STAGE : Can There Be a Second Time Around? : Singer-songwriter Hollye Leven seemed well on the road to fame when she was nearly crippled in a fall; now’s she got a musical that may go to Broadway

Singer-songwriter Hollye Leven and her band are on stage at the Genghis Cohen “cantina.” Smells of Sichuan beef and Chipotle chicken from the adjacent restaurant waft through the room. The nightclub is maybe the size of a living room.

Leven, however, is belting it out like she’s playing the Forum. She’s tossing off self-assured patter between songs, too, introducing a romantic ballad she just wrote for a major motion picture, a rock ‘n’ roll tune from her “soon-to-be hit musical.”

As she winds down her 30-minute set, a guy in the back hollers out, “Take it to Broadway, baby,” and everybody laughs.

Everybody, that is, except Hollye Leven, her manager, her attorney and the record executives packing the house. They’re all betting that’s exactly where she’s headed.

The 37-year-old guitarist with the Bob Dylan style and Kim Carnes voice is perched for stardom. Again. In the late ‘70s, when she was barely in her 20s, Leven was touring the country, talking record deals and opening shows for people like Mose Allison and Billy Joel. Then, in 1981 came what she now calls “a little career detour”--a devastating accident that left her body so badly smashed there were no guarantees she’d ever walk again, much less play music.

But Leven did not give up. Instead of surrendering to fate, she fought back, rebuilding her body and recharging her career. With a perseverance and determination that even her physical therapist calls inspirational, she refused to be a victim. Rarely, if ever, did she stop believing in herself.

Leven would not be denied her dreams. Not by record companies or theatrical producers. And not by doctors: “I made up my mind that I had two choices--to be crippled or not,” Leven says today. “(When) the doctor said, ‘Only 1% of the people with your kinds of injuries do the kinds of things ever again that you want to do,’ I said, ‘Why can’t I be that 1%?’ ”

Physical therapy went on for years, sometimes two and three times a week. She stopped touring, but she kept writing songs. Besides tending bar, she joined a band, trekking to clubs in the middle of nowhere, playing guitar at the back of the stage so her leg brace and wired arms would be less conspicuous.

Same story with “Funny Business,” her rock ‘n’ roll musical about stand-up comics. She revised it again and again, tinkering with the plot, writing new songs, getting rejected and starting over: “Giving up was not an option, until or unless someone who I respected said it’s not any good. I tried to get people to say that to me but nobody would.”

There are no visible signs of the accident today, not even a limp. But nothing came easily. Even when her first musical, “Polo Lounge,” nestled for several months in tiny local theaters, drawing both encouraging reviews and a cult following, she recalls making just $60 a week. “I’d wake up every morning saying ‘I’m gonna die, I can’t continue this,’ ” Leven says now. “I couldn’t work any harder, and I couldn’t work any longer than 18 hours a day.”

Better to write a big, commercial Broadway musical. So she came up with “Funny Business,” “A Chorus Line”-style story set in a comedy club. A handful of comics turn out short, topical comedy routines throughout a musical loaded with singing and dancing to gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, even rap music. Leven figured it would take “Funny Business” six months to hit the big time.

Five years later, the odds are improving. Polygram Diversified Entertainment, a producer and investor in the Broadway production of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” envisions “Funny Business” as a long-term money machine. While next year is probably the earliest the general public could see Leven’s show, Polygram executives talk of not just record albums but Broadway, touring productions, maybe a movie.

“It ‘ s young and it’s hip,” says Holly Browde, vice president of business affairs for Polygram Holding Inc. “Broadway for too long has been viewed as something older, wealthier people enjoy and not something accessible to the audience that would buy Michael Jackson records. (Polygram) now has so many different divisions and facets that can work with this one product that we pounced on it.”

“Funny Business” started taking shape in the late ‘80s. Friend Billy Riback took Leven around to comedy clubs, introducing her to his world and its people. “Hollye would bring her tape recorder and interview me for hours,” recalls comic Riback, today also producer/writer/warm-up for the TV comedy series “Home Improvement.” “I told her stories about being on the road, about my mentors and tormentors, about the life of a stand-up comic.”

Leven paid close attention. She read books, interviewed more people, visited comedy clubs night after night. She wrote a few songs, brought in four talented friends to record them, then called on everyone she knew for advice on how to develop her idea into a viable show.

