COVER STORY : Can This Man Save the Theater? : ‘Tommy’ has made Des McAnuff a hotter property. Now, can he continue to lure the Boomers to the stage with rock ‘n’ roll?

Last month Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, left his three-bedroom ocean-side apartment about four miles south of the theater and flew to New York to celebrate his 41st birthday at a party given for him in the East Village by Pete Townshend, the former airborne guitarist of the Who and more recently Tony Award-anointed composer. The next night, at another party given for the Broadway cast and crew of “The Who’s Tommy” at a Manhattan nightclub, McAnuff, who recently won a Tony for directing “Tommy,” performed the 1962 Rick Nelson rock ‘n’ roll ballad “Teen Age Idol” and the Buddy Holly anthem “Not Fade Away” backed by none other than Townshend on rhythm guitar.

“I was joined by some of the girls from the (show’s) chorus, who sang, ‘Um-bop, um-bop, um-bop,’ which helped a lot,” the director said. “It was a great thrill, really.”

The next day he checked up on “Tommy” at the St. James Theatre, then flew back to the West Coast to spend a couple of days in Los Angeles meeting with actors and discussing an independent film project with a Canadian producer. He returned to La Jolla to look in on final rehearsals of George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” at the La Jolla Playhouse, then two days after opening night, flew to London to see Townshend again and scout the West End for a theater to house the eventual London production of “Tommy.”

Then it was back to New York for meetings about the upcoming cast album release and national tour of “Tommy,” scheduled to begin in October, then up to Stockbridge, Mass., to inspect a new musical revue at the Berkshire Theater Festival, back to New York and finally back to La Jolla in time for the opening tonight of “The Hairy Ape,” by Eugene O’Neill. This stretch of his life covered a little more than three weeks.

It has been that kind of year for McAnuff, whose reputation as a leading resident theater director is well established, but whose name is now invoked more loudly as the guy who successfully chaperoned the former mod guitar-smasher Townshend down the red-carpeted aisle to a Broadway hit. Their kinetic, video-injected staging of “Tommy,” which Townshend composed in the late 1960s as a “rock opera” but had never officially dramatized until collaborating with McAnuff, is perhaps the most highly pedigreed rock musical on Broadway since the term tumbled out from the credits of “Hair” in 1967.

Originally an abstract concept album about a traumatized English boy who transcends the miseries of childhood by achieving mystical fame as a pinball genius, “Tommy” became in this new incarnation a more specific story set in post-World War II London, although McAnuff and Townshend decided to keep it largely an oratorio with a backbeat, forgoing a traditional book. It was awarded five Tonys in May, including McAnuff’s second as a director.

Not everyone in the theater (or the rock press) has been wild about “Tommy,” but whatever its flaws the show has made history for bringing cheek to cheek the long-separated sensibilities of rock and American musical theater. For those in McAnuff’s generation who grew up listening to the Who and the Rolling Stones on the radio but also found the theater a pretty interesting place (except for most musicals), it has been a long, strange wait.

Why is it that the theater took so long to hear the music that has been the soundtrack of the nation for more than 30 years? And why were the best rock and pop composers so blind to the appeal of writing music for the stage? The answer to the second question can probably be located at the cash register and in the theater’s diminished role in society, but if anyone can speak to these matters it may be McAnuff, who grew up in Toronto in the ‘60s taking every quarter note of the British Invasion to heart while simultaneously setting out to make a life for himself writing and directing plays and musicals.

“We’ve been terrible snobs about what we do,” McAnuff said one evening during a recent visit to Los Angeles. He was sitting in the bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel sipping a glass of white wine with a bottle of mineral water on the side. He had on a dark shirt, dark jacket and a broad black tie with large crescent moons and stars on it.

“Broadway was an insulated community from the ‘40s through the ‘60s--both in terms of the artists and the audiences. It was threatened by electric music, what Elvis was doing with his hips, race, sex. And in the resident (not-for-profit) theater movement there was a lot of prejudice against any musicals for years--the idea that musicals weren’t serious enough.”

Through the ‘70s and ‘80s, on Broadway and in London’s West End, there were Andrew Lloyd Webber and other younger composers influenced by the energy and pulse of rock, but to purists they were hardly the real thing, and even the rock-alikes were overshadowed by Broadway’s preponderant remembrances of things past.

