‘KUNI-LEML’ LYRICIST HAS AN EAR FOR UNIVERSAL THEMES

“I’m a words man,” lyricist Richard Engquist noted cheerfully. “I’m fascinated by the English language: how to manipulate it, how to make people laugh. I really want to make people laugh. That’s very hard when you’re not a funny person and have a dark view of human nature--which I do. But I try.”

The persistence is evident in “Kuni-Leml,” Avrom Goldfadn’s 19th-Century comedy (re-created by Nahma Sandrow, with music by Raphael Crystal and lyrics by Engquist). After a successful run off Broadway last year--and receipt of the New York Outer Critics’ Circle award for best musical--”Kuni-Leml” opens Sunday at the Westwood Playhouse.

The story, set in 1880s Russia, concerns high-spirited Carolina, who is in love with her dashing tutor Max--but betrothed to the matchmaker’s sorry pick, Kuni-Leml. (The term, Engquist explained, is one of Goldfadn’s creations--to denote “a nebbish, someone with a lot of physical problems: can’t talk straight, limps, can’t see very well, hear very well, can’t do anything very well.”)

The work originally was commissioned in 1984 by New York’s Jewish Repertory Theatre. Engquist and his collaborators happily dived into it, relying heavily on the play’s existing structure.

(Some modifications, however, were needed--as in the character of Kuni-Leml, “because in the original, he was the butt of a lot of cruel humor; it was pretty strong.”)

As it turned out, everything fell into place very quickly.

“So often,” Engquist said, shaking his head, “you can agonize over a show for months and months. But once in a while a miracle happens: The book writer has something in mind, the composer has something in mind, the lyricist has something in mind--and it’s all the same thing.”

The 15 resulting songs (which he unabashedly labels “traditional” fare) are a smattering of styles, “based on Russian folk music of the period, some of which we actually borrowed from the original score (Goldfadn’s play had five songs), and some--for a couple that’s young and in love and a little affected--with an operetta sound, a touch of Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Engquist said his own point of view relied on “the universals.”

“Because I’m not Jewish, I don’t know Yiddish. I had to work from what people told me about the culture. But I’m not interested in a parochial show. I’m interested in a show that’s going to appeal to everybody--something that deals with human emotions, human problems that never change.

“Paradoxically, it turned out I was the one who kept saying ‘It’s getting too far away from the original’ and began putting in some of the ethnic flavor my collaborators were taking out.”

Yet he said the Yiddish moniker may be damaging: “People assume it’s a foreign-language import or exclusively for Jewish audiences, which it’s not. So we’ve got an image problem. I think the title is a terrible mistake, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Engquist sighed, his “Swedish gloom” momentarily getting the better of him. Enthusiasm for the theater has been a constant in his life, ever since a mid-college switch from music (he was trained as a classical violinist) to drama. In 1955, he left Minnesota for New York, “with a script under my arm, thinking it was going to be produced and I was going to be rich and famous. Well, I was soon disabused of that notion.”

Except for a brief interval in the ‘60s--when he returned to Minnesota, writing and performing revue material--Engquist settled into a New York magazine editorship, until the company folded 14 years ago.

“So I said to my wife (New York Times reporter Jane Brody), ‘Why don’t I stay home and take care of the kids (twin sons Erik and Lorin) for a year?’ ”

He’s never left.

“My wife indulges me because she believes in what I’m doing,” he said. “And all those years at home, I never stopped working: I wrote two books and did a lot of free-lance stuff--but gradually that stopped because I got so interested in theatrical writing.”

Twelve years ago, determined “to learn what I was doing, instead of thinking about it the rest of my life,” Engquist enrolled at Lehman Engel’s BMI Musical Theatre Workshop (“studying what was great in the past, how the famous did it”). Now he teaches there.

“Teaching is perhaps the wrong word,” Engquist said with a shrug. “What I do is sit in a chair and listen to material which is written by other writers--and I, and other members of the workshop, comment on it.”

His personal credo: “I do a lot in terms of just plain rules. Like if you’re going to rhyme, it has to be a real rhyme. I don’t like false rhymes and sound-alikes--it’s one thing I’m very old-fashioned about.

“Another (rule) is that a theater song must have its own dynamic --it should travel from one point to another, unlike a pop song which can be written on one simple level; theater audiences won’t accept that. So you’re always thinking, ‘How can I go from the beginning to the end and have it play like a miniature play?’ ”

Success may be a tantalizing prospect, but Engquist, 52, is clearly more concerned with the writing itself--and nurturing talent around him. He claims he is not alone:

“People like Sheldon Harnick, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, Peter Stone will knock themselves out, give you advice, open doors. There seems to be almost no rivalry. I don’t understand it, but it’s true. In a business where there are so few successes, everyone is pulling for each other.”