Through draft after draft, “Funny Business” moved from a few songs and an outline to a full musical script and score. Leven sent her recording and 98-page script to dozens of theater and music people, but $7,000 and eight months later, there had not been a single response. So she sent herself to New York to personally nudge potential producers.

Enter Fred Gershon. “There are two critical ingredients for success,” says Gershon, a producer of “La Cage aux Folles” and other shows. “One is talent. Hollye Leven believed in herself and that’s the second ingredient--a self-belief, a passion that what you are doing is right and that when doors are slammed in your face, your hide is thick enough and you don’t go into the corner and hide. You go on to the next door.”

Gershon helped her to meet other theater people, then encouraged her to accept an offer to develop the show through the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival. Composer and director Mel Marvin, who worked with Leven at the Taper workshop, calls the musical “incredibly melodic and engaging,” and also encouraged Leven to keep going.

That was 1990, and the script has now been totally rewritten--42 drafts so far by Leven’s own count. There have been workshops, rewrites, rehearsals and performances all over Los Angeles. “I learned that scripts and tapes don’t work,” Leven says today. “People have to see and hear it. And each time I saw it, I saw where the problems were and went on a mission to fix them.”

From overseeing recording sessions at a tiny studio out in Sun Valley to supervising West Side workshops for potential backers, she is decidedly a woman obsessed. If somebody has to move a table to accommodate a new plug when a fuse blows, that somebody is generally Leven. Even at an industry workshop last spring, she was neither backstage nor in the audience, but rather hovering over the sound mixing board.

Leven doesn’t want any surprises on “Funny Business” either. Each of the show’s seven comics provide up to three minutes of original material, but only in specified sections. “Hollye hears everything before we go on,” says actor and comic John Marshall Jones, who has appeared in the musical’s last two workshops. “She tells us exactly what we can and cannot do.”

One thing they can do is be very timely. Jones, for instance, included references to the Rodney G. King beating in one of his routines at a workshop last fall; a performance in late April included material that grew out of the King trial verdict. Because comics keep coming up with new material, says Leven, “the show can never really age. It can retain its vitality. I told them I want it to be as topical as this morning’s news.”

Leven’s husband of three years, entertainment lawyer Seth Lichtenstein, has accommodated “amazing stuff”--scripts all over the house, actors and comics wandering in and out at all hours, recording sessions way past midnight. Then again, he was a musician before he was a lawyer and, she says, “that’s why he gets it. Nobody else would have put up with this.”

Leven grew up in St. Louis’ bars and nightclubs, accompanying her pianist father from one gig to another, so young that he often had to carry her home, asleep, on his shoulder. She began playing guitar when she was 8 and practiced so much as a teen-ager, she says, that her hands bled.

Her first job was at a small club in Chesterfield, Mo. The place was dark and smoky and she was 16, too young to even be there, much less entertain. She drank Golden Cadillacs--a combination of brandy, Galliano and cream--out of a coffee cup to bolster her courage.

She spent a year studying music at Clark University, another at UCLA. She was 19 when she went on the road, a long-haired girl in tight jeans, a knowing smile. Touring the country, she opened for Muddy Waters in Chicago, Mose Allison in Salt Lake City, Warren Zevon at the Roxy in West Hollywood.

Her gravelly voice wasn’t much suited to the Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins songs other women sang then, and she was soon writing her own stuff. Reviews were good--the Los Angeles Free Press called her a singer-songwriter-musician “definitely worthy of notice,” and the Los Angeles Times called her technique “appealing in its rawness.” She cut a demonstration record.

“Hollye had both a physical voice and an inner voice that were very particular and very engaging,” says Chuck Plotkin, a long-time co-producer of Bruce Springsteen’s records and then an executive at Elektra/Asylum Records. “I said, ‘You have the raw material to be an artist, (and) you’ll do it if you manage to stay at it.’ ”

Nobody factored in chance, however, and on Dec. 18, 1981, everything changed. On vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Leven was out drinking with friends on the balcony of a popular discotheque. Her sandal got caught in a cobblestone, she grabbed for the handrail, the handrail came loose, and she fell 30 feet.

She heard everything break as she hit the concrete. Then a 200-pound man landed on top of her. People pulled him off, but Leven’s kneecaps, elbows, wrists and hands were broken. Her teeth had gone straight through her lip and one eye socket was broken. The two parts of her right arm were attached by skin, not bone, and she couldn’t move anything.

