NEWLEY IN TOUR REVIVAL

“Life on the road is fine for an 18-year-old,” announced Anthony Newley, “but it’s an exquisite form of torture for a man of 55.”

Nevertheless, the British entertainer has been subjecting himself to just that for the last year, touring the country in a revival of his and Leslie Bricusse’s 1962 Broadway hit, “Stop the World--I Want to Get Off,” which arrives Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The assessment from his 25-year vantage point? “If you accept that fact that it’s a quarter of a lifetime away--who one was then, whom one loved and feared and where one’s arrived--it’s kind of shattering,” he said. “Any past connection is totally nonexistent. It’s a totally different creation, a totally different world and a totally different play.”

For those who might not remember that far back (the play’s been revived many times, but never by Newley), he offered, “It’s an hour and a half of I-dont-know-what-it’s-about. I play a character called Littlechap, and it works its way through the seven stages of his life, to earn knighthood and a title. He sings ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?,’ which says that none of it means anything if you haven’t got love.” As for the show’s style, “It’s a combination of burlesque, vaudeville, mime and musical--a real train wreck of musical forms.”

And how does all of this activity wear on him? “I refuse to believe I’m 55,” Newley said resolutely. “I’ll never believe I’m any older than 18. I get angry when my body can’t do what an 18-year old’s does. And looking in the mirror is really a tragic sight. There are many consolations to getting older, but physically it’s quite unkind. I find that I have as much mobility, but it takes longer to get pretty.”

So why the return to touring rigors?

“That’s easy,” Newley said pleasantly. “They offered me an enormous amount of money. I can be bought, you know.”

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the improv houses comes “Night of the Living Groundlings,” an all-new comedy revue, opening Friday at the Groundlings Theatre.

“We’ve got a number of new pieces,” offered director Tom Maxwell. Included are “The Sunday School Bible Story,” “The Park Bench Medley” (two women go into a round of totally depressing songs: “At Seventeen,” “One Is the Loneliest Number”), a takeoff on pirate movies, “Holiday Dinner” (where the women backbite and the men watch football)--plus Geroge McGrath (taking audience suggestions for an improv as “George Cougar Mellengrath”), Kathy Griffin in a rap song and Don Woodard in an improv in the style of a Cole Porter ballad.

And that’s only a sampling of the fare. “You never see all of the pieces in one night,” Maxwell explained. “It’s a rotating system; we always have more people and pieces than we can ever get into one show. So you never see the same show twice. It also gives everyone a chance to perform, so no one has to be here day-in and day-out. Every week it’s like putting out a new edition of the same paper. We know we’re going to have songs, skits and improvs. We just don’t know where they’ll go.”

“It’s not difficult to find scripts--there are a lot of bad ones,” said writer Sam Ingraffia, whose work is represented in “One Acts to Grind,” a quintet of one-acts that just opened at the Company of Angels, “but it is hard to find ones that you can do within the limitations of small theater: the set, the costumes and the cast.”

The five one-acts ultimately chosen “have no connection (to each other),” Ingraffia acknowledged. “We’re trying to get this to be an ongoing thing (for the writers in the company), and next year there’ll probably be a theme: motel plays, musicals. . . . But this time, in our inaugural year, we had enough problems--so we decided to leave it open. The only requirement was that it had to be a one-act, no longer than 40 minutes.” As for tone, “We’re trying to pair together the ‘finding-yourself,’ Kafka-esque, ethereal ones--and the gritty, realistic ones.”

His own “Thirty Nine Goodbyes’ definitely falls into the latter category. “It’s about an aging rock ‘n’ roll star, who has lost sight of the reason he started. He goes back to the old hotel where he began to find that spark. It doesn’t happen, and he decides to kill himself--but he’s stopped by a young fan. . . .”

Also in the program: Gregory Mortensen’s “Holdouts,” Christine Marie’s “Fox Finds a Friend,” Donna Wells’ “Washateria” and Babs Lindsay’s “Free, the Unbound.”

Also new is “Robinson Crusoe” (at Theatre Exchange) as a British panto, which director B. J. Turner described as “a bawdy romp--vaudeville and burlesque, ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Benny Hill all rolled into one.

“It’s very traditional to do these kinds of shows in England, but this is the first time a fully staged (panto) production has been mounted here.” The director himself will be among the cast of 15, playing Chrissie Crusoe, Robinson’s mom. But, he assured, “I’m playing her very male.”