THEATER : Give ‘em Hell, Randy : Mr. Irony, Randy Newman, is actually having fun working on his first musical, ‘Faust.’ And why not--he gets to put words in God’s mouth.

Over the years in rock ‘n’ roll, when speculation sifted among its best composers for someone who in another life might have been writing for the theater, Randy Newman’s name often came up. And yet those who might have wished for a stage musical from the author of such satirical and dramatic songs as “Rednecks,” “Political Science,” “Christmas in Capetown” and “Short People” might also have guessed that any songwriter who would sell a tune to Nike for a running-shoe commercial--as Newman did with his 1984 Olympic anthem “I Love L.A.”--probably would not be interested in the meager wages of Broadway.

And they would have been right.

All the same, Randy Newman, at age 51, has finally turned his piano hand to the theater, money be damned. His modern musical version of Goethe’s “Faust” opens for previews Tuesday at the La Jolla Playhouse; an album of the same music comes out that day (see review, Page 88) , with performances by Newman and pop stars Don Henley, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John (none of whom are in the show).

In an office behind a rehearsal hall in Del Mar, Newman bows his big head of salt-and-pepper curls, his eyes focused on the floor as the rising sound of a chorus leaks through the door. “It’s amazing,” he says. “They’re in tune and they’re singin’ in harmony!” With the fervor of a convert, he says it again. “It’s amazing.”

Newman’s fondness for his new friends in the theater is hard to miss during a visit to the “Faust” rehearsals, taking place in a shiny office building just off I-5. Accustomed to studio sessions with the Eagles and other rock virtuosos and to sound stages where he has composed the scores for such prominent films as “Ragtime” and “The Natural” and the upcoming “Toy Story,” Newman nonetheless was unprepared for his initial encounter with musical theater. “I’ve been around music since I was 5 years old,” he says, referring to his uncles Alfred and Lionel, both successful movie composers, “but this is such a strange world to me.”

Strange but apparently endearing. “I used to hold actors in low regard,” he says. “Just like in the Middle Ages, because, you know, they don’t write their own stuff. You meet ‘em and they’re disappointing often. But what these Broadway people can do--they dance, they sing in tune, they do back flips, they play instruments. There can’t be a thousand of these people in the world. They’re like NBA basketball players, except they don’t get paid anything. They should get subsidized.”

Newman has been shuttling between Del Mar and Los Angeles, trying to finish the score for Disney’s animated “Toy Story” while he fine-tunes his musical, which has been years in the making. “Coming down here is like leaving a coal mine and going to work in a jewelry store,” he says. “The process--there’s something nice about it. With movies, there’s so much baggage: so many people, so much money. It isn’t quite as human. I can see why people are in [theater], because it isn’t the money. I’ve never done anything that paid me less money than this up to now--like nothing.”

In recent years, Newman has busied himself mainly with film work, turning out scores for “Awakenings,” “The Paper” and “Maverick” (“They put banjo over everything in ‘Maverick,’ ” he chooses to note), with some time spent touring as a solo performer. His last album, the autobiographical “Land of Dreams,” came out in 1988.

Newman has been working on “Faust” on and off for the past decade. He says he wanted to do a musical “before I expire” and chose the much-used Faust legend after an attempt to get the rights to two books by V.S. Naipaul proved too expensive.

“When I read it,” Newman says of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1808 play about an aging professor who trades his soul to the devil for youth and power, “I liked it so much. I loved the idea of heaven. I just sort of started, wrote the story as it might be told today. Instead of the most intelligent man in the world, I picked this kid from Notre Dame.”

I n Newman’s not surprisingly revisionist version, heaven is “like the Whole Earth Catalogue” and the younger, self-absorbed Faust is a secondary character to Lucifer, whose historic battle with the Lord becomes a friendly wager on the nature of mankind set against a generation gap separating the angels of yore from the modern world and its children.

“The Lord and the Devil have a kind of basic civility that Faust lacks,” the composer explains. “I don’t know if he [Faust] has a soul. That’s not what it’s about. It’s not about the old ‘Faust.’ It’s about the impossibility of the old ‘Faust’ taking place now.”

Newman wrote the book as well as the songs, figuring “my song characters are based on dialogue somehow, so I had some experience doing that. And I didn’t want anyone else. I liked it too much.”

Last fall, he took the script to a workshop in New York, where it was directed by the estimable James Lapine (“Passion,” “Sunday in the Park With George”).

“Lapine is an earnest guy, an earnest liberal,” Newman says. “And I’m so liberal it makes him seem like a conservative. But there’s irony to me when I get up out of a chair. Almost too much so, but that’s the way it goes. We just didn’t speak the same sort of language exactly.”

