THEATER PREVIEW:

World-premiere productions by local playwrights have become quite fashionable at the Huntington Beach Playhouse this time of year — particularly when they reflect the city’s “Surf City” image.

In 2005, the playhouse mounted the first-ever staging of “The Golden Dream” by local playwright Joe Syiek. Then in 2006, the curtain went up on “Surf City USA,” Shirley Westlie Orlando’s tribute to the city’s surfing culture.

Now another premiere of a surfing musical is in the wings, awaiting a Fourth of July liftoff. It’s “Born to Ride the Waves,” written by Newport Beach’s Joseph Mulroy, who calls the upcoming show “the one I felt born to write.”

Mulroy credits his older brother Tom with introducing him both to surfing and the surf guitar. By the time he was in sixth grade, he’d started a surf band with a couple of classmates and entered a battle of the bands judged by Dick Dale, legendary “king of the surf guitar.”

“My older sister Julie taught me Hawaiian songs on our mother’s Martin ukulele and took me to my first musical, a Newport Harbor High School production of ‘Oklahoma,’?” Mulroy says. “Mom, who loved classical music, drove me to lessons and encouraged me to practice.”

Years later, he notes, when he wrote and presented the song “My Surfing Days” at a Los Angeles workshop, a classmate suggested he create an original musical around it.

“Ever since then, finding an entertaining, authentic surf story on which to base the show became my obsession,” Mulroy declares. “I combed libraries and used book stores, collecting material on surfing, I joined a longboarders club and interviewed surfers and their girlfriends.”