PERFORMING ARTS : Just a Singer Who Can’t Say No : Since his debut in ‘Carousel’ in 1945, singer John Raitt has continued to thrill audiences with his Broadway repertoire.

For every U.S. city he plays, singer John Raitt pokes a pin into a now-fading map on his wall. He’s about 100 pins behind, he figures, and already the map is so full you can barely see the lines separating states.

Since he made his Broadway debut in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carousel” on April 19, 1945, the resonant baritone has missed few leading roles in American musicals on Broadway, on tour or in summer stock.

He’s played Don Quixote in “Man of La Mancha” and Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” He’s starred in “Zorba” and “Shenandoah,” “South Pacific” and “Kiss Me Kate.”

“I don’t think anybody’s ever played more performances of Broadway musicals than I have,” Raitt says with considerable pride. “I’ve never stopped.”

To celebrate the 50th anniversaries of both his and “Carousel’s” Broadway debut, Raitt will be at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday and Saturday nights, singing some of the many Rodgers & Hammerstein songs that made them--and him--famous.

“John Raitt epitomizes the golden years of the great American art form, the American musical,” says Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conductor John Mauceri. “We’re really blessed that he is not only alive but still performing the original material composed and written for him 50 years ago.”

No matter that Raitt is 78 now. Give him a stage and he’ll sing. Since marrying his high school sweetheart, Rosemary Kraemer, in 1981, he has curtailed his traveling a bit, but he still needs little incentive to head off somewhere to perform.

For instance, in June he played pops night at the Santa Monica College amphitheater; earlier this month, he was at Massachusetts’ Berkshire Performing Arts Theatre. He recently toured Northern California cities--from Redding to Salinas--with Anna Maria Alberghetti, turning out 12 “celebrity concerts” in 10 days.

Sitting in the living room of his spacious Pacific Palisades home, the silver-haired singer concedes that doing as many as four of those “celebrity concerts” in a weekend is pretty exhausting. But, as seems to be his way, he prefers to emphasize the positive side: It helped get him in shape to record his new album, “John Raitt--Broadway Legend.”

The album, due to be released in September, will be his first in 25 years. It features three duets with his daughter, Bonnie Raitt, the popular rock-blues-pop singer, and also reflects a professional alliance between father and daughter that has deepened in recent years.

Through the years, and particularly in Los Angeles, John Raitt has appeared onstage during his daughter’s concerts, singing one of his signature songs. There’s a platinum record of her 1989 album “Nick of Time” up on his wall, and the elder Raitt often brings the conversation back to her success. High points of recent years, he says, include her presenting him with Theatre L.A.’s Ovation Award a few years ago and her inducting him last year into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York.

Neither of the Raitts would dispute that her celebrity has given him more visibility. Raitt quips that it took him two years to convince Bonnie that it was her idea for them to perform together with the Boston Pops on PBS in 1992. According to Bonnie, it was the first time they sang together in public, an occasion that led to their duets on the coming album.

“There is only one John Raitt,” his daughter says proudly. “He performed in more leading roles than any one person in musical history, and here he is still performing at 78. He deserves to be appreciated for the wonder that he is.”

J ohn Raitt was born in Santa Ana. He attended Fullerton Union High School and went to USC on a track scholarship before going on to the University of Redlands.

He sang locally at YMCAs, Kiwanis, Rotary Clubs and churches, and he says he has since appeared many times on the same stages he performed on as a young man.

Raitt was still doing the Los Angeles “rubber chicken” circuit, he recalls, when his agent arranged for him to meet a New York producer who was visiting Los Angeles. Her schedule was so tight that he was interviewed in a cab, but she was apparently impressed. When she asked if he would travel to New York to audition for the role of Curly in “Oklahoma!” the young singer readily agreed.

She hadn’t heard him sing, but two months later he received a registered letter offering to pay his way to New York and back to try out as the replacement for Broadway’s first Curly, Alfred Drake.

“I decided this would be the big break,” Raitt says today. “I sold the car and gave up the apartment [and] got on the train to New York, where I was whisked right from Penn Station to the St. James Theater.”

When he got to the theater, Raitt says, “I hadn’t sung since I left California, so I said, ‘Do you mind if I warm up?’ I sang Figaro’s aria from ‘The Barber of Seville.’ Then I sang all of Curly’s songs.”

There was considerable silence when he was done, Raitt recalls. What he learned later was that the problem was not his voice but his size. The producers worried that the strapping young Californian wouldn’t fit into Drake’s costume and that, at 6-feet-2, he would be too tall to look right in the part.

“But Hammerstein said, ‘I’m a tall man. Why can’t Curly be tall?’ ” Raitt says. “And all the Curlys that followed after me were as tall or taller than I was.”

The irony, of course, is that Raitt didn’t play Curly on Broadway, after all. Rodgers & Hammerstein had just received the rights to Ferenc Molnar’s play “Liliom,” on which they based “Carousel,” and, Raitt says, they figured he would be “a good bet” for the role of Billy Bigelow. Better to send him off to Chicago to play the national company of “Oklahoma!” until “Carousel” was ready, it was decided.