“Part of it was that the stagecraft was slow to catch up with the possibilities for rock musicals,” McAnuff said. “Like the use of wireless microphones. ‘Tommy,’ technically, wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago. . . . We lost something through that period--the opportunity to be developing a body of work, the chance to create some exciting theater with people who should have been welcomed into the theater years ago. I think this is all painfully obvious.”

Not that he wasn’t doing his part. McAnuff, who was born in Illinois but moved to Toronto with his mother as an infant, learned to play the guitar at age 12 and was playing in small clubs and with rock bands by the time he was in high school. Seeing a production of “Hair” got him interested in the theater, and he began composing guitar-based scores for a number of musicals produced at alternative theaters in Toronto.

After moving to New York in 1977, he directed C. P. Lee’s “Sleak: The Snuff Rock Musical,” using a Clash-sponsored British band called Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, at a Manhattan rock club. New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp staged McAnuff’s play (with original songs) “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,” and after directing “Henry IV, Part 1” for Papp in Central Park, he was invited to stage his original show about the coming of Hitler, “The Death of Von Richthofen as Witnessed From Earth--A Play With Flying and Songs,” at the Public Theater in 1982, using music that was a combination of English music hall tradition and rock.

When McAnuff came west in 1983 at age 30 to head the reborn La Jolla Playhouse, he announced his au courant style to local audiences that first season by bringing in the spiky-minded Peter Sellars to direct Bertolt Brecht’s “Visions of Simone Machard,” which was followed by his own production of “Romeo and Juliet,” partly set in the fictional Verona, Calif.

The next year he joined forces with country songwriter Roger Miller and playwright William Hauptman to fashion a musical adaptation of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The show that emerged, “Big River,” went on to Broadway and won McAnuff his first Tony for directing.

Director Susan Cox assembled a revue of Randy Newman songs at the playhouse called “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong” that traveled to the Roxy in Los Angeles. The next year director James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim reworked their 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” based on the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play.

These were just some of the musicals for the first three seasons, it should be noted, at a theater that also specialized in the classics and new plays. Considering the dearth of new musicals on Broadway, such titles brought understandable attention to the playhouse.

In the years since, McAnuff has brought to his theater Ray Davies (of the Kinks) to score “80 Days,” the jazz brothers Julian and Nat Adderley for the gospel musical “Shout Up a Morning” and Mel Marvin to do a new musical based on Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Elmer Gantry.” Sondheim also wrote some new music for a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which McAnuff directed. Not all these shows have been successful, but they speak to a vision of musical theater beyond civic light opera.

“We’ve been trying to bring rock ‘n’ roll and theater together for a long time,” McAnuff said. He noted there have not been a lot of models to learn from. “I really can’t think of many. I remember a show called ‘Your Own Thing’ based on ‘Twelfth Night’ that was a minor influence. ‘Jacques Brel,’ even though I know that wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, it was very hip music, a great point of view. That was probably an influence.

“I think of ‘Dreamgirls’ as a kind of breakthrough musical even though it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll--it was Motown--but it was a different sound in the theater.”

And Andrew Lloyd Webber? “You know, I think that what he’s done is nothing short of miraculous. He has created, as Pete says, this giantism, this landscape that he occupies, it would seem, almost by himself. But I didn’t grow up listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber, I grew up listening to Pete Townshend. So I can admire what (Lloyd Webber) is doing, but I don’t have the same kind of emotional response to that music. Clearly other people do. But when I hear ‘Listening to You,’ it does something to me.”

A few days after our meeting in Los Angeles, McAnuff is back in his La Jolla apartment on a Sunday morning, catching his breath and getting ready for the opening that night of a postmodernist “Arms and the Man,” directed by Lisa Peterson, a playhouse associate. His wife, actress Susan Berman, and their 3-year-old daughter, Julia, have gone out on an errand. He is moving around the room in jeans and a long-sleeved jersey with a cup of black coffee and what seems a perpetual glint of optimism in his green eyes.

