Director’s Show Goes by the Book of Lloyd Webber

When director Scott Ellis and his collaborators set out to create a concert of songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber, they pored over a list of every song he’d written.

“We called it the bible,” Ellis says in a recent interview, adding that, like Joseph’s coat of many colors, this “Book of Andrew” seemed to have songs to fit every emotion. “If something didn’t work in one slot, we’d either move it in the lineup or choose something else. This is a guy who is very prolific and the characters he writes, Evita, Jesus Christ, Norma Desmond, the Phantom, all know what they want--and go for it.”

The musical concert “Andrew Lloyd Webber--Music of the Night” opens at the Ahmanson Theatre today and plays through May 5, followed by an engagement at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach May 7-12. The show stars Kevin Gray--the Engineer in the Los Angeles company of “Miss Saigon”--and features Janet Metz and Patricia Ben Peterson. But, aside from Lloyd Webber, who dominates everything he does, the most influential theater artist involved in this production is Ellis.

In the last decade, the actor-turned-director has emerged as one of the hottest talents in musical theater--perhaps most notably for his recent Broadway hit revival of “Company.” This even though he also directs drama and earned solid notices for his productions of William Inge’s “Picnic” and Ivan Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” for Broadway’s not-for-profit Roundabout Theatre. In fact, one catches up with him these days during a break in rehearsals for Eric Overmyer’s drama “Dark Rapture,” starring Marisa Tomei and Scott Glenn and opening May 23 at New York’s Second Stage.

“I love moving between musicals and drama,” says Ellis, hungrily attacking a turkey sandwich in the late afternoon and appearing boyishly intense. “I like to defy categorization, I like to keep people on their toes.”

Ellis’ breakthrough show came in 1990 when, working with his frequent collaborator David Thompson, he took emotional highlights from the Kander and Ebb catalog and whipped them together for the popular hit revue “The World Goes ‘Round.” Two years later, he directed and co-conceived with Thompson “Sondheim--A Celebration at Carnegie Hall.” Given these experiences in the concert and revue format, Ellis seemed a natural for this show of Lloyd Webber music, brought about by Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky.

“When Garth approached me about doing this, my response was, ‘It’s been done before,’ ” says Ellis, referring to the 1989 concert tour of Lloyd Webber music starring Sarah Brightman, the composer’s wife at the time. “But I thought if we could do it in a really theatrical way, if it wouldn’t be just a ‘Then-he-wrote’ evening, then it’d be sufficiently different.”

For Ellis and Thompson, “theatrical” means “no stools”--and hiring such musical theater veterans as set designer Tony Walton, costumer William Ivey Long and choreographer Susan Stroman to help elevate the various moods of the evening into what Ellis calls “a sweeping emotional journey,” propelled by songs from “Sunset Boulevard,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita,” “Aspects of Love,” “Cats” and, of course, the mega-mammoth hit “Phantom of the Opera.”

“Andrew writes very large themes with great passion,” Ellis says. “It’s not the sort of music that invites a lot of thinking. But if you just listen to the music, something just picks you up and takes you away. I think that is what accounts for his phenomenal success with the masses.”

Lloyd Webber had de facto veto power over the show and he attended one of the first performances during its premiere run at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre last June, the first stop on a tour of eight Canadian cities. After the performance, Lloyd Webber summoned the creative team to a local Chinese restaurant, gave out notes and suggested some minor changes. Ellis thought his brusque manner indicated that he hated the show. An aide assured him that he liked it very much. “He’s a very focused guy,” Ellis said.

That’s also true of Ellis, although it’s a good bet he’s rather more charming in getting his way than the notorious British producer. Ellis is known as an actor’s director, probably because he started out as an actor himself. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Fairfax, Va., Ellis grew up in awe of the musical theater, which he saw regularly with his father, a lawyer, and mother, a frustrated thespian. Ellis moved to New York in 1979 and quickly landed a job in the cast of the Broadway production of “Grease,” but his life began to change when he was cast in the flop 1984 musical “The Rink” by Kander and Ebb.

Ellis struck up a relationship with the songwriting team, which led to his directorial debut in 1988, an off-Broadway revival of their show “Flora, the Red Menace.” The notices were complimentary enough for Ellis to think that he was onto something. “I still didn’t think that I could make a living at it, but I really didn’t know what else I could do.”

Having worked with some of the most popular songwriters in recent musical history, Ellis is in a unique position to compare their personal and professional styles. Asked to define how each of the composers approach the subject of love, he smiles and says, “Steve [Sondheim] is much more complicated and a little cynical. Andrew has a lush and dangerous approach to love, John [Kander] and Fred [Ebb] have a thing for the underdog, the losers who don’t ultimately get what they want. That’s more along the lines of my own personal take.”

Ellis adds, though, that all these artists are still reaching: “As much success as they’ve had, I find it inspiring that they continue to take leaps with their work.”

The director appears to be pushing boundaries himself, not only with Overmyer’s “Dark Rapture,” but also with “Steel Pier,” a musical on which he is collaborating with David Thompson, Susan Stroman and Kander and Ebb about marathon dancing in the ‘30s, as well as a revival of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Judd Hirsch slated for London’s West End.

“I read Overmyer’s script,” Ellis says, “and it was unlike anything I’d ever done before, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is scary,’ and then I thought, ‘Good reason to do it.’ ”

* “Andrew Lloyd Webber--Music of the Night” opens tonight and continues through May 5 at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500, then moves May 7-12 to the Terrace Theater, 300 Ocean Ave., Long Beach, (310) 436-3661. Tickets are $35-$60.