‘ME AND MY GIRL’ CROSSES THE POND

Five weeks to go. Down in the costume shop, chorus girls are being fitted for elegant ‘30s ball gowns. A few floors up, two dozen tap dancers practice racing forward at the end of a number without trampling one another. And when a bird flies in an open window, the director calls it a spy for producer David Merrick.

There’s nothing low-key about “Me and My Girl,” a boisterous, old-fashioned Broadway-style musical with a big budget, big cast and big production numbers. But this “Broadway-style” musical started in Leicester, England, is a huge success on London’s West End and opens June 3 at Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Then it goes to Broadway.

An award-winning revival of composer Noel Gay’s 1937 hit, “Girl” is about how Bill Snibson, the newly named heir of Hereford Hall estate, struggles to keep his Cockney ways, his girl and his inheritance. Re-creating his London role as Snibson, British sitcom star Robert Lindsay now leads an American cast through such numbers as “The Lambeth Walk,” a tune which spawned an international dance craze in the late ‘30s.

“The Queen Mother came up to me and said, beaming, that it was one of her favorite shows,” 35-year-old Lindsay recalled the other day. “I asked her if she remembered the Lambeth Walk, and she raised two thumbs in a jaunty Lambeth Walk pose.” As for himself: “It never fails to make me cry when I see it.”

What cost $1.2 million in London is expected to run $4 million on Broadway. The show came together fast in its first incarnation at the nonprofit Leicester Haymarket, explains director Mike Ockrent, and there wasn’t that much time--or money--to make big changes when it moved to London’s commercial West End.

The elaborate set, which was built in Upstate New York, cost about five times more than the London company’s; the costumes cost 10 times more. Items like English lampposts aren’t imported but remade, and there are 220 costumes.

There were changes made for the Australian production that opened in January, and more are being made here. Commissionaires have become doormen, and obscure historical references have been scrapped. Song-and-dance numbers have been adjusted to take advantage of--or downplay--the American cast’s dancing ability. There’s a whole new number in Act 1--”We felt it needed an ‘up’ sequence,” Ockrent explains--while other songs end with “a little more pizazz” to suit American audiences.

“Leicester, London, Australia and here--it’s all the same show,” says Ockrent. “But it’s better in places, because we improve it all the time. One of the wonderful things about theater rather than film is you can keep changing it. The process continues on.”

Ockrent, an easy-going 39-year-old, tosses a revised script across a table, pointing to dialogue trims. “We always fiddle. We’re great fiddlers. We probably will be messing around with it in Los Angeles as well.”

A dusty Leicester warehouse has been replaced with three airy New York rehearsal rooms at 19th and Broadway, and in one of them, several performers are sitting quietly on bridge chairs facing musical director Stanley Lebowsky. They’re learning by mental telepathy, one performer quips.

Hardly. Lebowsky, dialect coach Liz Smith and others are drilling cast members in not just British English but Cockney British English as well. Enunciation is everything, and Lebowsky has them repeat the same chorus again and again until he can hear the “n” in noble and all three consonants in Ascot.

Each of the rehearsal rooms has a purpose and a chieftain, and days are carved up like pies among the dance, music and acting teams. Jane Summerhays, one of the female leads, says it’s all so organized she feels like she’s on a conveyor belt, and Ockrent is clearly proud of the precision. “A big advantage is that (choreographer) Gillian Gregory and I do know the show very well. I know all the words, Gillian knows every single move and we can all hum the tunes.”

Everybody sings and dances in this show. Take Leo Leyden, for instance. Last in Los Angeles with “Aren’t We All?,” Leyden plays Sir Jasper, an elderly gentleman who “is completely deaf, but I sing a lot of numbers.”

Actor Lindsay, star of BBC sitcoms “Citizen Smith” and “Give Us a Break,” says he’d never really danced before “Girl.” He appeared in “Godspell” in 1973, but considers that show “more of a happening than a musical with a capital M . I didn’t dance. I moved.” Co-star Maryann Plunkett, who earlier succeeded Bernadette Peters in “Sunday in the Park With George,” recently learned tap by day while playing Shaw’s “Saint Joan” at night in Boston.