McAnuff is an average-sized man with devilish eyebrows that point toward the upper corners of a distinctively V-shaped face shaded by a close-cropped beard on the spade end. His voice, only vaguely Canadian, runs quickly with ideas and the sound of education but dips naturally enough into the rhythms of cool to mark him as, shall we say, blues-based. He studied theater at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto but did not graduate.

The living room area of the apartment has wall-to-wall carpeting, some merely functional furniture, a large black television set and the random decoration of stuffed animals and toys that leave the signature of a 3-year-old at play. A guitar case (he owns five) is nearby. “The guitars are my only possessions,” he says. Against the west wall, a set of salt-stained sliding glass doors open out to a view of the blue-gray Pacific. On top of the TV set is a Blockbuster Video copy of “Beetlejuice.”

“If I were a careerist--and I don’t think I am--I wouldn’t be doing musical theater,” he says. “It’s important, when talking about these projects, to remember those that didn’t go anywhere, that ended up in the dumpster.”

The success of “Tommy” has been a blessing for McAnuff and the playhouse, where the show began a little more than a year ago, but it has given some people the wrong idea, he says. “If there is a danger with a show like this, it’s that people think, ‘Oh, they’ll be fine now,’ ” meaning the not-for-profit playhouse that depends on grants and subsidies to survive, just like the Mark Taper Forum, the Old Globe in San Diego and other institutional theaters. Across the nation, resident theaters are struggling through the recession.

The playhouse was able to clear roughly an additional $500,000 last year from extending the show 110 performances in its 500-seat Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UC San Diego campus, but the extra income had to be applied to shortfalls from other productions. Once “Tommy” moved on to Broadway, the consortium of New York producers who put up the $6-million budget took control of its finances, returning a royalty of 0.5% of gross box-office receipts to the playhouse in a standard commercial producer-resident theater agreement. (Which with “Tommy” could amount to $2,500 a week, all of which is earmarked to help retire the theater’s debt of $1.5 million.)

The show’s successful transfer to Broadway also raised the thorny issue with some critics as to whether the not-for-profit theater, custodian of the classics and other noble intentions, should be aiming or developing shows for Broadway, where some people in the theater still actually make money.

McAnuff is not quick to anger, but this is a subject that almost brings red to his face: “It’s not an issue as far as I’m concerned. Because you can never expect to be commercially successful in the theater anyway. Look at the record. And then, should you want to be not successful?

“If we partner with somebody, we call the shots; nobody tells us what to do as far as casting, design, etc. These are healthy relationships as far as I’m concerned. We gain substantially back, it puts artists to work, and ultimately I’m interested in what serves artists’ work.”

The playhouse, whose five or six shows a year are budgeted at between $150,000 and $400,000 each, could never have afforded “Tommy,” which even in La Jolla cost almost $1 million. The additional “enhancement” money came from outside sources, including its eventual Broadway backers, Dodger Productions (of which McAnuff is a founding member) and PACE Attractions.

Still, McAnuff insists there was no thought of Broadway until two months into the run in La Jolla. The original plan put forth by PACE was simply to put the show on the road as a bus-and-truck production. “I can honestly say that no one ever mentioned Broadway in my presence except facetiously,” he says.

“I’m real committed personally to the musical being a legitimate part of our repertoire. And musicals are not happening. They’re happening once in a while because you get somebody like Garth Drabinsky, who developed ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ against all odds in Toronto, using I don’t know how much of his own money to make that happen, with the premiere musical director, Hal Prince. We’re going to get a musical every five years at that rate. The nonprofit theater has to find a way to make that happen.”

To hear him talk, McAnuff is not planning to ride the rocket of “Tommy” out of La Jolla; in fact, it’s hard not to notice that in conversation he often refers to himself and the playhouse as if they were one. Yet some might say it’s purely personal commitment that is keeping him here. As director and co-author of a Broadway hit that could conceivably spawn multiple productions, he stands to make a substantial amount of money over the years from the show, although he is quick to make the point that none of the investors has made a penny off “Tommy” yet.

The show has been “a dominating presence” in his life since it began 18 months ago, although he did find time to direct last season’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as plan the new season and attend to fund-raising and the other administrative chores that come with being an artistic director. (The playhouse pays him an annual salary of about $90,000.) He is not directing any shows during the current season, which runs May through October; he’ll be busy mounting the national tour of “Tommy.”

