MOVIES : Is This Plum Too Ripe? : After 35 years Off Broadway, can ‘The Fantasticks’ make the transition to the big screen? On the set, director Michael Ritchie hopes that audiences will try to remember.

You’ll believe a man can fly. You’ll buy Tim Allen as Santa and Tom Cruise as Vlad Jr. You’ll put faith in werewolves with receding hair lines, digital dinosaurs and aliens who phone home.

But will you believe something quite so fantastic as a young couple swept up in the swells of love spontaneously breaking into song?

Try to remember . . . if you can.

“This is not an attempt to redesign the musical for the ‘90s,” announces director Michael Ritchie between takes for his new picture on a Hollywood sound stage, headphones lowered around his neck, sights high. “I really do want to bring back the old-fashioned movie musicals, where the characters sing their thoughts and feelings to one another.” He chuckles, as if to acknowledge and dismiss the inherent idea that this might be just a little anachronistic.

Against just about all odds, Ritchie has a full-scale, traditional, major-studio movie musical in the improbable making: “The Fantasticks,” being prepared by United Artists for a Thanksgiving release.

Along with original lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt, Ritchie is adapting the film from a show that has been running for 35 consecutive years in the same Off Broadway theater and, with nearly 20,000 registered productions in the United States alone, has established itself as the century’s most oft-produced musical.

In theatrical circles, the show’s endless run is a running joke, its very title a kind of kitschy shorthand for the mysteries of eternal life. But dramaturgic immortality was little guarantee that a movie version was at all likely, especially now. For at least a quarter-century, of course, Hollywood has equated the live-action film musical with benign viewer neglect and agonizing box-office death.

Ever since Sir Richard Attenborough botched “A Chorus Line” 10 years ago, few have had the temerity to put into production a major picture based on an established theatrical musical property. The scant recent-memory attempts at creating an original film musical from scratch have either bombed (“Newsies”) or been aborted (“I’ll Do Anything”).

But with Ritchie’s determination not to let the genre go gentle into that good night, the final death knell appears not to have quite yet rung on America’s most uniquely indigenous film form.

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Ritchie is in high spirits as production moves into its final weeks of the shoot, which has been filming in central Arizona and around Los Angeles, and he comes still nearer to realizing a 3 1/2-decade-old dream.

“This is not an attempt to do what Bob Fosse did with ‘Cabaret,’ where you were in a theater and Joel Grey was singing performance numbers to an audience, and the plot wasn’t moved forward by the singing,” he says. “And I think if Jim Brooks’ ‘I’ll Do Anything’ existed with even the remote possibility that the musical numbers could be taken out and the story would still make sense, it wasn’t really a musical.

“To me, the musical is defined by, say, ‘My Fair Lady.’ If you take out ‘The Rain in Spain’ or ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,’ there is no story. After all, Henry Higgins would never say what he really felt to Colonel Pickering or anybody else; he would only say it in a sort of soliloquy. And ‘The Fantasticks’ has four or five of those very revealing moments in song.”

Suggested by an Edmund Rostand play, Jones’ slightly surrealist coming-of-age story concerns the plot of two farmer fathers to make their contrarily minded teen-agers fall in love. The dads’ co-conspirator in matchmaking, a mysterious, possibly sinister impresario named El Gallo, ends up indoctrinating the kids in the chillier realities as well as the rosier hues of romance.

In the ‘60s, the show produced hits in the form of “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” which for a while was Barbra Streisand’s signature song. Still, there is the nagging fear that today’s core audiences, weaned on grittier fare, may take a look at all this post-Higginsian singing and dancing and collectively utter, By George, I don’t think I get it .

On a bench outside the sound stage, 23-year-old lead actress Jean Louisa Kelly slips off the pointe shoes she has been wearing for the “Abduction Ballet” dance, takes a deep breath, and allows herself to worry a little that her peers might indeed be past the point of no return.

