For Ron Abel, Songs From Films Linger On and Become a Revue

“If I didn’t want the attention, I wouldn’t have this hair,” said musical director Ron Abel, shaking his white-blond mane. “Still, I’m never comfortable being the focus on stage. I’m at home behind a piano, behind people singing.”

As an accompanist, some of those singers have included Peter Allen, Paula Kelly, Linda Purl and Donna McKechnie. In theater, he has musical-directed “Godspell,” “The Ritz,” the recent hit “Mail” and, currently, “Blame It on the Movies” at the Coast Playhouse.

Directed by David Galligan, with choreography by Larry Hyman and additional music and lyrics by Billy Barnes, “Blame It” was originally envisioned as “this nice, simple revue for Monday and Tuesday night--like 75 minutes,” explained Abel during a recent interview. He arranged and orchestrated the score. “But as soon as we started getting into rehearsal,” he said, “we saw that it could turn into something more. And it did. At last count, I think there were 80-something songs.”

The Port Chester, N.Y., native describes the eight-person revue as a tribute to film music, “evoking the emotions the movies brought out in us.”

The production includes numbers from the ‘40s, songs from foreign films, some 20th Century Fox love songs, movie themes (including “Jaws” and “Goldfinger”), a collection of songs from what he calls “Oscar losers” (such as “My Foolish Heart” and “Alfie”) and “A Place in the Sun” ballet.

“The order must have changed at least 40 times,” he said. “Once you see a song (done), you say, ‘Well, this doesn’t work here or go there,’ so you switch, put something else in. It’s almost harder to do than a book show, because there’s no throughline of a book to keep it together; you’ve got to do it all with the music. . . . How many voices to use on one song, should it be a solo, putting harmonies to songs that never had harmonies before. . . .

“It was a lot of work.”

But lately, the results of such work have been increasingly worthwhile.

“In the last two years, I’ve stopped making a living--and now I have a career, which is a real different thing,” Abel said. “When I first came to L.A., I got a revue of my songs at the Taper (Lab) called ‘Stars in Your Eyes.’ It was like ‘Ron Abel Is Alive and Well. . . .’ But who knew who I was and would go see it? “Now my name has been around, so I at least get calls to submit for TV theme songs. I’m on that list of people.”

He also has a lot of projects cooking on separate burners. Just back from a trip to New York where he was music director of a Drama League tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Abel is concentrating on the fourth annual benefit for AIDS Project L.A., which will be held Thursday and Friday at the Variety Arts Center.

Yet recently, Abel has been moving away from musical directing into writing. One project-in-the-wings is “Life on a Palette,” in which 28 to 30 Norman Rockwell paintings come to life and become musical numbers.

At the moment, Abel’s flying highest over “To Sir With Love,” an ‘80s update of the 1967 film, featuring Abel’s “heavy-duty pop/rock score.” The show, choreographed by Michael Peters and starring Dorian Harewood and Stephanie Mills, had a $250,000 workshop staging at the Aquarius Theatre last year and is slated to open in New York this fall.

The prospect of joining the “big leagues” brings little trepidation. “A big house in the hills, a place in New York--sure, I could go for that,” Abel said. “But this is all new for me. Up till now, I’ve never felt like a star. In the past, the photographer and interviewer would arrive--and I’d go into the other room while the person I was working for would deal with that. Now you’re coming to interview and photograph me .”