In the musical “Forever Plaid” a quartet singing group gets a chance to come back from the dead and perform a show they always wanted.

For Sean Maurer, an actor in the Renton Civic Theater’s opening season show, it’s also an opportunity to start over.

A semi-professional entertainer from New Orleans, he saw that industry collapse after Hurricane Katrina.

“There’s not much of an entertainment industry there anymore,” he said, adding that the casinos that hosted much of the entertainment were destroyed.

Maurer moved to Port Orchard knowing the Seattle area has a thriving art community, and while he was still looking for a day job as a high-rise window cleaner, he landed the part of Francis, the leader of the singing group.

“It’s been good fun getting to know these guys,” he said of the cast and crew.

In a few weeks he went from jobless to working 19 hour days, he said. “It’s going to be worth it.”

Forever Plaid was produced with the Bellevue Civic Theater, opening today in Renton. It’s also scheduled to show at the Kirkland Performing Arts Center before closing at Bellevue.

The show is often referred to as a musical revue, where actors sing about 30 songs from the 1950s, ’60s and a little Motown. However, director Gregory Magyar contests that it’s really a musical.

“It’s conceived better than that,” he said. “It’s very much about their relationship to music.”

The story starts with a narrator explaining the amateur quartet group was headed to pick up their custom plaid jackets when a bus full of Catholic teens on their way to watch the Beatles U.S. television debut on the “Ed Sullivan Show” broadsides them.

The group, “Forever Plaid,” dies instantly, but they are allowed to come back from the dead and play the show they never could.

“I think they have done an excellent job on focusing on the characters,” Magyar said. “All of them find confidence through the course of their evening.”

The four boys, Jinx, Francis, Sparky and Smudge, were all members of the audiovisual club, pinning them as a little geeky.

“He’s so nervous that he’s not going to be liked, he messed up a lot,” said John E. Olson III of his character Smudge.

It’s a shout out to the innocent and sincere side of ’50s music, where quartets wore dinner jackets and bow ties.

“It’s really a heart-felt show,” Maurer said.