“I think it’s difficult now for audiences to let go of reality,” Kelly says. “When they’re watching musicals, I’ve heard people say, ‘That’s not realistic! Why would they just start singing?’

“But,” she adds with a slight, sweet smile, “I think they can believe it if they try! I mean, science fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, but people allow themselves to sit back and enjoy it anyway.”

Ritchie is well aware of these hurdles. “I think audiences really began to abandon the musical in the early ‘70s when they felt an artificiality between the speaking and the singing. It was OK in ‘The Sound of Music,’ but somewhere into that post-’Easy Rider’ world, there was a sense that, ‘Uh-oh, this doesn’t correspond to anything in my universe.’ ”

Not that “The Fantasticks” will necessarily correspond to anyone’s literal universe, either. “But I think that we’re helped by the fact that ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Aladdin’ and the whole Ashman/Menken sound being so similar to this Broadway ‘60s sound allows an audience to feel more comfortable,” Ritchie says.

And as for the problematic artificiality of those transitions between singing and speaking, Ritchie has a newfangled trick up his sleeve--and up the collars of his actors, who include Joel Grey and Brad Sullivan as the fathers, English stage actor Jonathon Morris as El Gallo, and Barnard Hughes and actor/magician Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) as El Gallo’s bumbling cohorts.

In every other major American film musical to date, the soundtrack reverts to a prerecording the moment that last bit of dialogue turns into that first line of lip-synced lyric. But in a grand experiment, the director is equipping his actors with body mikes and earphones and having them sing their parts live , theoretically allowing for a seamless transition.

There may be a former member of the pop group New Kids on the Block--Joe McIntyre--among the principal cast, but the general rule of the production is: No lip-syncing allowed.

‘Earwigs in!” Ritchie shouts to his leading man and lady. On the set of “The Fantasticks,” a good half of which is in song, this is the most common command.

Decked out in simple 1920s period garb, Kelly and McIntyre face one another and place the devices in their off-camera ears, where they’ll hear a basic piano and bass track and their own prerecorded guide vocals.

And then, the two young would-be lovers--standing inside a traveling carnival tent, in front of a screen showing a silent film of “Romeo and Juliet”--break the hush with sudden bursts of loud, a cappella harmony.

“You are love!” sings he, repeatedly. “I am love!” echoes she, in full coloratura soprano. This one-sided exchange is meant to be impossibly romantic and slightly satirical: The stricken boy thinks the object of his affection is the goddess Venus herself, and she’s hard-pressed to disagree.

Cut. Harvey Schmidt, who composed this music more than 35 years ago and is a daily visitor to the set, sidles up alongside Ritchie and whispers approvingly: “That was the best it’s been. Joey was more on pitch.” That’s a print. Earwigs out.

The singing is going rather smoothly on the sound stage. In his first dramatic singing part, McIntyre seems to be holding his own, and newcomer Kelly is an intriguing enough mixture of naive ingenue and soprano bravura that phrases like “a young Julie Andrews” are suggested by those not usually prone to exaggeration.

But before the production finally settled in L.A., the first few weeks of shooting were mostly at outdoor locations on the remote plains of Arizona, where the vocalizing--and tempers--weren’t always quite so harmonious.

The principal location in Arizona, serendipitously enough, was just a quarter-mile from where “Oklahoma!” was shot 40 years ago and was still as gorgeously unspoiled.

Of course, when “Oklahoma!” was shot there, Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones had the liberty of lip-syncing amid the elements. McIntyre, Kelly and company, though, had to belt it out even while the wind came sweeping down the plain. In some coolish early-morning circumstances, the combination of open air and open mouths gave new meaning to the phrase shiver me timbres.

“It’s real difficult to sing out in the elements at 2 in the morning in 35-degree weather while you’re dancing in a sleeveless chiffon dress,” says Kelly. “But you’re also in the moment, and it’s probably more pure, so you gain some things and lose some things.”

The man who plays Kelly’s father, Joel Grey, is even blunter about this new experience of singing live to tracks heard faintly through an earphone. “Maddening. Maddening,” he says with a smile.