Searching for another director and a full production, Newman found his way to the La Jolla Playhouse, which had mounted a successful revue of his songs, “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong,” in 1983. The theater’s new artistic director, Michael Greif, is a protege of Des McAnuff, who launched “Big River” and “The Who’s Tommy” from the La Jolla stage.

Of Greif, Newman says: “I realized I could be in the same room with the guy for months at a time and it would be all right. He understands me. And he can translate for me. Because, I’ll tell you, it’s a different language. All the inarticulate babble that works with oboe players doesn’t work with actors.”

Greif, 35, has been a resident director at the Public Theater in New York and will direct Tony Kushner’s “Slavs!” at the Mark Taper Forum next month.

Says Greif, who is known best for his work with straight plays: “There was never any question about the music working. What we talked about were characters’ presence in different places. We talked dramaturgically, really. I’m interested in finding out what he wants to see up there, what story he’s telling and the way he’s telling it.”

Close to home, La Jolla was also a choice favored by Newman’s record company, Warner Bros., which, in partnership with “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels, is supplying $735,000 of the approximately $1.1-million budget, with hopes of a possible Broadway future.

T he question remains whether Newman’s napalm-strength wit, so lethal in three-minute caricatures and ballads, will serve the genre requirements of musical comedy or, over the course of two hours, send them up in smoke.

“The book scenes fall into some new realm for me,” says musical comedy veteran David Garrison, who plays the Devil. “They’re not vaudeville or sketch comedy, yet they’re not kitchen-sink realism either. And they’re not a cartoon.”

“We’ve had to look after the irony quotient,” Greif says. “The play is extremely ironic, and yet on the other hand I think we’re all on the lookout for where we’re not too clever for our own good--when in fact the audience is able to identify and root for these characters in a way in which we find they must in musical comedies.”

Newman himself is aware of the problem. For example, he says he originally wrote the sweeping love song “Feels Like Home” as a “trick” song, meant to be sung by a young party girl deceiving the Devil with mock affection. (It’s sung memorably on the album by Bonnie Raitt.) In the show, it has become an earnest duet between young Faust (Kurt Deutsch) and the ingenue, Margaret (Bellamy Young).

“I was neglecting to notice that music does things to people,” Newman says. “Now, I’ve softened it up some to where he actually falls in love and the song does him some good. I forget things like that. There’s some sort of human component missing in me where I don’t notice if things are dark or hard, and they are.”

Musical jokes abound in a score that ranges from near parodies of heavy-metal angst and pop sincerity to rocking gospel, blues, lullaby and funky recitative. The rousing opener, “Glory Train” (sung on the album by James Taylor as God), Newman says, is intentionally “mindless,” while the Devil comes along in logical counterpoint “giving you all this info” about the true nature of the universe and the blind fears that inspired organized religion.

“It’s like my career as opposed to Elton John’s,” Newman says with a straight face. “I’m giving you all this info and these characters, and he’s just--his stuff is too good to compare it exactly--but he’s doing ‘Your Song’ and ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ ”

In conversation, Newman is ironic even about himself. Anyone who has seen him in concert has had a glimpse of this. When he played two nights at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in April, he told the audience that he had written enough songs by now to do an entire evening without repeating any of the numbers he had done the night before. “Of course,” he added, “it would be a pretty crappy show.”

And how is it that, alone, with just his average white man’s blues voice and a grand piano, he is able to hold an audience in thrall for two hours, as he has been doing for 25 years? On the “Faust” album, he sings the part of the Devil, breaking into that opening gospel march with discordant obscenity and later closing out the record with a defiant rocker, “Happy Ending,” that describes the Devil’s finding bliss at last in Las Vegas (“You can take your desert / Goddamn it, give me mine / I’ve got Las Vegas on my mind”).

The song, along with a couple of others on the album--”Little Island” and “Northern Boy”--will not be in the show, for reasons having to do with how the story line has evolved in rehearsals.

“I found anything expendable,” Newman says. “I like ‘Happy Ending’ the best of anything on the record, and I didn’t hesitate to get rid of it.”

The closing number is now a reprise of another song from the Devil’s canon, “Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” which will also be the first single from the album. (Raitt’s “Feels Like Home” would be the logical choice, Newman concedes, but she is on a label other than Warner Bros.)

“I have so little knowledge of the form, really, that I didn’t think of reprises when I was writing it. When I go to see a show on Broadway now that I’m paying attention--Jesus, they play things over and over again. I didn’t have one . A song went by and it was gone.

