Hollywood Calls a Hot Playwright : Stage: Ken Ludwig has stage successes in ‘Tenor,’ ‘Crazy’ on each coast and he also practices law.

Playwright Ken Ludwig is enjoying the ultimate bi-coastal experience.

His successful Broadway comedy “Lend Me a Tenor” has just opened at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Across the country, his new Gershwin musical, “Crazy for You,” has just completed a 4 1/2-week preview run here at the National Theatre and is scheduled to open Feb. 19 on Broadway.

That’s not bad for a 41-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer. “My life has been going like a rocket,” he said in an interview at his townhouse on the outskirts of Georgetown.

Indeed it has. Another play, “Sullivan & Gilbert,” produced by the Kennedy Center and the National Arts Centre of Canada, was voted the best play of 1988 by the Ottawa critics. Ludwig wrote the 1990 Kennedy Center Honors show for CBS, which was nominated for an Emmy. He has finished a screenplay for “Lend Me a Tenor,” and his next assignment is to write the sequel to “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” for Steve Martin and Michael Caine.

While he wasn’t able to attend the opening of “Lend Me a Tenor” in Pasadena, he is relaxed about its prospects. The comedy ran for a year on Broadway, where it won numerous awards, and in London and Paris. In London, it was produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and nominated for the Olivier Award as the comedy of the year.

Its resounding success has allowed Ludwig to focus on the preparations for opening “Crazy for You” in New York. The first preview on Jan. 31 is a sold-out benefit. The production is one of five musicals on Broadway this season.

In Washington, where the musical garnered rave reviews, it was sold out the last week and a half, and broke the theater’s record for the biggest gross for a single performance on New Year’s Eve. President and Mrs. Bush brought 20 family members to one performance and the White House has asked the cast to perform next month for the nation’s governors.

What the public never saw was the grueling retooling process that Ludwig, director Mike Ockrent, and dance music arranger Peter Howard undertook to mold the production into the one they wanted. Concerned that the first act was eight to 10 minutes too long, they rewrote two scenes and switched them, and redid numerous other lines. It was at a Saturday matinee about a week after previews began that Ockrent and Ludwig looked at each other and knew that they had just given birth to their show.

“No matter how good the show is, or how much confidence you have, you have to push it, pull it, tug it, and hammer it into shape,” Ludwig said.

Early preview performances brought in $15,000 to $18,000 a day to the box office. But after good reviews of the Dec. 18 opening, daily box-office figures soared to $75,000 to $85,000.

Now, as the musical moves to the stage of the Shubert in New York, Ludwig said, “We’re confident we have the show we wanted to produce.”

The Washington preview run also reaffirmed his instinctive belief that it was necessary to take the production “out of town”--out of New York--rather than start there.

“The whole purpose of going out of town is to work on the substantive role of the show,” he said. “You need time to work on a musical. You don’t know they will work until you get them on their feet.”

It was a far different experience than that other play, “Nick and Nora,” which did not involve Ludwig, and which had a lengthy two-month preview tryout in New York in the fall, then opened and closed in about a week. Ludwig believes those involved with the musical were “terrifically talented people,” but after seeing a preview performance, he felt that “they just didn’t get it right.”

Writing for the stage and screen may seem an odd mix with Washington lawyering, but not for Ludwig.

“I’ve wanted to be in the theater since I was 6 years old,” he said. He was stage-struck from the first time his parents took him to see a play, “and it hasn’t changed one iota.”

Ludwig was born in York, Pa., played Henry Higgins in a high school play, and went to Haverford College, where he majored in music theory and composition, and wrote some comic spoofs for school productions. At graduation, his physician-father suggested that a career in law might provide him more stability than life as a young playwright, so he opted to go to Harvard Law School. But his soul burned to write for the theater.

Bored with his legal studies, Ludwig took a break to attend Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. Even there, the subject of law seemed dull, so he switched to English literature, then returned to Harvard to finish his degree in international law.

International business lured him to Washington and to the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson. But in a very un-Washingtonian fashion for eager young associates, he refused to work late at night or on weekends. All the while, he got up each morning at 4 a.m., took a shower and made coffee, and wrote from 4:30 to 8:30 a.m. before suiting up for work.

The law firm never rebuked him, he said, because, “they all knew I was writing. They took great pride in what I was doing.”

Three or four years later, when his plays were being produced, he was allowed to practice part time. With the success of “Lend Me a Tenor,” he knew that he wanted to write full time. He now maintains the status “of counsel” with the law firm, essentially consulting in areas of publishing, copyright and intellectual property rights.

Ludwig has mixed emotions about his dual careers. “Being a lawyer doesn’t help me in the least in being a playwright. I think it has hurt me in the sense that the initial reaction of people is to say he’s a dilettante (playwright) and that he doesn’t take it seriously.”

What has fortified him is his self-imposed discipline to write in solitude on a yellow legal pad in the same red chair in the same room of a townhouse that he shares with his wife, Adrienne George, an attorney. On the wall behind him is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase brimming with plays.

Writing plays has also piqued his interest in meshing the elements of his craft with the more visual techniques used to create movies.

“I find movies very exciting,” he said. “I want to write screenplays very much, but only for projects I care very much about.” The success of “Lend Me a Tenor” prompted a number of calls from Hollywood, but they turned out to be projects he didn’t want to do.

Regardless of the format, it is the genre of high comedy that is the focus of Ludwig’s passion. “The comic tradition that I admire and care about is the reason I write,” he said.