IT’S HOAGY CARMICHAEL’S TURN FOR MUSICAL REVUE

Some of the most revered names in American popular music--George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers--have received their proper due in the popular one-composer revue.

Now it’s Hoagy Carmichael’s turn. His repertoire of songs from the ‘20s through the ‘50s is the basis for “Stardust,” a new production opening today for 25 performances at Saddleback College’s Studio Theatre in Mission Viejo.

“It (a Carmichael revue) is long overdue. His songs have a wonderful naturalness, like falling off a log. He was the quintessential songwriter from the American midlands. He wrote about the fundamental values, about love, family and nature,” said Greg McCaslin, 34, director of “Stardust.”

“There had been some earlier commercial attempts (at a revue), but none ever got off the ground,” added McCaslin, a longtime Carmichael aficionado who has staged musicals and other works in New York, Chicago and with the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in Santa Maria.

The production, which runs through Aug. 11, launches the Saddleback Company Theatre’s summer program at the Mission Viejo campus.

Last year, when McCaslin--who is a teaching associate at the Lincoln Center Institute in New York--was preparing to join the Saddleback College performing arts program as a visiting instructor, he found that program coordinator Geofrey English was also intrigued with the idea of a Carmichael tribute.

“Once we got the blessings of Hoagy’s family (Carmichael’s widow, Dorothy, lives in Palm Springs), it was all go for the project,” recalled McCaslin, who spent weeks tracking down the numerous firms that had rights to the songs. “There was no problem (in getting rights). Our strong suit was that our production is academic-backed and nonprofit,” he said.

The 30 numbers picked for the revue run the whole gamut of Carmichael songs, covering musical trends from the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression to the post-World War II period. “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind” are, of course, included.

So are such other characteristic Carmichael compositions as “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” “Up a Lazy River,” “Riverboat Shuffle,” “Lazy Bones,” “Can’t Get Indiana off My Mind,” “One Morning in May” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

The revue’s seven performers have all worked extensively in regional stage musicals. The pianist-trumpeter is Jimmy Van. The singers-dancers are Jon Bernstein, Katherine Curran, Timothy Dey, Diane Morris, Richard G. Rodgers and Diane King, who is also the revue’s music director.

When Carmichael died in 1981 at 82, he was still widely admired among professionals but remained relatively obscure to the younger rock generation. “Hoagy’s work has generally been underrated by most people, even in his own time,” said McCaslin. “Yet his works are models of the songwriter’s craft, and they cover just about every style, from ragtime and jazz to the most enchanting ballads.”

The Indiana-born Carmichael was raised in the American heartland and was at the core of the golden age of jazz. He performed with some of the greatest names in jazz and big bands of the 1920s and early 1930s, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jack Teagarden, Eddie Lang, Benny Goodman and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. The legendary cornetist Bix Beiderbecke was a close friend.

Still, Carmichael’s songwriting began in the most casual manner. While a law student at Indiana University and a moonlighting band leader, he liked to hang out at a popular off-campus candy store, where he would pick out melodies of his own on a piano.

One of those tunes evolved into the ballad of the era: “Stardust.” At first, the song, published in 1929 as an instrumental piece only, was played by bands as a fast-beat number. However, after 1931--when the Mitchell Parish lyrics had been added and the song was being sung at the appropriate dreamy pace--”Stardust” became the most widely heard of all pop standards for three generations. (It became the standby for virtually every singer from Bing Crosby to Nat King Cole; the 1940 recording by the Artie Shaw band for years was immensely popular on radio and jukeboxes.)

After “Stardust,” more big hits followed for Carmichael, who had given up law and turned to full-time songwriting and band conducting after a brief fling as a practicing attorney.

Sometimes he wrote the lyrics as well as the music (“Rockin’ Chair,” “Hong Kong Blues”). More typically, he collaborated with some of the era’s best-known lyricists, especially Johnny Mercer (“Skylark,” “The Nearness of You,” the Academy Award-winning “In the Cool, Cool of the Evening”), and Frank Loesser (“Heart and Soul,” “Small Fry,” “Two Sleepy People”).

In the 1940s and 1950s, Carmichael established a performing persona of his own. In Hollywood films, he was usually the laconic, piano-playing observer with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He perfected this type in “To Have and Have Not,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” and in the film inspired by Beiderbecke’s tragic life, “Young Man With a Horn.” On television, he hosted variety shows and co-starred in the “Laramie” western series.

Nevertheless, Carmichael was never to enjoy the highest rank as a composer (besides Rodgers, Porter and Gershwin, pantheon status was granted only a few others, including Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen). There was one important tribute given him by Newport Jazz Festival musicians in 1979.

There was also a play, “Hoagy, Bix and Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhaus,” based on Carmichael’s accounts of his college-day friendships with Beiderbecke and poet-playwright William E. Moenkhaus. The production, written by British playwright-poet Adrian Mitchell, had a run in 1981 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Carmichael saw the play several months before he died.

Saddleback director McCaslin notes that the “Stardust” revue is but the latest entry in the current generation’s rediscovery of the pre-rock era of pop standard composers. He cites the success of Linda Ronstadt’s recent recordings of ballads from the ‘20s and ‘30s, including some by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

And he notes that certain Carmichael songs still thrive as recording favorites. “Georgia on My Mind” (with lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) not only is a celebrated staple for Ray Charles, but it also has been revived by everyone from Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to the Righteous Brothers. Willie Nelson, no less, included both “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind” in his album of oldie-but-goodie standards.

“We’re not sure how strong a trend this is, or precisely what it means. But we do know that people like Ronstadt and Nelson have found what others, especially jazz musicians, have known for years--how fresh these classic songs still are and how adaptable they are to newer (singing) styles,” said McCaslin.

“We realize more than ever that the songwriters of that era--Hoagy and all the rest--had mastered a genuine art form and given us reflections of ourselves. That’s what our revue is really about.”