She was first rushed to a nearby clinic, then airlifted to a Los Angeles hospital.

Leven recounts the horror of seeing her reflection in the mirrored sunglasses of an ambulance attendant. She re-creates the moment when, being wheeled into the operating room at Cedars-Sinai, she started yelling, “Set my arm like Les Paul,” the legendary musician whose crushed arm was permanently set so that he could play his guitar.

Leven says she was unsuccessful in attempts to sue the disco, which she says is now closed. Medical insurance picked up costs the first two years of major surgery and physical therapy, she adds, after which her policy was canceled. During the three years she wasn’t working and had no other insurance, says Leven, the doctors and physical therapists treated her for free “because I was so motivated. I had to pay hard costs for things like X-rays, but they didn’t charge for their services.”

Physical therapy continued long after she left the hospital, taking her in and out of medical offices regularly for nine years. Spurred on by memories of her late mother, who was paralyzed from multiple sclerosis, Leven persisted, fighting the pain, rebuilding her body. Today her small frame seems nearly healed; she lifts weights and is back to running.

Friends from the ‘80s say she was in pain--”just being on her feet took courage,” recalls one--but she never talked about it. The only time it came up, says one collaborator, is when she drew on the experience in her songs.

Yet for a while she thought of little else, and even today it is rarely out of mind.

“People don’t realize that when something like that happens to you--in a billionth of a second your life just changes,” Leven says today. “I have a lyric to one song: ‘It could all be gone in a second flat, in the time that it takes for your fingers to snap.’ It’s not a brilliant lyric, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

Those days, Leven sometimes tended bar, sometimes performed with a local band called Mister Girl. They played local parties and clubs, places that drummer Debbie Reiss remembers by the flashing tilted cocktail glasses out front. On many nights, the five women in the band shared as little as $200 for four hours work, heading out to places like a small Mexican restaurant in Pico Rivera to play sets of Top 40 material, maybe a Leven song or two.

Single then, Leven lived in a converted garage she rented for $250 a month. Any money left over, and it wasn’t much, went toward the sophisticated computer equipment and instruments she needed for her music.

Leven and Lichtenstein live in a pleasant, rented house in a picturesque neighborhood. Leven’s studio is a small, cramped room with guitars along one wall, a computer and sound equipment on another. Stacks of audio and video cassettes, sheet music, notes, documents and such spill out of cupboards and bookcases.

Taped to walls in her studio are assorted newspaper articles with “you-can-do-it” sentiments, and Leven wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” There’s a tiny gold guitar on a chain around her neck, and her hair is still long, her clothes still folksy, her smile still childlike. She took a photograph of her audience at one workshop “so I could prove that people really showed up.”

That they did. Representatives from Polygram Diversified Entertainment were in the audience at Leven’s Odyssey Theatre showcase last fall, and started talking with the playwright and her manager the same week. Talks progressed, and over time Polygram signed Leven to a music publishing contract and agreed to back “Funny Business” through several more stages.

“Our highest aspirations would be for it to be a Broadway play and a film,” says New York-based PDE vice president Jeff Rowland, here last spring to see a workshop of the show at the Tiffany Theatre. “But one doesn’t start with those. The important thing is we made a commitment to back it and develop it with Hollye. So far our investment has been fairly modest (under $50,000) but our commitment is several times that.”

Leven is now off to a comedy festival in Montreal, more meetings with Polygram in New York, and casting sessions on both coasts. “Funny Business” is still being rewritten, but she’s already turned out a theme song and score for a TV pilot and three songs for James Brooks’ new movie musical for Columbia.

She has also written an outline for “Lightning Strikes,” a musical about her accident, but first comes “Harmony,” something a little more commercial.

“Harmony,” Leven says, “is a rock ‘n’ roll musical with the rebel spirit of ‘Thelma & Louise’ and the hopes and dreams of ‘The Commitments.’ ” Its plot: Five women “are out to change the world but first they have to get through the day.”

After all, that’s what she had to do. She may appear ingenuous and casual, but below the glib facade she is carefully weighing each thing she says, each action she takes. She spent two hours getting ready for this interview, for instance, and refers several times to notes on a legal pad.

Sitting in her studio, recounting her “little career detour,” she makes a tiny space with her fingers: “You learn that you’re this close to losing everything at any moment. . . . People go, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll start working on this, tomorrow I’ll take care of that,’ but nobody’s promised tomorrow.”