Nothing but Blue Skies : After his Tony-winning success with ‘Tommy,’ Des McAnuff is headed for worlds beyond the La Jolla Playhouse. His revival of ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ is bound for Broadway. His next stop: Hollywood.

It’s a gorgeous day, and the Pacific is so close that surf noises are distracting. Director Des McAnuff is sitting in his living room, doors flung open to the sea, explaining why he really isn’t leaving La Jolla and the theater he’s turned into a major national contender.

Never mind that last year he announced he was concluding 12 years as artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse to become its “director-in-residence.” And put all those movie deals you keep hearing about in perspective.

“I’m not leaving the Playhouse,” insists the man best known for sending “The Who’s Tommy” on to popular and critical acclaim. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just changing jobs.”

Call it what you will, but all his moves are high profile now. Last year, 42-year-old McAnuff received his second Tony, for directing “Tommy.” (His first was for “Big River” in 1985.) “Tommy” is currently on a national tour and will soon open productions in both Toronto, where McAnuff grew up, and Germany.

The rock musical’s success lifted McAnuff to star status. Now, in his first directorial outing since “Tommy,” he’s doing “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a revival of the 1961 musical sendup of corporate culture.

“How to Succeed” opens here today with plans for a Broadway opening in March. And although McAnuff doesn’t officially leave his La Jolla post until early November, he’s already got film projects cooking with both Disney and Warner Bros.

In fact, the list of film and theater projects McAnuff’s working on right now could give many people Excedrin headaches, but the energetic writer, director and musician does not seem at all intimidated. Asked to explain the weight that each project has for him in comparison to the next, he throws up his hands: They’re all great.

He’s working on an animated film project with “Tommy” collaborator Pete Townshend. While he is contracted to direct one play a year in La Jolla, McAnuff has also bought a loft space in New York’s TriBeCa, finished his first movie--a short called “Bad Dates”--and made the trade press for dropping out of a full-length feature on James Dean.

McAnuff was brought in to direct the Dean biography for Warner Bros. starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and did a well-received rewrite with “Malcolm X” producer Marvin Worth. But McAnuff left the project earlier this month, citing “scheduling” problems.

“ ‘Dean’ is a project that could heat up very quickly,” the director explains. “At this stage, it would have been impossible to fulfill all of my other responsibilities.”

A spokesman at Warner Bros., which put McAnuff up for several months in a West Hollywood apartment to work on projects, says pretty much the same thing. Acknowledging the director’s assorted theater assignments, for instance, the spokesman says, “We’re grateful to Des for his contribution to the James Dean project (and) hope to continue our excellent relationship.”

Meanwhile, “in active development” at Disney is the live-action “Monster Musical,” which is just starting up and, apparently, easier for McAnuff to devote time to. He and producer Worth wrote an 85-page treatment--McAnuff calls it a “little novella”--based on an idea of Worth’s, and composer Alan Menken was originally involved.

“Movies are mainly about conveying ideas, storytelling and working with actors, which I have spent the last 20 years of my life doing,” says McAnuff, who already looks pretty Hollywood with his properly torn jeans, leather jacket and maroon sports car. “In many ways, it seems like a very natural transition.”

First, however, comes “How to Succeed.” About $900,000 of its $1.3-million budget here is “enhancement” money from commercial producers, and New York-based producer Michael David at Dodger Productions expects a $5-million price tag by the time the show opens on Broadway after its run here and at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

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McAnuff’s choice to take a familiar musical to Broadway comes at a time when expectations could hardly be higher. Not only is he riding the crest of “Tommy,” but his “How to Succeed” will follow and probably be competing with acclaimed revivals of “Show Boat,” “Carousel” and “Damn Yankees.”

“How to Succeed” was crafted by a team including Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows, the men best known for “Guys and Dolls” (whose long-running Broadway revival closes in January). There have already been about 2,700 other amateur and professional productions of “How to Succeed” in the United States alone.

Winner of both the Tony for best musical and the Pulitzer for drama, “How to Succeed” originally ran more than three years on Broadway at the 46th St. Theatre--now the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it is also expected to play during this revival--and was made into a film in 1967. Based on the best-selling novel by Shepherd Mead, who died last August, “How to Succeed” lampoons a corporate America where coffee breaks are celebrated, and deception never hurts.

