Rock ‘n’ Roller Singing a Different Tune : * Stage: Adam Ant is producing the rock saga ‘Be Bop A Lula,’ opening tonight at Theatre/Theater.

He’d first seen this play a year ago in the basement of a Hollywood rock club, but Adam Ant was still laughing, scribbling down his impressions of this latest dress rehearsal for “Be Bop A Lula.”

Up on stage was actor Paul Hipp as rock pioneer Gene Vincent, making sick jokes to a horrified Eddie Cochran about Buddy Holly’s plane crash. And the legal pad on Ant’s lap was just another sign that this rock ‘n’ roller has become a theatrical producer, joining former Doors drummer John Densmore and other investors to open the drama tonight at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood.

“Be Bop A Lula,” written by Rex Weiner, re-creates one night in a hotel room with Vincent and Cochran during their doomed 1960 tour of England. Before leading to Cochran’s death in a traffic accident, the play explores the traditional rock ‘n’ roll themes of youth, sex and rebellion, along with the less celebrated elements of fear, competition, substance abuse and religious guilt.

It’s that sort of grim realism that originally attracted Ant to the script. He said the play captures the unglamorous side of life on the road, with “the exhaustion of the players, their hopes and dreams and fears. It’s really like approaching a period piece. We had to research it. And I like the history of (rock music).”

Ant’s own rock career emerged from London’s new music scene of the late-1970s, ultimately earning new wave hits with the singles “Antmusic” and “Goody Two Shoes.” But in recent years, he’s been spending his time between albums in acting classes or with the occasional film or television role.

With “Be Bop A Lula,” his first effort as a theatrical producer, Ant said, “My job is to get some new, fresh people in. For a lot of people, this is their first production. So it’s a young production, with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Among those young faces is actor Donal Logue as the lighthearted Cochran. And working as the play’s musical director is local rock/country luminary James Intveld.

Alternately limping and swaggering across the stage as the leather-clad Vincent is Hipp, who was nominated for a Tony Award last year for his title-role performance in “Buddy.” But where that musical drew its strength from a high-energy re-creation of Holly’s final concert, “Be Bop A Lula” is mostly drama, with only brief raw moments of music to illuminate the emotional tension.

“Gene was a hard-living, hard-driving, alcoholic drug addict, with a bad leg that tormented him his whole life,” Hipp said, comparing the two rock pioneers he has portrayed. “It was a real spiral downward for Gene the whole time. So there are certain similarities. They were driven by demons, but just different demons.”

He added that the musical euphoria of “Buddy” was “a blast . . . But if you came to see ‘Citizen Kane,’ you went away a little disappointed. This play is a bit weightier. It’s definitely not a puff piece about rock ‘n’ roll.”

For Densmore, who has watched the legend of Doors singer Jim Morrison balloon into a superhuman antihero with little in common with the bandmate he remembers, the new play was an opportunity to “deglamorize” rock musicians.

Long active as an actor, playwright and musician in the local theater scene, Densmore added that he was also happy to re-introduce Cochran and Vincent to an American audience that has largely forgotten them. Vincent died broke, of a bleeding ulcer, in 1971. “Nobody’s heard of these guys outside of heavy music fans, and they were important roots,” Densmore said. “They certainly aren’t overblown at all. And it’s great to discover more of the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. They’re not Elvis or the Beatles, but they’re in there with Fats Domino and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.”

The story of these rock musicians, and of Cochran’s premonition of his own impending death, came to Weiner while researching the characters for an aborted film project. The old themes of rock music had always intrigued him, he said.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is one of the last areas of culture that Americans share in common. We used to tell stories about Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett,” Weiner said. “Nobody knows about those people anymore. But everybody knows the legend of Elvis. So these guys are sort of our modern myths.”

The play, Weiner said, is not just a historical drama, but also offers a relevant message in this era of AIDS. “It relates not just about rock ‘n’ roll. It’s about any two young men, or any young person, who comes to terms with his mortality. At that time, youth was resurgent in America. Then Buddy Holly died, and all those young rockers got their first whiff of mortality.”

* “Be Bop A Lula,” Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays. Through May 29. $15. Call (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.