It took Noel Gay’s son Richard Armitage two years to get “Me and My Girl” on the stage. He had terrible trouble finding the script to the original show, and eventually worked backwards from a pre-rehearsal script unearthed at the British Museum, an amateur version of the show and even a recording of a ‘30s radio show featuring his father’s songs.

“Girl” opened in Leicester in November, 1984, and was playing in London by the following February. James Nederlander, who later became one of the show’s producers, had just bought the West End’s Adelphi Theatre. Recalls Armitage: “We weren’t even in rehearsal but we asked for the theater and he said yes. It meant going dark for weeks.”

Armitage, who dropped by rehearsals here the other day, figures 300,000 Americans will already have seen the show before it opens as part of the Nederlander-run Los Angeles Civic Light Opera season. “One perfectly normal Englishwoman has seen it 135 times,” he adds. (Armitage and colleagues picked up the tab for her 100th visit.)

There’s a break in the rehearsal. One young man is knitting a sweater for his mother and another is practicing aristocratic sneers. The duchess is doing needlepoint and the butler is tapping his foot while he listens to his Walkman. Everyone is quite pleasant to a visiting reporter, although one dancer chides her for forgetting her tap shoes.

Chorus member Craig Innes says his parents and other family, friends and neighbors are chartering a bus from San Francisco to come see “Me and My Girl” in Los Angeles. That happens all the time, comments colleague Michael Hayward-Jones. His family trekked from Charleston, W. Va., to Indianapolis in three vans when he was in “Mame” with Angela Lansbury. “I guess I should be glad they didn’t come in pickup trucks.”

Singer Timothy Jerome, in his seventh Broadway show, spent two years as Gus the Theatre Cat in “Cats” before taking on his role as the family solicitor in “Me and My Girl.” Jerome explains that he has the “unique distinction” of playing the title role in “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” the last show to open--and close--at the Morosco Theatre before it was torn down to make room for the Marriott Marquis Hotel, whose theater will open with this show.

Detail is important to director Ockrent, who studied physics before turning to the theater. He has sent his players off to the library to research the period, but also brought the library to them just in case. A chunk of wood balanced between two chairs acts as a makeshift bookcase for maybe a dozen books, and most look well read. (Among them is a Penguin paperback of Walter Greenwood’s “Love on the Dole”--billed as “the first novel to be set against a back cloth of chronic unemployment”--which bears an inscription to Karen from her friend Janet.)

Rehearsal-room walls are covered with photographs and articles, including copies of the original program from the 1937 version of the show. By the second week of rehearsal, even some of the mirrors in the dance studio were being overtaken by photos of servants balancing tea trays and of aristocrats taking the sun in Hyde Park.

One dancer wanders through and says to nobody in particular: “We’d need an entire lunch break to read all this stuff.”

Richard Armitage and his sons, Charles and Alex, continue the music and artists’ management firm that Noel Gay began in 1938, but “Girl” represents Armitage’s first West End producing venture. Before taking the show to America, the first-time producer ran a demographics study to see how many Americans were in London audiences. He even went to London hotels last summer to interview porters about American theater tastes.

What did he learn? Armitage smiles: “They all told me, ‘You’re the first producer to come talk to us and the one who least needs to.’ ” He adds that the show’s London success has continued despite major cast changes last January and the current European tourist slump.

Winning last year’s Laurence Olivier Award for best musical certainly didn’t hurt, and Armitage says he expects a three-year London run. Besides the production currently touring Australia, “Girl” opens in Mexico next spring and is expected to tour Spain, Norway, Sweden and possibly Hungary by next summer.

Ockrent says there have been “several offers” for videos and films but everybody is waiting to see what happens on Broadway. “It would be a sensational film,” he believes, however. “It has all the ingredients of one of those old MGM musicals.”

Meanwhile, Armitage and Nederlander are putting together a musical version of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, “Flowers for Mrs. Harris,” with the notion of opening in a British provincial theater next February, then moving on to London and, hopefully, Broadway. No cast yet, says Armitage, but Ockrent will direct and Stephen Fry, who revised “Me and My Girl,” is doing the book.

He and Nederlander were having lunch one day, recalls Armitage, and discussing “Flowers” when a woman sitting at a nearby table said she couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. “She said we should get the people who did ‘Me and My Girl’ to do the show for us.”