“I don’t think I’ve seen 15 musicals in my life,” Newman says, improbably. “I saw ‘How to Succeed’ as a kid and loved it, saw ‘Bye, Bye Birdie’ and loved that too. Some of the experiences I’ve had more recently I understand less well. I don’t find myself reacting immediately to them. I probably don’t understand the tremendous appeal of ‘Cats’ or ‘Les Miserables.’ ‘Sunset Boulevard’ I understand a little bit better. But even in ‘Les Miserables,’ when the girl who dies sings a song and she isn’t miked, it’s a powerful thing, in the midst of a thing I was bored with essentially. It was like a children’s pageant. I may be rendered unfit for this occupation by my inability to appreciate what is widely appreciated. But not necessarily.”

Newman is very much aware that the audiences for rock and Broadway don’t seem to overlap much, with “The Who’s Tommy” lately coming the closest to bridging the gap. “And ‘Tommy’ is winding down in New York, while ‘Cats’ goes on forever,” he says. “There’s really despair about the Broadway audience, I’ve found. But I’d like to think that if Paul Simon could do something that really jumped and that was much better, people would notice it.”

During the workshop of “Faust” in New York last year, Newman met Stephen Sondheim, who said to him, “I’m coming to your rehearsal--I hope it won’t make you nervous.” “I said, ‘No, it won’t make me nervous, but I hope it doesn’t offend you if I rhyme girl and world and things like that.’ He said, ‘Well, it does bother me. I don’t come from that tradition, and neither do you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes I do.’

“And I do. I may have classical training and I can write the arrangements for orchestra and do movie stuff, but I grew up with rock ‘n’ roll more than anything else except classical music. I loved Fats Domino, who rhymed New Orleans with shoes . And my own diction is so bad. I know the literature before rock--I know Rodgers & Hart, I know Rodgers & Hammerstein and [Jerome] Kern and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. But I come from rock ‘n’ roll, yeah.”

‘W hat the Lord is saying-- ‘Get on the Glory Train’-- is a big hit, and what the Devil is saying isn’t, as a concept,” Newman points out. “But, yeah, religion’s a giant hit, giant.”

Though not with the show’s author: “I’m Jewish, but I don’t believe in a supreme being. I’m an atheist, I guess. If you could have faith and believe you’re going to go somewhere when you die, rewarded, that the world isn’t just a random mess where bad things happen to good people, it’d be a comforting thought. But if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. I mean, I don’t need that to make me happy. I’ve got kids and a lot of other stuff. The world makes me happy, really. I’m endlessly interested in people’s jobs, where they live and what the weather is and everything like that. There’s enough down here.

“People have asked me, ‘Do you think audiences will be disappointed that you and these other [stars] are not in the play?’ I say, ‘Listen, if we were in the play, the acting would be so unbelievably dreadful we’d never get through five minutes of it.’ I couldn’t in a million years play the part of the Devil.

“We’re not going to get anyone who has a voice like Linda’s [Ronstadt] to sing those ballads, and yet we’ve found a girl you believe when she stands up and does them. That’s what matters.”

Garrison, the man who is playing the Devil, says he is “not trying to get the Randy Newman-ness” into his interpretation of the songs. “To impersonate him would be a disservice to the material.”

Ken Page, one of the original stars of “Cats” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” on Broadway, will play the Lord, sounding altogether different from James Taylor on the record. “I’m a big James Taylor fan,” Page says, “but we’re so different--completely.”

In all, there are two dozen people in the cast and eight musicians (doubling on 16 instruments, including piano, synthesizer, acoustic and electric guitars, alto and tenor sax, drums, flute, clarinet and trombone). The choreography is by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, whose credits include the 1984 movie “Footloose.”

Though evidently less eye-popping in concept than the Playhouse’s pyrotechnic “How to Succeed in Business,” the set for “Faust” will include overhead video screens flashing images of what characters are thinking (as opposed to saying) as well as samples of the Lord’s archival footage of memorable divine retributions. Newman’s designated settings for the story are “Heaven, Hell, South Bend and Costa Rica.”

“There’s no guarantee that a writer as good as [Paul] Simon is, or Prince is, or I am, if I’m a good songwriter, that we can necessarily do something that works theatrically,” Newman says.

“It’s a different thing. But I’ve enjoyed it so much that even a resounding failure is not going to tear me up much, you know? If this succeeds to any degree and I get any encouragement, I’ll do another one. Or if I can make enough money where I can afford to do another one. But I have five kids, so that would be a miracle.”

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“Faust , “ La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Center, UC San Diego, La Jolla. Next Sunday through Oct. 29 (previews begin Tuesday). Show times are Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. $25-$37. (619) 550-1010.