“I see the playhouse as my artistic home, and that’s not going to change unless the board decides they don’t see it as my artistic home, and I hope that doesn’t happen. I would very much like to stay here and continue to be part of this community. I feel like I’ve invested a lot in this place.”

Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Broadway’s next musical hit originating in La Jolla, with the leader of the Who flying back and forth from London to develop it. (Townshend will be back in La Jolla on Aug. 4, playing a one-night benefit concert for the playhouse.) But things have changed in the American theater almost as much as they have changed in baseball and the auto industry.

McAnuff says audiences here aren’t that different from those that came to see his shows when he was working at the Chelsea Theater Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. “I think what we share with those audiences is they didn’t know what to expect and seemed to like that. They seemed to come to the theater wanting to be surprised. I think the reputation of San Diego as a Navy town is a couple of decades old. There is a new kind of San Diego that’s more progressive.”

Clearly “Tommy” has changed his life in the way so many people in show business dream about, but his wife, Susan Berman (who starred in Susan Seidelman’s 1982 rock ‘n’ roll movie “Smithereens” and continues to act at the playhouse, most recently in Elizabeth Egloff’s “The Swan”), says he has taken the last year in stride. “What I love about Des is that he hasn’t changed. He’s a great father, a great husband. It hasn’t been overwhelming for him because he’s not a 20-year-old with an overnight success.”

There haven’t been that many new offers, McAnuff says. “Maybe I’ve had a few, but there are very few people who do musicals. It’s a small field. When you’re the flavor of the month--I’m not saying I am, but I may be one of the flavors of the month--I may get to see these projects earlier than I usually would. But there are damn few sexy projects in musical theater anyway.”

There is always Hollywood, but thus far it has not been much of a distraction for McAnuff, who just now begins to recite a list of names of talented theater directors of his generation who have been “lost” to the television factory because of the simple inducement of money. Although he recites the names as if giving a list of the dead, he also says, “I have nothing against money or artists making money.”

He is actually close to directing his first movie, a script by Canadian writer Hugh Graham based on a true crime story set in Toronto. “It looks like it might happen in October,” he says warily. “We’ll see.”

He says he would like to make a film, mentioning the examples of Orson Welles, Preston Sturges and, lately, Kenneth Branagh as theater people who went on to make distinguished movies. “I think Hollywood has an even shorter memory than the rest of our culture,” he says about this.

“Early on,” he says, “because we have this reversal of the season--mainly we operate from the spring through the fall--and being close to Hollywood and all, (I had) this sort of Bergman fantasy that we could have this company of actors that could do one film a year and develop this magnificent repertory. That’s one of the things that hasn’t worked out at all.”

But the proximity to Hollywood has almost certainly been an advantage in drawing to the playhouse some of America’s leading acting talent, which most people agree has steadily moved west in the last decade. Playhouse casts have included John Goodman, Linda Hunt, Holly Hunter, Amanda Plummer and Jon Lovitz, to name just a few.

But McAnuff is not really aiming himself at the studios.

“Artists have always been interested in reproduction,” he says. “You go from playing a concerto for the court to reproduction where you reach millions of people the way the Who have. It interests me. It’s based on the notion of posterity, I suppose. But I think the theater has taken on a new value too, because of the environment and nuclear proliferation. When we have such an uncertain future, the notion of live art becomes more highly valued. Theater might only reach a relatively few . . . people, but it can affect those people in a really meaningful way.

“I know it’s true of me. I’m a real film lover, but I have a harder time remembering films than I do theater experiences. I think it’s the human connection when you’re in a room with live people. They’re real, they’re actually living their lives before you. Even though with film there’s a high degree of verisimilitude, it’s not real, it’s an illusion. I think we make a different kind of emotional investment in it.”

“He’s always had this thing about flying, Des, and he has much more of a rock ‘n’ roll thing than I do,” James Lapine says. Lapine has known McAnuff for more than a decade, since both were doing shows at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater downtown. Lapine went on to become Stephen Sondheim’s director of choice, staging “Sunday in the Park With George” on Broadway, as well as venturing to La Jolla for “Merrily We Roll Along.” He’s back at the playhouse this summer, preparing to direct his own play, “Luck, Pluck and Virtue.”