Is it something one gets used to, perhaps? “No,” Grey says flatly. “But I gave up on that and said, ‘I put my trust in you, Michael.’ It’s something that he wanted to do and really believes in. And the results may be brilliant.”

But for all these new twists on technology, “The Fantasticks”’ screenplay, like the stage play, still sports only seven speaking/singing roles.

“Every effort that I’ve made is to try to make it look as big as ‘Oklahoma!’ but still feel as intimate as the play. We’ve really opened this up.” Ritchie waxes fondly upon the Arizona location’s “huge agricultural valley where there are no paved roads, no telephone lines, no telephones. Big saving on this movie: No cellular phone bill. We saved thousands.”

Ritchie’s dream has been long in coming. While living in New York on his first directing job for TV’s “Omnibus,” Ritchie first saw and fell in love with “The Fantasticks” just a week after it opened at New York’s Sullivan Street Playhouse in May of 1960 (then starring Jerry Orbach as El Gallo). Thirty-five years and Lord knows how many cast changes later, it’s still playing the same 150-seat house. But by waiting a week to catch it, Ritchie nearly missed it altogether.

Says Harvey Schmidt, “The miracle is that it ran the second night, not that it’s run 35 years. People love to say it got bad reviews, which is not true; they were mixed, but people in the business were saying these were not ‘money’ reviews. I remember hearing that and just hoping we’d run one more night, because I had friends I wanted to see it, and opening night all the tickets had gone for critics.”

Naturally, Hollywood came knocking. In the wake of “Funny Girl’s” success, Elliott Gould, who had played El Gallo in a national touring company with Liza Minnelli, got together with producer Ray Stark and proposed a film adaptation with then-wife Barbra Streisand as the girl; the writers couldn’t agree with Gould and Stark on a vision and ended up declining the offer.

In the ‘70s, rights were briefly optioned to an unnamed “awful, awful man” who summarily hired another composer to rewrite the score as a--gulp--rock musical. William Friedkin was interested, Franco Zeffirelli was momentarily attached.

Still, no one ever figured out a proper way to “open up” the stage show’s careful minimalism. Finally, studio interest withered.

It was Ritchie who optioned the material two years ago and proposed setting the action--the time and place of which were formerly indeterminate--in the American Midwest of the ‘20s, and having El Gallo be the proprietor of a traveling carnival that visits this rural area.

In contrast to the play, which maintained a consistent level of quasi-fantasy, the outdoor scenes will be more naturalistic, while the carnival scenes will be more stylized--Fellini-esque, even.

The score itself has been transferred pretty much intact, with one inevitable exception. “The Rape Song” has been cut and replaced with “The Abduction Song,” which Jones and Schmidt wrote for a touring production. As for the vocals, not everything heard in the finished film will be “live” after all. Some parts will be re-sung in post-production. Still, the hope is to use as many of the “real” vocals as possible.

But for all this late-inning enterprise, some still wonder if “The Fantasticks” is simply too much a product of its time to work for ‘90s audiences in any translation. Could one of the show’s famous song titles apply: “This Plum Is Too Ripe”?

Joe McIntyre is about due to go back on the set and, thanks to his on-screen antagonist Teller, has reason to dread it.

The ex-New Kid seems good-natured and genuinely humbled by the decline and fall of his formerly huge vocal group, which went separate ways a year ago; he insists he’s out of contemporary music for good and only wants to act. Right now he’s just happy to have his first post-pop job, trying not to focus on the pressure of being the most dramatically untested commodity cast in a classic.

“I can’t pay attention to the fact that it’s 35 years old and it’s been 20,000 people that have played this character before me and that my whole career is riding on it,” he says, earnestly enough.

All outside pressure aside, McIntyre is having a hard time of it today for purely physical reasons, though he’s being a good sport. Back inside the stage, he begins work on a shot for a globe-trotting fantasy sequence in which Teller, dressed up in drag as a Venetian hooker, carries McIntyre’s prone body around a faux-European alley, bumping his unconscious captive’s head against the walls.

