When Families Still Lived in Harmony : Musical’s Creator Ties His Own Clean-Cut, Childhood Memories Into a Swell ‘Plaid’ Package

Frankie, Jinx, Sparky and Smudge may be stuck in day jobs, but they haven’t lost sight of their show-biz dreams. As the Four Plaids, this crooning quartet sees itself as the next big group, up there with the Four Aces or the Crew Cuts.

What they do lose sight of is a Catholic school bus loaded with teen-agers. It creams them on the way to their first gig at the Airport Hilton Cocktail Bar.

Dying is not a good way to launch a career--unless you’re in “Forever Plaid,” the successful musical revue conceived by Stuart Ross. Death becomes the fictional Plaids. The boys are resurrected by the Almighty for one last performance, giving them an opportunity to show their chops before vanishing into the vapor once and for all.

Ross, who directed the national touring production of “Forever Plaid” that comes to Fullerton’s Plummer Auditorium tonight for one show, said his musical may have a “Twilight Zone” vibe, but it’s really about cheery nostalgia and having a swell time.

“This is their last chance to perform, to prove they’re good, (and) it’s my chance to evoke a period that was important to me,” Ross explained during a telephone interview from Maui, where he’s staging yet another version of the revue.

That period--the late ‘50s and early ‘60s--”was a time when kids tried to please their parents and everyone followed the American Dream. It was really the last period when whole families listened to the same music together,” Ross said.

The revue is set on Feb. 9, 1964, which Ross said is revealing. While the Plaids embrace their notions of breezy harmonies and all-purpose entertainment, a revolution is bubbling around them. In fact, the kids in the bus survive the crash and continue to their destination--to watch the Beatles in their famous “Ed Sullivan Show” debut that night.

That event would push singing groups such as those Ross modeled the Plaids after out of the spotlight for good, but that doesn’t stop his foursome from giving it their all.

Summoned from limbo, they strive to do justice to the more than 20 numbers they’ve been practicing, songs such as “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, “Chain Gang,” “Matilda,” “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Catch a Falling Star.” But once they take their place in the spotlight, a deathly stage fright is just one in a series of problems.

“Both the humor and the tenderness come from their earnestness in getting everything right,” Ross said. “There’s a desperate quality as things go wrong, even though they sound brilliant.

“They get nosebleeds; peptic ulcers act up; one of them has a retainer fall out, and they trip during the choreography. The audience feels the excitement of seeing the show done for the first time. . . . It also puts in everybody’s mind of, what would you do if you could come back to life for one hour?”

The musical has mostly been praised by reviewers, although some have been annoyed by its shtick and kitsch. “Forever Plaid” has been all over the country since premiering off-Broadway in 1989 and enjoyed a well-received run at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1991. Sylvie Drake, The Times’ drama critic then, described it as “a frothy, happy, nostalgic, tender, untaxing, talented time.”

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Audiences have apparently agreed. Ross said his original investment of $8,000--mostly charged to credit cards--used to begin shaping “Forever Plaid” in 1987 has returned millions. The show’s appeal, he noted, crosses generational lines.

“We find that it transcends any kind of demographic era--older crowds remember the songs, (while) younger crowds fall in love (with the Plaids the same way) they fall in love with the Monkees,” Ross said.

For inspiration in creating the revue--the show’s musical arranger, Orange County native James Raitt, died last year at 41 of AIDS complications--Ross turned to his memories of the ‘50s and his parents’ diner about 45 minutes outside New York City. What excited him as a kid, he said, was the jukebox. While people ate and drank, he’d listen for hours to all the songs, taking the records home when they were replaced.

As he grew older, Ross put those records aside. But in the ‘80s, he began playing them again, gazing at the album covers. Everything began to click, he said, as he listened to the Four Aces singing “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

“These guys looked like they didn’t even know what a woman was, but they were singing about love and romance,” Ross said. “I just had this (thought about their) innocence and love of the music. . . . It just went on from there.”

* “Forever Plaid,” the musical revue conceived by Stuart Ross with vocal arrangements by James Raitt, will be staged tonight at the Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. 8 p.m. $18-$25. (714) 773-3371.