After less than a year on the road with “Oklahoma!” Raitt was back in New York rehearsing “Carousel.” But he was worried about his lack of experience.

“I met with Rouben Mamoulian, who was the director not only of ‘Oklahoma!’ but ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” Raitt remembers. The young singer confessed his fears to his director. “He said, ‘Johnny, you look like the guy?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess so.’ He said, ‘You’re not worried about the singing?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And then he said, ‘Let’s you and I work out the rest.’ ”

Then, a few days into rehearsal, Raitt was handed a piece of paper folded up like an accordion. It was the “Soliloquy,” and when he unfolded it, it was about 15 feet long.

“What prompted it was my singing of Figaro,” Raitt says. “It had some of the same pattern and range of voice. And what a legacy Dick Rodgers left--it’s practically a one-act opera and takes 6 1/2 minutes to sing.

“I suppose if I were asked to do just one number, I would do that one, because it exemplifies pretty much everything I can do as a performer.”

“Carousel,” the “Soliloquy” and Raitt fared well with the critics, not to mention history, and Raitt moved on to star in other musicals. It wasn’t until 1954, though, that he found himself the lead in another hit: “The Pajama Game.”

“Pajama Game” landed him in the movies--the film version of the show was released in 1957. Raitt had had a brief run on screen as a contract player at MGM in the early ‘40s. But he is the first to acknowledge that his parts then were small.

“Pajama Game” also lost him a shot at the movie version of “Carousel.” The 1956 film was made, with Gordon MacRae as Billy Bigelow, while Raitt was still committed to “Pajama Game’s” Broadway run.

“I hit the pictures at the wrong time,” Raitt says with a shrug. He is far more interested in talking about his stage work. He played 1,060 performances of “Pajama Game,” for instance, and one of his greatest compliments came six months into that run when someone remarked on the consistency of his performance. Every audience, Raitt says, “is entitled to get the best that I have to give.”

He remembers performing in “Carousel” in Framingham, Mass., in August, 1960, when Oscar Hammerstein died. A reporter asked what he would be doing that night. “I said, ‘I’m gonna give the best damn performance I can possibly give. That’s what Oscar would want me to do.’ ”

That’s what daughter Bonnie says he taught her too.

“He treats every performance with equal thrill and passion,” she says. “He puts the same into it no matter whether it’s a charity breakfast for 50 people or opening night of a Broadway show.

“Your chart position or whether or not you’re in the latest hit Broadway show doesn’t determine your worth. What really determines your worth is the continuing relationship you have with your fans, and the devotion you have to being as good as you can be. I think that’s why he is still around and why I’m still around.”

Raitt says he did 25 straight years of summer stock--from 1959 to 1984--and tried to keep his fees relatively modest. A lot of other performers have priced themselves out of the market, he says, “but I like the work. If I upped the price, I wouldn’t get the work.”

He has also varied his fare through the years, augmenting his continuing work in musicals with a performance piece called “An Evening With John Raitt.” Those evenings are casual, he explains--no tuxedos, no special effects, just 23 songs from 16 Broadway shows.

One way or another, Raitt says again and again, getting onstage to sing is what life is all about: “I’ll sing as long as people want to hear me, and I’ll be able to sing as long as I’m alive. If I can talk I can sing.”

“He’s the last of the red-hot mamas,” says Broadway conductor Paul Gemignani, who worked with Raitt many times through the years as well as on his new album. “He’s going to sing at his own funeral--and in the original key.”

Besides his hundreds of concerts and performances, Raitt has been a local resource, turning up for community events, to lend stature to an awards ceremony, to lead master classes. He has sung at Santa Monica College’s pops concerts three times, says the show’s producer, Don Richardson, and had to be persuaded to take an honorarium.

Raitt’s longtime manager, James Fitzgerald, says he gets one or two requests a week for Raitt to make appearances. But even when he doesn’t attend, as in the case of a coming production of “Pajama Game” in Dubuque, Iowa, Raitt will still send a letter to be read on opening night. He is, Fitzgerald explains, “that type of individual.”

When Raitt’s second marriage (to Kathleen Smith Landry) was breaking up back in 1981, he was staying with Fitzgerald in Pacific Palisades. (Raitt’s first wife, Bonnie’s mother, was Marjorie Haydock, now Goddard. They were divorced in 1971.) He heard that his childhood sweetheart, Rosemary Kraemer, had recently been widowed and was living nearby.

Remembering the lyrics he had sung in “Zorba,” he picked up the phone and called her.

“You don’t believe all that philosophy,” Raitt says with a smile, “but I believe in grabbing at life every minute. I called her and said, ‘This is your first love’ and asked her to dinner that night. . . . After about two weeks I went over with my suitcases and said, ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’

“It makes it easy to sing love songs.”