The original production and film made Robert Morse a star; this time, Matthew Broderick plays J. Pierrepont Finch, an upwardly mobile window-washer with an eye on the executive suite. Rocketing up the corporate ladder at the World Wide Wicket Co., Finch is guided by such credos as handling a disaster by keeping a cool head and putting the blame on somebody else.

‘How to Succeed” is obviously less groundbreaking than “Tommy,” and McAnuff’s longtime agent, Gilbert Parker, thinks there’s nothing wrong with that.

“He is at a point where he can do something that appeals to him, and the idea of working with Matthew Broderick on a Frank Loesser show is something very few people would turn down. He doesn’t have to take risks every time.”

Besides, it’s fun. Plopped in a San Diego rehearsal room, fresh from a run and workout, McAnuff laughs at every run-through of a song spoofing suburbia, then calls the whole show “inspired lunacy.” And he hints that classic musical or not, he’s planning some nice surprises onstage.

There are 23 actors in the show (plus the voice of Walter Cronkite, the show’s narrator), and McAnuff keeps them very busy. Instead of simple scene changes, for instance, the director frequently fills his stage with people and action. The story takes place in a New York skyscraper, and McAnuff says all the activity “evokes a sense of the harried pressure and frenetic work energy of an office tower.”

Staging concepts aren’t all that different from those of “Tommy,” comments choreographer Wayne Cilento. “Des has a little bit of a signature on his style,” says Cilento, who also worked on “Tommy.” “It’s a very smart take on the period, and it’s classy.”

McAnuff’s style is also well-rooted in research. Even when working on musicals like “How to Succeed,” and on his 1990 production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” he and his team do the same sort of dramaturgical work they might do on Chekhov or Brecht.

“It’s possible and perhaps mandatory to have a contemporary point of view,” says McAnuff. “You don’t simply have to obediently re-create something.”

The orchestration on “How to Succeed” is different, and production numbers are re-conceived. But McAnuff did not tamper with the book. “I think it would almost be like rewriting George Bernard Shaw or Shakespeare,” McAnuff says, “because of the particular times they lived in. And at a certain point, that becomes desecration.

“I think Loesser and Burrows (who wrote the musical’s book with Jack Weinstock & Willie Gilbert) were very hip people. They’re not promoting (suburban bliss). They’re satirizing it. It’s definitely a scathing (and) enlightened attack, if not on the lives we lead today, then on the lives that parented the lives we lead today.”

This is the first time the La Jolla Playhouse planned from the start to take a musical to Broadway, McAnuff says. “When we did ‘Tommy,’ we weren’t sure. On this, in part because of Matthew’s participation and because it’s post-’Tommy,’ there’s confidence that we’ll send the piece on.”

M cAnuff’s track record is good. By the time he was 25, a dozen plays, musicals and scores he’d written had been produced either in Canada or in this country, where he’s been living since 1976. He is also one of six partners in Dodger Productions, a group of buddies who’ve teamed up for nearly 20 years and who earlier backed the director’s “Big River.”

In 1982, McAnuff wrote, directed and composed music for “The Death of Von Richthofen as Witnessed From Earth” at New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater. Featuring such special effects as a flying piano, it got him tagged a Wunderkind in Newsweek and cemented his appeal to La Jolla Playhouse board members who flew in to see it before hiring him.

“He already had the stamp of genius about him,” recalls Dr. Willard P. VanderLaan, the longtime Playhouse board member who headed the original search committee. “He was just turning 30. He was a very good risk for a new theater that wanted to be bold and innovative.”

The Playhouse reopened under McAnuff’s direction in 1983 after languishing almost two decades. Mel Ferrer, Dorothy McGuire and Gregory Peck founded the place in 1947, and McAnuff brought in such actors as Bill Irwin and Holly Hunter. Guest directors have included Peter Sellars, whose production of Brecht’s “The Visions of Simone Machard” reopened the Playhouse, and James Lapine, who came here with Stephen Sondheim in 1985 to rework “Merrily We Roll Along.”

But by the end of the ‘80s, McAnuff began to get restless. And as early as 1990, he started talking with VanderLaan and other board members about moving on.

“It isn’t so much that I didn’t enjoy the job,” he says today, “but if you’re going to do it well, you have to be around. We have always been hands-on producers, and when you’re standing behind not only your own work but maybe the work of four or five other directors in the course of a season, it requires a lot of time and energy.”

