REVIEW: WORLD OF COLOR

This is a longer version of my review of the new spectacle at California Adventure. The review will run as a cover story in Saturday's Los Angeles Times Calendar section.

Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year and there is a mad effort underway by the theme park’s masters to make sure that birthday isn’t met with sour headlines about the years of corporate disappointment or seasons of tourist apathy. So it was that the “new” California Adventure -- or the latest “new” California Adventure -- was ushered in Friday by the scheduled premiere of a new attraction, a water-and-fire show called “World of Color” that not only lives up to the hype, it manages to tap into the company’s long but sometimes elusive tradition of true spectacle innovation.