“The thing about rock ‘n’ roll is that lyrically it doesn’t tell a story very well,” Lapine observes. “I think that’s one of the reasons there haven’t been more rock musicals. And even with ‘Tommy,’ you’re not getting the story from the lyrics but from the stagecraft.”

It is Sunday evening now, about an hour before the curtain of “Arms and the Man,” and McAnuff is in his humble trailer office on the UC San Diego campus. He has on a dark-olive double-breasted suit, dark shirt, tie and fresh white sneakers. Spread out on a table in front of him are blueprints for the road company staging of “Tommy.”

He is talking about how the show changed when it moved to New York from La Jolla. “The biggest change we made is we embraced pinball more as a metaphor for rock ‘n’ roll in Act II. . . . It’s totally obvious--and why I didn’t catch this in La Jolla I’ll never know--. . . that the pinball machine was really a Stratocaster (electric guitar), and that completed the notion of Pete really being Tommy.

“Going into La Jolla, perhaps in reaction to the (Ken Russell) film, it always seemed preposterous to me, the pinball wizard, once you got into the stadium-scale fame. It just didn’t seem to make sense. (The Who’s Roger) Daltrey actually said to me when he saw the opening here, ‘Why didn’t you put any pinball in the second act?’ And I thought, ‘Well, because it just doesn’t seem plausible.’ But as I watched the show over and over again, I started realizing, of course they’ll accept pinball if you can connect it to performance.

“The climax of the pinball sequence now is him, actually,” and here McAnuff rises to mimic Townshend’s patented windmill strumming of the guitar. “It’s the only place where any of Pete’s movement is used at all. On some level ‘Tommy’ is the story of rock ‘n’ roll, in the loosest terms. It’s the connection between the postwar generation and World War II.

“In the first couple meetings Pete and I had, we decided very quickly that the piece was autobiographical. Happily it related, of course, to his life as the principal creator and the person who put it together. But what allowed me to plug into it was that it sort of traced my own upbringing too. . . . My father was killed in a car crash before I was born; my father was RAF and was a Spitfire pilot. We had a certain amount of shared experience that way. We had turbulent early childhoods. So that was an easy decision to make.

“In La Jolla, the second act drifted into the guru thing. And his relation to his fans, which was disastrous--drama needs faces.”

And conflict. McAnuff believes there wasn’t enough in the original: “Originally we had tried to keep Tommy kind of an innocent, sharing his new knowledge with his followers. That just didn’t work. It was dramatically dead. Now it’s completely different. Tommy essentially wakes up mad and hasn’t finished his journey toward understanding.”

But, even after the changes, there are still some ‘60s loyalists who have not blessed this conspicuous marriage of theater and rock. Although the show has set box-office records in New York and is currently a tough ticket, there is a school of opinion among some critics that, despite Townshend’s involvement, the show lacks the hard edge of the original album and of the Who’s druggy, Dionysian philosophy of the streets. A short essay on the editorial page of the New York Times recently went so far as to call the show “Reagan-esque.”

McAnuff is well aware of the criticism. He takes a breath and says, “Pete’s philosophy and attitudes and ideas have changed over the last 20 years, and my response to this is: Whose haven’t? I think he really feels that we’ve opened the vein of ‘Tommy,’ that we’ve dug deeper than it simply being about his relationship to any one specific thing in his past.

“This is veracity in terms of ‘Tommy’; this is the guy who created it. It’s not me--I’m his collaborator, but it’s not like I had to force him into anything.

“I don’t know what to say to these people. I flash back to when I saw Bob Dylan play at a club in Toronto when I was 12. I saw him get booed by college kids when he put away his acoustic guitar and strapped on his Telecaster. I think this particular ‘Tommy’ is more angry than my impression of watching past Who performances. But there’s a kind of person who is closed to this experience because ‘Tommy’ to them is a time capsule to their youth. To them I say maybe the best thing is to get out the album and the hookah and put it on the stereo and play it. I can never compete in their imagination with that.”