The Playhouse’s eclectic artistic policy has allowed him to go from musicals to classics to contemporary drama, but he concedes the administrative duties were wearing him down. And although he’s just 42, he speaks of wanting to turn the place over to younger artists who could have a shot at the opportunities he and his contemporaries had here in the ‘80s.

After “Tommy,” McAnuff says, he saw greater financial and staff stability at the Playhouse and felt the place could manage without him. And his successor is 35-year-old New York-based free-lance director Michael Greif, a graduate of UC San Diego’s theater graduate program whom McAnuff has both known and worked with for years.

“I actually had this job for considerably longer than I intended,” McAnuff says. “I’m really proud of this theater and its accomplishments, but I’m glad to have my freedom. It’s really great to have my wings back.”

F riends and colleagues indicate little surprise at his film inter ests. “We have this kind of friendship where each wants what the other has,” comments director Lapine. “The summer I was there doing ‘Luck, Pluck & Virtue,’ Des said, ‘You made movies.’ And I said, ‘You have the Broadway gusher.’ Now he’s going to make movies, and he’ll see what he’s been missing.”

Then again, McAnuff indicates he already knows. “As a stage director, what you really have to learn to celebrate is your own lack of control. But there’s something really exciting about taking many of those same elements--actors, story, hopefully great language, strong ideas, important themes and subjects--and being able to lock something in.”

Films are something he’s had on hold for at least a decade, McAnuff points out.

Even before he came to La Jolla, he says, there was talk about making a film of “The Death of Von Richthofen.” And early on in La Jolla, he’d even hoped to develop an ensemble company equally at home onstage or in cinema.

He and Townshend have been talking for a while, he says, about an animated version of “The Iron Man” based on Ted Hughes’ popular children’s book. Townshend did a stage musical of “The Iron Man” at London’s Young Vic last year and an album in 1989, but McAnuff says this will be a new incarnation. They are now “in discussions” with a studio on it, he says.

McAnuff is coy about the Disney live action musical, saying only that it is “about a young girl, set in Transylvania.” But Disney sources add that the young girl goes on a fantasy journey to Transylvania where she meets and befriends a set of monsters who are misunderstood and unappreciated by local inhabitants.

McAnuff’s also involved in developing a smaller film called “A Sudden Darkness” by Canadian writer Hugh Graham. It takes place in ‘70s suburban Toronto, around where McAnuff grew up.

Meanwhile, he’s already directed “Bad Dates,” a 29-minute film for Touchstone. Starring Nancy Travis, it is about a kindergarten teacher with bad luck dating and children who begin to eat inanimate objects. McAnuff considers the film, which is scheduled to play in a short film festival in Paris in January, not just black comedy but “magic realism.”

The longtime musician also wants to do more composing. There are five guitars (including one Townshend gave him) in the beachside apartment McAnuff shares with his wife, Susan Berman, an actress he married on the Playhouse stage in 1984 (under a portrait of George Orwell), and their 4-year-old daughter, Julia.

McAnuff wrote some music for “Bad Dates” and did so occasionally for the Playhouse as well. But he felt awkward writing for the theater here, he says, and wanting more time to write was another incentive to moving on. “Before I came here, I was always comfortable about changing hats,” he says.

He expects to be in La Jolla at least three months a year, and he and Greif are already talking about next season. Possibilities include directing a revival of Julian Barry’s play “Lenny,” a project McAnuff and former Lenny Bruce manager Worth have been talking about for several years.

H e will “absolutely” continue fund-raising for the Play house, McAnuff says, concentrating on such things as a capital campaign and building an endowment and cash reserve. And he also will entertain theater offers elsewhere, saying: “What’s nice is that I’ve been getting offers from really hip companies, ones I thought might have forgotten I existed.”

On his long-term dream list is a presentation of Shakespeare’s tetralogy, “Richard II” through “Henry IV,” and he says he’s also often flirted with the idea of doing his Public Theater hit, “The Death of von Richthofen,” here. But at the moment, he confesses, “I’m not itching to do another theater piece.”

That doesn’t seem to worry successor Greif, however. “Des has real roots and real heart connected to this place,” says Greif. “It’s realistic that we are going to have scheduling complications at times, but I think we’re all dedicated to making it work. Des loves the theater and he loves our theater.”*

* “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, UC San Diego, La Jolla. Today through Dec. 4. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. $28-$47.50. (619) 550-1010.