‘Teacher’ Drama Finds New Life as Latino Story : Theater: El Rancho High students get a taste of Broadway by resurrecting a musical that had been on the shelf 15 years.

Imagine the unlikely. A potential Broadway musical is derailed when the star takes ill. The work languishes on the shelf for 15 years and then finds renewed workshop life with Broadway aspirations and a revamped Latino story line in a high school drama production.

Not a regional theater, nor an out-of-town theater. Not even a college theater, but a high school!

Such is the curious odyssey of the new musical, “Teacher, Teacher,” that drama students at El Rancho High School are performing in the 150-seat theater on the Pico Rivera campus. The show opened Wednesday and will run through Saturday night.

Drama instructor Stan Wlasick, El Rancho’s one-man theater department, provided the momentum for resurrecting the musical.

“A year ago I heard a pirated tape of the original score and thought what a great story it would be if the musical book were ‘Hispanicized’ so it would mean something to our predominantly Hispanic student population,” he said.

The musical version, based on Emlyn Williams’ classic autobiographical play “The Corn Is Green,” was originally called “Miss Moffat.” Directed by Josh Logan and starring Bette Davis and Dorian Harewood, it was shuttered prematurely when Davis became ill during out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia in 1976.

Until El Rancho High picked up the rights, it was dead in the water. Now, thanks to Wlasick’s efforts and to Broadway composer Albert Hague, librettist Renee Orin and lyricist Thomas O’Malley--the show’s co-creators who happily reworked the book and score--the show is on the road once again.

Wlasick had to find the show’s living creators and get their cooperation. Williams and Logan had died. Through the Dramatists Guild, the teacher tracked down Hague and Orin, who are husband and wife, at their home in Marina del Rey.

In the original musical, Davis (in what turned out to be her last stage appearance) played a teacher who came to the Deep South at the turn of the century and helped a black field hand achieve his educational promise with a scholarship to Harvard. (In Williams’ autobiographical version, the playwright was an impoverished Welsh student raised by a teacher who got him a scholarship to Oxford.)

But nothing works like a variation on a theme. What Wlasick and his El Rancho drama students have done is to turn the central figures into Latinos, and place the setting in the contemporary vegetable fields and grape vineyards of California’s San Joaquin Valley.

In the high school production, students Erika Chavez and Pete Morales play the teacher and the adolescent charge who is inspired to pursue a higher goal.

“The play deals with the importance of education and the courage it takes to overcome prejudice,” Wlasick said, “not only by whites but by those within the Mexican race who belittle those who try to better themselves by accusing them of ‘acting white.’ ”

Hague and Orin (the former was the curmudgeonly music professor Shorofsky in the film and TV series “Fame”) played and sang all the show’s new songs for the El Rancho students before rehearsals began. Four of the show’s songs preserve Williams’ original lyrics.

Hague and Orin plan to attend Saturday night. “We will take a big look at it,” Orin said, “and make further changes, I’m sure. We hope to workshop it across the country and reopen it on Broadway or London.”

She added: “I would love to see Angela Lansbury or Tyne Daly in the role of the teacher. Either one would be perfect.” No harm in wishing.

Ironically, in 1976--the same year that Bette Davis was playing Miss Moffat, the teacher--Wlasick was a young actor in Laguna Beach playing the role of the young student in a production of “The Corn Is Green” at the Laguna Moulton Playhouse.