The Long and Short of It Is, Newman’s Thinking Big

Randy Newman’s latest project is big. Really big. Not that the celebrated singer-songwriter has frittered away his life up to now thinking small, his 1977 hit “Short People” notwithstanding.

During his 27-year recording career, he has assumed the voice of the Almighty (“God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)”), pleaded to the nation’s chief executive (“Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)”) and taken over, if just in his own twisted mind, as the Boss of rock ‘n’ roll from Bruce Springsteen himself (“My Life Is Good”).

Still, each of the 100-plus songs in his imposing catalogue has represented just one slice of his Brobdingnagian talent. Now, in exploring the “Faust” legend with both a concept album and a stage musical, Newman finally may have found a subject vast enough to immerse himself in.

“In a way, this thing is so big that what I know is easily contained within it,” he said recently by phone from his home in West Los Angeles (punctuating the comment with a mocking laugh that left it unclear whether he thinks the appropriate repository for his amassed knowledge is a thimble or an ocean). “I can use, for good or evil, everything I know; musically, it’s all there.”

In the recorded version, slated for release this fall, Newman has a do-it-yourselfer’s answer to an all-star tribute album. Don Henley, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John and Newman himself will be singing the 17 songs he has written to chronicle Satan’s wager with the Lord over whether mankind is God’s greatest creation or his grandest folly.

The time and place is “now, heaven and hell and South Bend, Indiana,” Newman said. “The Lord and the devil are making a bet out of boredom. Things look easy for the devil. . . . The Lord hasn’t been paying attention to mankind particularly since World War I. . . . They bet on a student at Notre Dame whom the devil knows to be bad. And off they go. . . . The kid is a complete pain. It’s like dealing with a real 19-year-old.”

Newman has been working on his “Faust” for years, performing larger and larger chunks of it in concert as it has developed. In fact, he said, “the high point of my life so far” came during a 1991 performance at the Coach House, in San Juan Capistrano, when members of the audience spontaneously began chanting “ ‘Faust’! ‘Faust’!” to goad him to play something from it.

For his shows Friday and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, he said, he plans to play “as much of it as I can . . . if they’ll take it.”

After this venture into the public, it’ll be back to wrapping up work on the “Faust” album and then on to fleshing out the stage version, scheduled to premiere Oct. 1 at the La Jolla Playhouse--the same theater that launched “The Who’s Tommy” with Pete Townshend and parlayed it into a Broadway hit now touring the country via bus-and-truck companies.

Newman’s “Faust” also could be headed to Broadway if the six-week run in La Jolla lives up to producers’ expectations. “Oh, they’d like to,” Newman said. “The money’s there.”

He thinks the biggest challenge for him at this point is neither the songs (“They’re the best I can do”) nor the dialogue (“I’ve still got a lot of rewriting to do, but I’m relatively satisfied with how I can do it”), but in conjuring up a physical environment.

“A lot of my songs are based on the way people talk,” he said. “When it comes to having to describe a room, it kills me. Very rarely have I done something like in ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,’ with pale dead moons in skies streaked with gray.”

At times, he has felt as if he’d been “totally unarmed when I went into this.” The fact that the New Orleans-born, Southern California-raised singer has attended theatrical productions only infrequently may help explain his leap-of-faith attitude toward “Faust.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen 50 musicals in my whole life,” he said. “I’m probably preparing my own indictment.”

Like most children of the rock era, he said the Broadway-musical form never had much relevance to him.

“I was in New York recently, and I saw a bunch of stuff. But most of it didn’t have much to do with me. I saw ‘Tommy’--that does have more to do with me.”

However his “Faust” fares, Newman doesn’t envision turning into an Andrew Lloyd Webber-type hit-making machine.

“I’ve just got a feeling I’m not destined for that” degree of commercial success, said Newman, who has seen only one of his nine albums crack Billboard’s Top 40--and that was because of the left-field success of the “Short People” single. “Something in me says I probably can’t have that.”

Of course, it’s mostly his own doing, as he freely admits. For one thing, Newman thinks his melodies, which can sketch a mood with the economy of a Picasso line drawing, generally “don’t have that instinct to go for the jugular. I don’t write that way.”

But beyond that, his songs--be they hysterically funny, poignant or frightening--typically zero in on murderers, racists and assorted psychopaths, decidedly not radio-friendly fare. For all the notoriety of rap-lyric writers, few have come remotely close to capturing a tortured psyche in action the way Newman did in “I Just Want You to Hurt Like I Do” from his most recent album, 1988’s “Land of Dreams.”

And then there’s his penchant for lyrical depth charges.

“If I had written ‘I Love You Just the Way You Are,’ I probably would have added ‘You Little (Expletive)--I throw in something to blow it out of the water every time. . . .

“Billy Joel has a track record of reinventing himself, and that’s very difficult. It’s a talent to have. I have a track record too,” he said, laughing, “which includes almost no hits.”

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But, at 51, he sounds perfectly at peace with his lifelong role as the outsider looking in.

The closest he has come to genuine “Tonight Show” A-list fame has been in his second career in the family business of film composing, following in the footsteps of his uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil Newman. His scores for “Ragtime,” “Avalon,” “The Natural,” “Awakenings” and, most recently, “The Paper” have brought him numerous Academy Award nominations, though he has yet to win an Oscar.

He was up for best song this year with “Make Up Your Mind” but lost to Elton John and Tim Rice, composers of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from “The Lion King.” In 1990, his song “I Love to See You Smile” from “Parenthood” lost in the same category to Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s “Under the Sea” from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Even though he didn’t think he stood a chance of trouncing “The Lion King”--he thought his best chances of winning were in 1985 with “The Natural” and in 1991 with “Avalon”--he still prepared an acceptance speech.

“If I’d won, I would have apologized and said that I assumed it was because Simba had killed his father and that voters turned on him.

“I got beat by a singing lobster before, and by Mufasa and Simba this time. ‘Pocahontas’ will probably beat me next time,” said Newman, who has film-scoring assignments lined up for the next several years.

Two of those are for Disney.

“I suppose it’s better to be with them than against them,” he said.

Still, he wonders about climbing aboard the machine that has turned out one animated box-office smash after another since “The Little Mermaid,” just as his “Faust” is nearing its two-pronged public unveiling.

“I’ve possibly set myself up to have a series of enormous public failures. Being in a movie with Disney, it would be my luck if they had a big stiff with what I do with them. And I have two in a row lined up. If they bomb, they won’t have to look far to come up with a suspect. And in ‘Faust,’ people are making jokes, singing songs. It’s all going to be real visible.”

* Randy Newman and Buffy Sainte-Marie play Friday and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 8 p.m. $25 to $48. (800) 300-4345.