The Chance Theater's 2009 season began with a show called Jesus Hates Me, set at the Blood of the Lamb miniature-golf course, and it'll end with the perennial alternative-Christmas show The Eight: Reindeer Monologues. In between, there was the premiere of a new musical, a revival of that evergreen hippie spectacle Hair and a production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. That's variety, folks, and it's the scope of the Chance's programming that has helped elevate this Anaheim Hills company into the vanguard of Orange County's storefront-theater scene. Whether tackling highly complicated musicals such as the Stephen Sondheim magnum opus Sunday In the Park With George, staging intense contemporary plays such as David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole, or working with Holocaust survivors and students at a New York City high school near Ground Zero, you can always count on the Chance to mix it up. Which almost helps us forgive their staging of the occasional Neil Simon play.