Pasadena Playhouse producing artistic director Danny Feldman first had the idea years ago: concert stagings of classic American musicals, each featuring an all-star cast and a full orchestra.

The Tony-winning regional theater scheduled the shows for back-to-back weekends, three performances each, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium: Cole Porter’s 1934 comedy “Anything Goes,” starring Jinkx Monsoon, Wayne Brady and J. Harrison Ghee and directed by Annie Tippe, on Jan. 25 and 26; and Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 composition “Follies,” led by Rachel Bay Jones, Stephanie J. Block, Derrick Baskin and Aaron Lazar and directed by Leigh Silverman, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.

But on Tuesday, multiple fires began to spread throughout areas of Los Angeles, killing 10 people and destroying thousands of homes, businesses and cultural institutions. The Eaton fire, which has burned 13,956 acres and structures in Altadena and Pasadena, spurred mandatory evacuations and official warnings about not consuming the region’s smoke-filled air and contaminated tap water supply.

With numerous Playhouse staff, board members and artists evacuated from their homes — some of which have been lost in the fires — as well as the ongoing hazardous conditions in the Pasadena area, Feldman made the decision on Friday to cancel all six performances.

“Everyone was trying their absolute hardest to keep going, but at a certain point, it just became clear that this wasn’t the best thing to move forward with,” Feldman said Friday afternoon. “We know how many people were looking forward to it, and we all were too. But my tiny heartbreak of all the work all of us have put into it pales in comparison to the loss everyone is dealing with, which is vast and overwhelming and deeply hitting.”

Rehearsals for “Anything Goes” began at the nonprofit theater on Tuesday but were canceled starting Wednesday. (“Follies” was scheduled to start rehearsals next week). The performances at the 3,000-seat Pasadena Civic Auditorium — a first-time expansion of the Playhouse’s commitment to put on regional revivals of classic American musicals — were well on track to hit sales goals, with a final marketing push set to unfold in the coming weeks. The theater will be contacting ticket holders for both shows about refunds and other ticket options.

“It’s a huge unknown, but two to three weeks from now, people might be ready to smile again and enjoy, and we’d have to put in the work now to make that happen,” Feldman said.

“But it just hit a point where it stopped making sense to ask folks to come together in smoky conditions to make a thing, as much as we’d be doing so in service of the community. It’s going to be a financial hit, but there are just bigger things at hand. We have to care for our people and our community and make sure we can get everyone through this moment together.”

The Playhouse’s cancellations are among many throughout L.A.’s live performance scene. The Hollywood Pantages Theatre canceled three performances of “Wicked” this week and is aiming to resume on Saturday afternoon. The Wallis rescheduled its weekend Jeremy Jordan concerts and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra performance; Los Angeles Philharmonic postponed its shows with Igor Levit and Cody Fry, among others. The Actors’ Gang Theater canceled the opening weekend of its 10-minute play festival “Night Miracles,” now starting on Jan. 16 and runs through Feb. 8.

Additionally, many other companies that were readying to open full productions also saw their plans thwarted by the fires. The world premiere of Laura Shamas’ “Four Women in Red” was set to begin this weekend at Victory Theatre Center and is now scheduled to begin Jan. 17. Moving Arts Theatre’s world premiere of Lisa Kenner Grissom’s “here comes the night,” initially scheduled to start shows Jan. 16, has delayed its first performance by a week.

Colony Theatre canceled its first weekend of performances of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and is aiming to begin its run on Jan. 14. The production is offering free tickets to firefighters and first responders on Jan. 14, 15, 21, 22 and 25 (with code LAFF) and is doubling as a donation center for nonperishable foods, clothing and pet supplies.

Rogue Machine Theatre’s West Coast premiere of Will Arbery’s “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” set to begin performances at the Matrix Theatre on Jan. 18, lost power during Wednesday’s rehearsal but continued its preparations with lanterns in the parking lot and later canceled two rehearsals. Center Theatre Group’s world premiere of Larissa Fasthorse’s “Fake It ‘Til You Make It,” scheduled to start performances at the Mark Taper Forum on Jan. 29, initially canceled rehearsals and has since resumed.

And both the Fountain Theatre’s production of Audrey Cefaly’s “Alabaster” (beginning Feb. 5) and A Noise Within’s staging of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (starting Feb. 9) have moved their rehearsals to Zoom this week.

These theaters are monitoring the situation as it develops, and preparing to potentially cancel more rehearsals and performances — a tough decision, said Feldman. But given the circumstances, it’s one that needs to be made.

“That phrase of ‘The show must go on’ is widely mistaken,” he said. “That’s for when you’re going onstage and your prop is missing, so you make it up. But when people are in pain and trauma the way our community is right now, I don’t think the show has to go on.”

One of the more agreeable outcomes at this past weekend’s Golden Globes was Flow winning for Best Animated Feature. As of this writing, it’s still playing here in the Valley, at Pollack Cinemas in Tempe and at AMC Ahwatukee 24.

If you see only one Latvian animated movie about a cat this year, make it this one. Directed by young Gints Zilbalodis from a script he wrote with Matiss Kaza, this wordless, dreamlike, almost free-associational feature is possibly the most visually beautiful movie of the year, and it has one of the year’s most vividly drawn heroes, too.

