‘Elmer Gantry,’ Born Again : Director Des McAnuff breathes new life into producer Joseph Cates’ second try at a musical version--but don’t mention the ‘B’ word

Superstition insists that none dare speak its name.

“It” is the Great White Way, Broadway, the promised land, which is beckoning “Elmer Gantry,” a musical adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel that has its West Coast premiere tonight at La Jolla Playhouse. Like actors in “Macbeth” who fearfully call Shakespeare’s accident-cursed tragedy “the Scottish play,” the production team for “Elmer Gantry” believes the mere mention of the “B” word might sabotage this very promising, very ambitious and very American venture.

Unlike the spectacle-oriented British musicals “Miss Saigon” and “Phantom of the Opera,” no helicopter or chandelier hovers over the Playhouse production of “Elmer Gantry.”

Director Des McAnuff, in tandem with set designer Heidi Landesman, is keeping the focus on the story’s theme of sexual obsession and religious martyrdom. John Bishop’s book, like the popular 1960 film version, depicts the section of the novel where “born-again” preacher Gantry seduces the evangelist Sharon Falconer. But unlike the film, Bishop introduces black gospel singers and a Jim Bakker-style religious retreat. He’s made the sinner Gantry more sympathetic, both victim and exploiter of the savior Falconer. By moving the action from the World War I era to 1933, Bishop allows for inescapable comparisons between today’s recession and yesterday’s Depression.

The Mel Marvin/Bob Satuloff score also emerges from grass-roots America: bluegrass, gospel, country, folk, jazz and blues. “The genre is what I call natural American forms,” explains composer Marvin, adding a crucial description: “unmanipulated.”

Above all, this “Elmer Gantry” has soul. The cast is populated with true believers and Bible Belt veterans. Mark Harelik brings to Gantry his exposure to Christianity in rural Texas. Sharon Scruggs brings to the Falconer role her own childhood background as the daughter of a Southern fundamentalist preacher. Devout Christian Darlene Love, who came to prominence singing “He’s a Rebel,” finally makes her West Coast stage debut as one of Gantry’s gospel belters.

Won’t all this make Broadway believers beckon with open arms and investment monies?

Ssssssshhhhhhhhhh .

“Lately it’s been a principle around the Playhouse that nobody talks about it, nobody really cares about it,” says McAnuff, La Jolla Playhouse artistic director. “If it happens, great; if it doesn’t, great.”

McAnuff knows the American musical landscape, having triumphed in 1985 with “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the musical that earned seven of Broadway’s Tony Awards. If McAnuff believes the “B” word should go unspoken, so be it. “Part of me would love to be 21 again and believe in Santa Claus,” McAnuff says, “but right now we’re just trying to create and hoping it goes well here. If you second-guess what might work in a commercial house, then you start making choices for the wrong reasons.”

If “Elmer Gantry” does reach Broadway, it will be for the second time. In 1970, a version simply titled “Gantry” made its Broadway debut. Despite stars Rita Moreno and Robert Shaw, this pop-oriented production closed after 28 previews and four performances at the George Abbott Theater. That production had different composers and a different author, but the same producer who lost $400,000 on Broadway in 1970 is funding La Jolla’s version in 1991.

To say that 67-year-old producer Joseph Cates believes in “Elmer Gantry” is an understatement. He first acquired the theatrical rights from the Sinclair Lewis Estate in 1967, convinced by his experiences as a television producer of country music specials in the South that the novel would make “an indigenous American musical. I became really aware while working down there of the impact of ‘born-again’ Christians and the Evangelists. But the 1970 production didn’t do justice to the basic material. And I hurt that first attempt badly by miscasting it. (Robert) Shaw just wasn’t right as an American.”

However, Cates never lost faith in its potential and continuously optioned the rights. A decade after the Broadway failure, he decided that the musical adaptation was flawed. He hired playwright John Bishop to write an entirely new book. Meanwhile, Cates, a New Yorker and always a lover of Broadway (he now produces the televised Tony Awards for CBS), accepted the brutal reality that “developing a musical takes years. It just takes years. These are long labors of love. In the meantime you have to find other ways to make a living.”

Among Cates’ many producing efforts was the annual television fund-raiser for Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. In 1985, Ford’s executive producer Frankie Hewitt attended a run-through of the new “Elmer Gantry.”

“I loved the book and hated the music,” says Hewitt. She persuaded Cates that the musical needed a new score and enlisted Marvin and Satuloff, who had been collaborators since 1969.

