It’s a Train, It’s a Film, and Now It’s a Musical : A stage adaptation of Truffaut’s ‘The Last Metro’--about the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II--finally gets on track eight years after its co-creators began their journey

After eight long years, filled with more fits and starts than its makers care to think about, Philip Gerson and Jeffrey Rockwell’s musical of Francois Truffaut’s film, “The Last Metro,” is now pulling out of the station--namely, the Colony Studio Theatre, where it opened Saturday.

By this point, one would think that the collective patience of Gerson and Rockwell, along with that of director Todd Nielsen, has been pushed to the limit.

Au contraire .

Sitting across from Rockwell, Gerson says, “I can’t think of a better time for this show to open.”

Come again?

Think of a musical as a wine stored until it’s at the peak of taste, and you get an idea of the paradox. Or, let the authors explain.

“This is a book musical,” says Gerson, in his Studio City living room. He should know, since he--literally--wrote the book. “It wasn’t long ago, when ‘Cats’ was the rage, when book musicals were a dying breed.”

Rockwell picks up the thread: “But with ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ book musicals with complex narratives, developed characters and a darker tone are back.”

“The Last Metro,” the musical, seems to have been held back for its right moment--thereby following a pattern set by “The Last Metro,” the movie. And, as the capper to the Colony’s 15th anniversary season, Nielsen’s ambitiously planned production constitutes an expectant, nervous moment.

Truffaut, who died in 1984, had long desired to make a film re-creating his boyhood years during the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. Rare among filmmakers, Truffaut possessed a seemingly bottomless capacity for tracking and refashioning passages from his own life (“The 400 Blows,” “Jules and Jim” and “Stolen Kisses”).

Like a horse that refuses to be tamed, his personal tale of day-to-day life under the Nazi shadow was not corralled into script form until after he compiled the essays of his cinematic mentor, critic Andre Bazin, under the title “French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance.”

In his introduction to the volume, Truffaut laid out the setting for “The Last Metro”: Parisians would flock to the theaters, seeking respite from the occupation but fretting to catch the last Metro before the sternly enforced 11 p.m. curfew.

In the film, with Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, Lucas, the Jewish artistic director of Theatre Montmartre, has fled in hiding to the theater’s basement and passed the reins to his actress wife, Marion. This sets in motion an elaborate dance of survival, where people must perform on and off stage to save their lives, and the lives of their loved ones.

For all that, Truffaut’s work struck some as tepid, often curiously avoiding the natural conflicts that marble the story’s political conditions. It’s partly why, as Gerson recalls, “when we told some people that Jeffrey and I were adapting the movie to a musical, they gave us a very strange look.”

Gerson, though, takes pains to support the film, even as he delves into how the musical varies greatly from it. “In Truffaut’s defense, he was obliquely viewing his tale from a child’s point of view--he was an avid, movie-going preteen at the time. Like many French films, his isn’t interested in the conventional beginning, middle and end format--which is one reason why people love going to French films.”

“The movie contains this lovely mood of warmth,” says Rockwell, “but because of the very nature of musical theater, we had to take the story--and the music along with it--in a very different direction.”

Gerson, 37, a screenwriter and author of the musical parodies “Fiddler on the West Hollywood Roof” and the upcoming “West Hollywood Gypsy,” and Rockwell, 38, an actor (with no less than five roles and understudy duties for lead James Naughton in “City of Angels”) and composer (the Colony’s “Dandelion Wine”), began building their new “Metro” in 1983.

That was two years after Gerson, child of a French mother and a German father, had failed to secure rights to Philip P. Hallie’s book “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed,” about how rural French Protestants gave sanctuary, under the eye of the Nazis, to European Jews.

“From the start, Jeffrey and I agreed on our approach,” explains Gerson. “We decided on several elements right away, and we never veered from them. Marion had to have a strong, clear dramatic arc, from innocent to woman-in-charge. Lucas would begin working in the theater, and then go into hiding. The opening scene would be on opening night. The first act would end on the fruition of Marion’s affair with Bernard, her co-star. Truffaut’s was a backstage story; ours is a war story that takes place backstage.”