The main character – the title character? I couldn’t be sure; the title (Straume in Latvian) may just refer to the flow of the waters that sweep the characters along – is a small, dark, short-haired cat with wide, perpetually alarmed eyes. The creature wanders an idyllic wooded area alongside a body of water, reflection-gazing and hoping to score a fish from some stray dogs.

Then an enormous flash flood rages through the area. The cat barely makes it to high ground, and eventually takes refuge, as the waters continue to rise, aboard a derelict boat which gathers an inexplicably diverse assortment of other animal refugees from different continents or islands: a patient capybara, a ring-tailed lemur with hoarder tendencies, a stern but protective secretary-bird, a playful, irksomely guileless retriever.

It may be a postapocalyptic world through which the craft carries this oddball crew; human habitations appear to be deserted, and a colossal whale that surfaces nearby from time to time seems to be a multi-flippered mutant. Gradually the animals learn to steer the boat a little; they also learn to care and even sacrifice for each other.

If this sounds sentimental and annoyingly anthropomorphic, I can only say that it didn’t feel that way to me. The animal behavior comes across believably, as does their capacity for growth and empathy. If it’s anthropomorphic, it’s about as low-key as anthropomorphism can be, and the subtle yet insistent sense of allegory for the human experience is moving.

Zilbalodis takes Flow into pretty epic and mystical realms in the later acts, yet on another level the movie works as an animal odyssey adventure in the genre of the Incredible Journey films, or Milo & Otis. At the core of it is the sympathetic and admirable pussycat, meowing indignantly at the perils all around, yet facing them with heart and pluck. It’s not to be missed.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bob Clearmountain was driving back from Apogee Studios in Santa Monica to his home in Pacific Palisades. The revered producer and mixer has helmed records by such rock legends as Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music and David Bowie, often out of his home studio, Mix This!, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He could feel the Santa Ana winds ripping up the coast and through the canyons.

“From Sunset Boulevard, I could see flames up on the hill and smoke. I thought, ‘Well, I’m sure the fire department’s gonna be there pretty soon.’ The news said the wind was blowing in the other direction, so I kind of assumed they’re going to contain it pretty soon. But a few hours later, my daughter called me and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of there.’”

As Clearmountain, his wife and his assistant packed up three cars with gear and valuables, they still hoped it was just a precaution. Much of the gear in the studio he’d custom-built over decades was immobile — the Bösendorfer grand piano or the SSL recording console couldn’t get out on short notice.

“We grabbed everything we could think of. I had some some things that Bruce Springsteen had given us; he had done a little one of his little stick-figure doodles for my wife’s 50th birthday, which I thought, ‘Well, that’s something pretty special.’

“But we just figured we’d be back in a few days,” Clearmountain continued. “That once the evacuation order was lifted we’d just be loading everything back into the house. It really didn’t occur to us that this could be the end of our world.”

They decamped back to the Apogee Studios in Santa Monica, where Clearmountain and his wife, Apogee founder Betty Bennett, stayed in a guest apartment usually reserved for bands passing through. Helpless, they watched the scene through their doorbell camera as the Palisades fire advanced down the hillside toward their community.

“We could see our neighbor’s fence was catching fire and our trash cans were on fire. The cameras went out at about quarter to 8, and we figured, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe somehow it’s just gonna skip our house because our walls are all stucco.’ We didn’t know anything until Wednesday, and then we heard that that all but one house on our street were gone completely.”

“Finally, this morning, one of our new neighbors somehow got in and took a picture of our driveway with nothing behind it,” he said. “Just a driveway and some ashes.”

The scale of the destruction from this week’s fires is overwhelming, with at least 10 lives lost and more than 9,000 structures damaged or destroyed in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other neighborhoods. Among that devastation are irreplaceable cultural sites, which include beloved recording studios where artists made some of their cherished albums.

The rustic recording studio retreat is a visual icon of Los Angeles music history. In the L.A. recording community, Clearmountain’s home is a nearly sacred site. Many other studios are also believed to be damaged or lost in the area and in Altadena, which has become a home for L.A.’s indie music community.

Clearmountain is only beginning to take in the reality of losing his home and a generationally important recording studio, one built over decades to his exact designs and full of instruments and gear that yielded some of the most popular rock music of our time. He said he’ll continue to work one way or another in the wake of this.

“I look at it as a challenge, the next chapter,” he said. “I can’t really look back. I can’t spend too much time being bummed out about it. I’ve got to say, ‘OK, what can I do?’ I’m going to change the style of what I do. I’m gonna do what I do, but do it differently, and hopefully it’ll be good, maybe better than what I was doing. That’s all I can think right now.”

He worries about other studios and home recording sites that don’t have his resources to rebuild elsewhere. The lives and homes lost are innumerable and devastating, but the cultural loss and inability of musicians to work is part of the tragedy as well.

“Maybe there should be a fund. Not for me, because I’m doing fine, but for other studios,” Clearmountain said. “There’s a lot of people that aren’t as well-off. I can survive, but there are people that that are going to have a really rough time, and they need help. I’d be willing to chip in and help them.”