THE THEATRICAL TICKET STILL GETS HESTON’S VOTE

Charlton Heston, who looks like an admiral even in tennis shorts, opens Tuesday night at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for a brief, three-week run as Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.”

The production, which Heston himself directed, had a smashing run, critically and commercially, at the Queens Theatre in London last year. It was an uncommonly satisfactory experience for him.

“It’d been an ambition all my life to act on stage in London,” Heston said before heading off to rehearsal one morning earlier this week. “Any actor working in English must dream, I think, of performing for London audiences.”

After delicate negotiations between American and British Equity, he was allowed to assemble an Anglo-American but largely American cast. Ben Cross, the intense and likable star of “Chariots of Fire,” played the defense attorney Barney Greenwald, and will repeat the role here (“The most extraordinary American accent of any British actor I’ve ever heard, better than Olivier’s,” Heston says).

Heston’s first idea had been to play the two roles alternately: Queeg one night, Greenwald the next. “It would have meant a bit of a cheat on the age--Greenwald is much younger--but at a stretch it could have worked.”

The difficulty was finding an actor who could alternate with Heston in the roles, although he also began to see that doing both roles and directing might have been overburdensome.

When the idea was dropped, it was Heston’s producer son, Frazer, who suggested Cross as Greenwald. “Ben has an adamantine decency, as Fonda did, and it’s the absolute requisite for the part,” Heston says. “And it’s a pleasing way of coming full circle to be playing in the theater named for Fonda.”

This is evidently the first major production of “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” in the U.S. since Fonda was Greenwald and Hume Cronyn was Queeg at the Ahmanson some two decades ago. After the brief run here, the Heston company moves to the Kennedy Center in Washington, which has financed the production, for a longer run.

Heston is doing the play in the seasonal hiatus from “The Colbys,” on which he’s now a regular. “We finished shooting the last episode at 10 o’clock of a morning a few days ago,” he says, “and by 11 I was at a first reading with the ‘Caine’ cast in a rehearsal hall in Hollywood. That’s about as short a hiatus from work as you can get.”

Heston, who looks more senatorial than most senators, has been intermittently mentioned as a potential political candidate, to seek the lightning that struck his close friend Ronald Reagan. But he has dismissed the idea about as firmly and resolutely as can be.

“It’s a joke I’ve made before,” he says, “but it’s true: I’d rather play a senator than be one. Politics is an ethnic gift, and I’m wrong for it.

“I was on Air Force One the night before the last election,” he says. “I’d been doing some rallies with the President. His people had the figures. We knew how big it was going to be--we’d lose the District and maybe Minnesota but take everything else. I couldn’t believe the magnitude of it, but they had the numbers and they were right.

“There was a celebrant mood, and champagne. But everybody was drained, exhausted, including myself. But not the President. His eyes were bright, his color was great, he was snapping his fingers, loving it all.

“The Irish do love it. Think of them all--Daley, Curley, Kennedy, Reagan. But my ancestry is largely Scottish”--Heston goes into a heavy burr--”wi’ a dour sense of obligation, and ya moost na ta’ any pleasure in it, ever.

“Suppose I gave up acting, never to go back to it, because you never could. . . . I couldn’t do it. I don’t love politics but I love acting. It’s a trivial way to make a living, of course, and you’re doing something you never quite get right. But it’s what you do . It’s what I do.”