And, most crucially for a musical, the theater was no longer a house for dramas, as in the film, but for operettas. To accent this, the musical’s theater is now Theatre de la Cite (the dialogue slyly refers to the Nazis closing down the old Theatre Montmartre).

Gerson is a walking encyclopedia on the subject and era: Immediately after the interview, he presses into his guest’s hand a copy of the historical chronology that he and Rockwell compiled for the cast from their extensive research, as well as his personal editions of the Bazin essays and “The Last Metro” screenplay. Characteristically, he notes that the change to an operetta house is more accurate historically: “Remember, the Nazis wanted Paris to be the City of Light, a showcase of fun.”

This shift was a big one, as far as Rockwell was concerned: “Our conception included four musical styles, and this mix was what really attracted me. You start with the frothy lightness of the operetta. Then there’s the follies dance sound. I wanted long, legato lines echoing French ‘40s tunes for the book songs, which bind the characters and the story.”

The fourth musical dimension introduces a mood nowhere found in Truffaut’s film: the alienated, ironic starkness of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s music, “especially the tone of ‘Mahagonny,’ ” Rockwell adds. “But the driving force is romance and suspense. My model was the emotional directness of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric style.”

All of this--plus extensive shifts of action and clarification of characters--amounted to a considerable alteration of Truffaut’s vision. But Gerson and Rockwell couldn’t proceed without the filmmaker’s permission. Would he give it?

Strengthened with advice from New York attorney Elliot Brown, who negotiated the acquisition of rights for the musical “Nine,” from Federico Fellini’s film, “8 1/2,” Gerson met with Truffaut in Paris before his death. The director unhesitatingly gave the pair the green light after reading the first draft and listening to Rockwell’s song tape.

“He was very, very supportive,” says Gerson, and though there were the inevitable legal hurdles in dealing with Truffaut’s estate after his death, nothing got in the way of “The Last Metro.”

Except for one thing: It had no final theatrical destination point. Although Rockwell had spent nearly 15 years with the Colony, a theater that consistently tries to make room for an annual musical on its subscription season, this Paris epic seemed too much for the small theater to handle four years ago. Happy with a reading of the show at New York’s Musical Theatre Works, but with no production offers, Gerson and Rockwell could do nothing but wait.

Colony artistic director Barbara Beckley ended that a year ago, when, as Gerson recalls, “she just decided to do it. She thought the theater, after 15 years and lots of musical experience, was ready. You know, with 180 or so light cues, a 25-member cast and the obvious demands of the set, this is a huge project for a little theater.”

“The Colony not only can’t afford an orchestra,” adds Rockwell, “it can’t afford to pay two pianists, which is how I wanted it performed. But the synthesizer alternative usually sounds tinny, and that was the last thing we wanted.”

Enter Geoffrey Stradling, orchestrator, arranger and, by reputation, a master of the synthesizer jungle. “The score is on tape,” Gerson admits, “and though it won’t be a 20-member pit orchestra, it’s as close to that as you can get. With the voices Todd has put together, we’re very pleased. I must admit I had my doubts going in, but not anymore.”

For his own part, director Nielsen never had doubts, “not with the years I’ve spent at the Colony. This is not a big, splashy musical. I wanted the effect of seeing many layers of action at once, with a dark, shadowed look that suggests the desperate times then. People didn’t know whom to trust.”

Those desperate times may not be a thing of the past.

“The rise of the skinheads and Hitler youth is a fairly recent thing,” Rockwell notes, “and the economic downturn and the AIDS crisis have definitely created a climate of desperation and intolerance.”

Like a two-part harmony, Gerson continues, “This is the mood Hitler fed on, and the tragic culmination of Hitler’s power is what the people in ‘The Last Metro’ are faced with. Yet even the evil critic, Daxiat, has his reasons for collaborating. People who do evil things are more interesting if we see why they do them.”

“The Last Metro” plays at the Colony Studio Theatre, 1944 Riverside Drive, Los Angeles, at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays until Sept. 29. Tickets: $18 to $20. Information: (213) 665-3011.