Marvin was a particularly appropriate choice. Growing up in South Carolina, he was exposed to tent meetings similar to the ones Gantry exploits. For “spending money” as a boy, Marvin played organ in the Methodist Church and continued supporting himself while at Columbia University graduate school by playing at churches in New York. His original ragtime musical “Tintypes” became a hit at the Mark Taper Forum in 1981, as did his “The Portable Pioneering Prairie Show” at Ford’s Theatre. Both were quintessential American works, Hewitt knew. Marvin also scored another Sinclair Lewis stage adaptation, “Babbitt,” at the Mark Taper Forum for the 1987 Arts Festival.

“We only had a five-week rehearsal period,” Marvin remembers of the Ford’s “Elmer Gantry.” “We were all a little frustrated because we had not been able to go in and fix the things that we had wanted to fix.”

“It was essentially a first draft,” echoes Satuloff, “written and put on hurriedly in order to meet a schedule.”

But then history became “Elmer Gantry’s” publicist: The night the musical opened at the Ford Theater in 1988, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart resigned from his media pulpit after confessing to carnal sins. Jim and Tammy Bakker’s fall from grace were still making headlines. Ford’s Theatre had the highest advance-sale day in its history. The reviewers raved and its five-month run broke the theater’s box-office records.

Did Broadway beckon?

It did to Cates, who told the Washington Post: “I think we’ve got a great American musical on our hands. We’re going to New York.”

It didn’t beckon Bishop.

“I was one of the people who yelled and screamed not to take it to New York,” Bishop remembers. “At first I was kind of a voice in the wilderness, roundly disliked by just about everybody.”

But Bishop believed there were story problems in the second act he never had time to resolve. The Marvin/Satuloff composing team began having doubts, too. When New York producers saw it in Washington, they encouraged revisions. “ ‘Don’t be fooled by the reviews,’ ” Cates remembers the producers advising. “ ‘You’re not ready for Broadway yet. You need a new actor as Gantry, a new director, new scenery, and much of the score reshaped.’ ”

“We had been so hopeful we could take it to Broadway,” Hewitt sadly remembers.

Cates and Hewitt joined forces and together resumed the relentless march toward Broadway. The search for a new director became their primary focus. In an effort to raise the required $4 million, a backers’ audition was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in early 1990. About $1 million was invested. Hartford Stage Artistic Director Mark Lamos agreed to direct, but then dropped out. Actor Treat Williams was set to portray Gantry, but film commitments eroded his availability.

Meanwhile, Mel Marvin supported himself through a variety of smaller jobs. One was providing incidental background music at La Jolla Playhouse for Des McAnuff’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” Although he had not seen “Elmer Gantry,” McAnuff knew of its success at the Ford.

Producer Cates’ daughter, Phoebe, had performed at La Jolla in “The Three Sisters. “She grew as an actress tremendously under Des’ direction,” the elder Cates enthuses. “He taught her a lot. It left Des and I feeling warm towards each other.”

Building on this trust, co-producers Cates and Hewitt decided that the next step for “Elmer Gantry” would be La Jolla. “The next production needed to be big enough to move forward,” Hewitt says. “The La Jolla Playhouse has a Broadway-sized stage.”

A “special arrangement” was forged with the Playhouse, cemented with $475,000 that Cates and Hewitt provided through a contract formally titled “The Elmer Gantry Try-Out Partnership.”

Then McAnuff began reshaping “Elmer Gantry” in his own style. He drafted Tony-winning designer Heidi Landesman, who had both designed and co-produced “Big River” for Broadway. He lured Ted Sperling, who had just assisted Stephen Sondheim on three consecutive shows, including “Sunday in the Park with George,” from New York to be his musical supervisor and conductor. And he began supervising drastic revisions of the Ford’s Theatre version.

“I spent a long time getting to know this musical,” McAnuff says of “Elmer Gantry.” “Unlike a lot of big musicals, there is real content here. This has something important to say about faith and about faithlessness and maybe even our country in this time.”

McAnuff’s own commitment to the American musical genre can be traced to his high school experiences in Toronto. While a player in a rock band, the teen-age McAnuff saw the touring production of “Hair” in 1969. It inspired him to write and star in an original high school musical. “That made the decision of what I was going to do with my life,” he remembers.

McAnuff drives both himself and his collaborative team through methodical 18-hour workdays.

“We fight like cats and dogs,” Bishop says of McAnuff. “He’s as stubborn as I am. I rewrote a third of the book for La Jolla. He pushed me harder and I did better. Des is tough. Now I’ve made it a love story. I’m more concerned with what love and faith are about. I’m not out to hammer the Jimmy Swaggarts of this world.”

Marvin and Satuloff composed a minimum of seven new songs for La Jolla. “It’s a constant refining process,” lyricist Satuloff explains, “that goes on and on and on. A song has to be approved by Des first. Some of what we’ve written hasn’t got past him. This man really knows what he’s doing. He’s really articulate about what he feels a song needs.”