On the next break, Teller, still done up in tresses and rouge, unlaces his camisole and breaks down the extended sequence wherein he and Barnard Hughes basically beat the hell out of the young hero.

“We get to knock him over onto the floor, grab his wallet, slap him back and forth vigorously in the face, break a bottle over his head, throw him into a canal, from which I pull him out dripping wet, carry him over my shoulders and bang his head against a pillar,” Teller says. “And then in India, we throw him on a bed of spikes, I dance on his chest and stick snakes up his pant legs.” It’s not entirely illusion. “I really did hit him very vigorously in the face with the wallet; we tried to fake it, but neither of us is very experienced with those stage hits.”

Teller finally states what’s really on his mind: “It’s just particular pleasure to do this to an ex-New Kid on the Block. Because I think once you’ve been a New Kid, you should pay for it the rest of your life.”

If anyone would be cynical about a show with as much a reputation for sentiment as “The Fantasticks,” you might figure it’d be Teller, whose preference for literal gallows humor is legend. (His preference for being silent is also legendary, but it’s not something he practices in real life or in the film.)

But when he heard a movie was being done, he called and nearly begged to be cast. Part of it was that his character--Mortimer, a bad actor specializing in death scenes--gets offed repeatedly in a grisly assortment of ways, much like what happens nightly in the Penn & Teller revue. But it turns out Teller’s first professional job about 30 years ago was running the lights for a Philadelphia “Fantasticks” production, and 200 or so viewings of the play proved seminal in his thinking.

“I memorized most of it. It was a revelation to me,” Teller recalls, “because I began to see that if you selected the right things and did them in a tasty and memorable way, that that could matter just as much as bigger . I mean, the staging of ‘The Fantasticks’ infests the Penn & Teller show to this day, because we’ve never had a setting more elaborate than a single backdrop.

“The other thing that was a big influence is, you’ll notice in typical Penn & Teller shows, the first half is happy, and the second half is evil. That’s certainly true of ‘The Fantasticks,’ and I’m sure that that’s where I got that from.”

Teller rejects any notion that the show might be too treacly for today’s audiences.

“There’s a severity about it. You don’t even end up knowing who El Gallo really is, ever. You’re never allowed in the show to go ‘ Awwww ‘ in that sweet sort of way, because by the time you want to do that, it’s cut with something. And when this thing first came out, it was very noticeable, because you had the likes of the Rodgers & Hammerstein things, which are unrelentingly sappy.

“Even ‘Try to Remember,’ as sweet a ballad as that is, within a verse is reminding you that this season the kids are going through is one that you’ve already passed through, and you’re on your way to death.”

Ritchie, whose very best films have been dark satires (critic John Simon has named Ritchie’s “Smile,” “The Candidate” and “Downhill Racer” as three of the five best modern American movies), hopes to bring out this edge in the material, but isn’t shying away from sentiment.

“The show is unabashedly romantic, and at the same time has its tongue in its cheek,” the director says. “For the people who love it, that’s a delightful combination. For people who like everything in clear pigeonholes, that’s an intolerable mix. And the reason ‘The Fantasticks’ drew me back again and again for so many years was that combination.”

In turn, the package Ritchie has put together brought up some emotions for Schmidt, especially on the Arizona location, where the shoot combined two of the most seminal special effects, the great outdoors and the a cappella voice.

“Every evening they would shoot right at dusk,” says the composer. “Joel Grey would go out and shoot part of ‘I Can See It,’ where he sees the carnival lights in the distance. He would be hearing the track in his head, but we would just be out there in this gorgeous twilight, hearing his unaccompanied voice from a distance. I just found that so moving, because we were millions of miles away from anywhere and it was like time had stopped, and hearing this fragment of a song we’d written years and years ago . . . I always burst into tears.”