picnic suppers. The Center has invited a number of food trucks to be on hand to serve dinners. Barbecues and similar food preparation are not permitted.

Contests will be held prior to each screening (starting at approximately 7:30 p.m.) and are open to all movie-goers. Prizes such as show tickets, apparel, CD/DVDs and other great items will be awarded to winners. Previous contests have included trivia games and dance competitions.

July 7 - The Little Colonel
Set immediately after The Civil War, Shirley Temple stars in this family comedy - drama as the spirited granddaughter who tries to mend the estranged relationship between her cantankerous grandfather (Lionel Barrymore) and dismayed mother (Evelyn Venable). The classic film features the famous stair-case dance duet between Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Rated NR (children's classic), 1935, 80 minutes

July 14 - Spice World
Bob Spiers (director of TV's Absolutely Fabulous) directed this feature-film debut of the five Spice Girls - Posh Spice, Sporty Spice, Scary Spice, Ginger Spice, and Baby Spice - as the quintet challenges the London pop scene during five days before their first live performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Photojournalists follow as they travel from press conferences to practice sessions to photo ops, passing London landmarks in the comfort of their cavernous Spicebus and emerging in a musical cascade of color, trendy clothes and blinding flashbulbs. Filmed in 43 days, the movie features cameos by everyone from Elton John and Elvis Costello, to Stephen Fry and Bob Hoskins.

Rated PG, 1997, 90 minutes

July 21 - Gigi
Leslie Caron is Gigi, a young girl raised by two veteran Parisian courtesans (Hermione Gingold and Isabel Jeans) to be the mistress of the wealthy, handsome young Gaston (Louis Jourdan). When Gaston falls in love with Gigi and asks her to be his wife, Jeans is appalled: never has anyone in their family ever stooped to anything so bourgeois as marriage! Weaving in and out of the story is Maurice Chevalier as an aging boulevardier who, years earlier, had been in love with Gingold's character. Chevalier gets most of the best Lerner & Loewe tunes, including "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Any More," and his matchless duet with Gingold, "I Remember it Well." Caron's best number (dubbed by Betty Wand) is "The Night They Invented Champagne" while Jourdan gets the honor of introducing the title song. Filmed on location in Paris, Gigi won several Oscars, including Best Picture.

Rated G, 1958, 116 minutes

July 28 - Cabaret (Winner of this year's Audience Favorite Fan Poll!)

Originally a 1966 Broadway musical, this groundbreaking Bob Fosse musical was in turn based on Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, previously dramatized for stage and screen as I Am a Camera with Julie Harris as Sally Bowles. Fosse uses the decadent and vulgar cabaret as a mirror image of German society sliding toward the Nazis, and this intertwining of entertainment with social history marked a new step forward for the movie musical. Michael York plays a British writer who comes to Berlin in the early 1930s in hopes of becoming a teacher. He makes the acquaintance of flamboyant American entertainer Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli. Sally works at the Kit Kat Klub, a George Grosz-like Berlin cabaret where each night the smirking, androgynous Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) introduces a jazz-driven "girlie show" to his debauched audience. Virtually all the film's musical numbers are staged within the confines of the Kit Kat Klub, and each song comments on the plot and on Germany's "progression" from hedonism to Hitlerism. Most of the Broadway score by John Kander and Fred Ebb was retained, with the welcome addition of "The Money Song." Although it lost Best Picture to The Godfather, Cabaret won eight Oscars, including awards to Minnelli, Grey and Fosse.

Rated PG, 1972, 128 minutes

August 4 - Sweet Charity
Shirley MacLaine plays Charity Hope Valentine who, despite her job at a seedy dime-a- dance joint, is an incurable optimist. Charity never stops looking for true love and never seems to look for it in the right places. We first see her in the company of Charlie (Dante DiPaolo), a slimeball who steals her purse and pushes her into the Central Park pond. Next she stumbles into a one-night stand with Vittorio Vidal (Ricardo Montalban), an egotistical movie star; this comes to nothing when Vittorio's contrite girlfriend Ursula (Barbara Bouchet) comes calling, forcing Charity to spend the night hiding in the closet. Desperate to escape the dance hall, Charity heads to an employment agency, where a bureaucratic clerk (Alan Hewitt) informs her that she has no qualifications. Unhappily, Charity heads for the elevator, where she becomes trapped with the very shy - and very claustrophobic - Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin). Once they've gotten out of the stalled elevator, Charity begins dating Oscar, never telling him of her checkered past or her sordid dance-hall job. Oscar eventually finds out but assures her that it doesn't matter. However, at the engagement party held at the dance hall, Oscar's puritanical streak emerges. He walks out on Charity, leaving her alone and heartbroken once more. With the help of a group of flower children (among them Bud Cort and Kristoffer Tabori), Charity is able to pick herself up and start living "Hopefully Ever After." Sweet Charity was adapted from the 1965 Broadway musical of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the 1957 Fellini flick Nights of Cabiria.

Rated G, 1969, 157 minutes

Segerstrom Center for the Arts applauds Kia, Official Automotive Partner of the Center and United Airlines, Official Airline of the Center.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts is unique as both an acclaimed arts institution and as a multi- disciplinary cultural campus. It is committed to supporting artistic excellence on all of its stages, offering unsurpassed experiences, and engaging the entire community in new and exciting ways through the unique power of live performance and a diverse array of inspiring programs.

Previously called the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Center traces its roots back to the late 1960s when a dedicated group of community leaders decided Orange County should have its own world-class performing arts venue.

As Orange County's largest non-profit arts organization, Segerstrom Center for the Arts owns and operates the 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall and intimate 250-seat Founders Hall, which opened in 1986, and the 2,000-seat Rene?e and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, which opened in 2006 and also houses the 500-seat Samueli Theater, the Lawrence and Kristina Dodge Education Center's studio performance space and Boeing Education Lab. A spacious arts plaza anchors Segerstrom Center for the Arts and is home to numerous free performances throughout the year as part of Segerstrom Center for the Arts' ongoing Free for All series.

The Center presents a broad range of programming each season for audiences of all ages from throughout Orange County and beyond, including international ballet and dance, national tours of top Broadway shows, intimate performances of jazz and cabaret, contemporary artists, classical music performed by renowned chamber orchestras and ensembles, family-friendly programming, free performances open to the public from outdoor movie screenings to dancing on the plaza and many other special events. It offers many education programs designed to inspire young people through the arts. These programs reach hundreds of thousands of students of all ages with vital arts-in-education programs, enhancing their studies and enriching their lives well into the future.

In addition to the presenting and producing institution Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the 14-acre campus also embraces the facilities of two independent acclaimed organizations: Tony Award®-winning South Coast Repertory and a site designated as the future home of the Orange County Museum of Art.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts is also proud to serve as the artistic home to three of the region's major performing arts organizations: Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and the Pacific Chorale, who contribute greatly to the artistic life of the region with annual seasons at Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, T (714) 556-2121, F (714) 556-8984

For more information, visit SCFTA.org.