McAnuff kept only two performers from the Ford cast, a minor background musician and Scruggs as the zealous Falconer.

“It was very courageous of Des to cast me,” Scruggs believes. “Any other director would have wanted to start fresh. He didn’t know if I’d be flexible and would change. But his eye is so good.”

What McAnuff may have sensed in Scruggs was her roots in evangelism. Her father was a minister with the Assemblies of God. With her four sisters, Scruggs sang in his church choir. She watched her father teach homiletics in Bible School so “preachers could manipulate their voices so they could manipulate a crowd.”

“I went to a different school every year of my life,” Scruggs says, “wherever the Lord called. My character of Sharon feeds off the memory of my father. This (role) is the ultimate revenge.”

McAnuff also cast Jennifer Leigh Warren, who had starred in “Big River” and who was raised in a Baptist household. But his casting coup was Darlene Love. In “Elmer,” Warren portrays Love’s daughter; both are members of a gospel choir.

Love, who says she grew up “all over Los Angeles, all the way from the mountains to the water,” is the daughter of a Pentecostal minister and sang in the church choir along with her sister and brothers. That led to her work while in high school as a studio backup singer for producer Phil Spector. A chance recording of “He’s a Rebel” made her a star at age 15.

Several other pop hits followed, including “Da Doo Ron Ron,” but her fame did not make for riches. “I never got paid for the things that I did,” Love says, laughing. “Even today, ‘GoodFellas’ had two of my songs in the soundtrack (“He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home”) and I never got a dime.”

In the early ‘80s, Love was reduced to singing on cruise ships. But in 1985 she was cast in the Broadway musical “Leader of the Pack.” It was Love’s first stage play. “After that they started calling me up for auditions,” she says, still amazed at the turn of fate, “and I got cast as the school teacher in the musical ‘Carrie.’ I started off singing ‘He’s a Rebel’ and now I’m singing ‘Carrie’ at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. It was like, ‘Am I really here?’ ”

But after three months developing the musical in England, “Carrie” lasted only a week on Broadway. Yet Love’s stage exposure led to recurring roles in the smash “Lethal Weapon” films--and to “Elmer Gantry.”

“I have a heavy gospel background but this is the first time I ever portrayed a gospel singer,” she says. “I want people from Los Angeles to see me in this. My brother and sister-in-law have a church together in L.A. called the Word Center, and my other brother is a minister at Chapel of the King on Western and 54th. We were all raised Pentecostal, which is how I know so much about blacks integrating into white situations like in ‘Elmer Gantry.’ I’m filled with the Holy Spirit and can really discuss that with (the production team). I speak in tongues and pray in the spirit to the Lord all the time. I have to pull on that strength sometime. I was out on the road with Cher last year for nine months and I pulled on all the strength I had.”

Just as she did with “Carrie” and for the Cher tour, Love leads the production’s prayer circle. Does she pray for the success of “Elmer Gantry”?

“Of course,” Love answers. “I believe in saying how you feel and putting it out there. They don’t want to say it, but I just put it in the air. From my mouth to God’s ears, there it goes. It’s that superstitious thing. But I’m not superstitious. I really love opening night on Broadway. Opening for movies is OK, but opening night on Broadway, that’s big time.”

But the more experienced theater professionals associated with the La Jolla Production still choose not to not speak that “B” word.

“If there’s life after La Jolla,” says McAnuff, “I’m not necessarily convinced it’s Broadway. If the time comes when larger ambitions are there, we’ll deal with it then. But it’s definitely not the time now.”

Composer Marvin, veteran of numerous Broadway shows, agrees with McAnuff. “If you try to do a (regional) show for Broadway, it just never happens, somehow,” he says. “Do your work and do it the best you can. That’s all you can control.”

But another Broadway-seasoned New Yorker, musical supervisor and conductor Sperling, is more positive. He looks back on his experiences with Sondheim and says, “I think this has a shot at Broadway. It’s good enough. I think good will out.”

Certainly producers Cates and Hewitt aren’t afraid of the “B” word. Hewitt has arranged for her potential investors to fly out from the East Coast, including CBS anchorman Dan Rather and Senators Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.). A minimum of $4 million would be required for a move to New York, they say.

They hope, Cates explains, to open there in February after another rehearsal period. But before their prayers can be answered, the La Jolla Playhouse must deliver. “If it’s really sensational in La Jolla,” Cates vows, “we will take it to Broadway. May the wish be father to the thought: a major American musical. Nothing less than that would satisfy Frankie (Hewitt) or myself.”

But Love has enough faith and spirit to carry “Elmer Gantry” by prayer alone. “It has all the ingredients of hit, hit, hit!” she shouts for all to hear. “We going to the great milky white way!”