Stage Struck

The walls of Dean Pitchford’s Hollywood Hills home reverberate with an eclectic group of paintings, from the grand Americana vistas of Kansas artist Fred Shane to a funky, Red Grooms-like view of Manhattan by James Paul Brown.

There’s a visual juxtaposition of the country and the city, perfectly reflecting the conflict at the heart of Pitchford’s musical, “Footloose,” opening in a national touring production tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

A classic pattern in musical tales is that the hero moves from the country to the city, then must adjust to the culture shock. Part of what made the 1984 movie “Footloose”--written by Pitchford and making the career of star Kevin Bacon--a $100-million hit was its reversal of this pattern: Bacon’s Ren McCormack had to leave his native Chicago with his widowed mom for the small, dusty Bible Belt town of Bomont.

“I had just come off of writing ‘Fame,’ with Michael Gore,” said Pitchford, 48, “and I wanted to find a story which made music something special.

“ ‘Fame’ was about music as a career. I came across this report about how kids in 1980 in Elmore City, Okla., wanted to put on a dance, but discovered that the town had outlawed dancing for 100 years. The kids fought the ordinance and won. This was it.”

Which takes us back to the city. Pitchford didn’t want a “Music Man” redux, in which the small town changes itself. In this case, Bomont needed an outsider as a catalyst.

“Ren was my way of making music and expression special,” Pitchford said. “He was trying to get over the loss of his father, and loved dancing, and then had to adjust to this small town. But when I was pitching this to studio executives, they would ask, ‘This is set in the present? I buy it if it’s in 1959, but not now.’ But setting it in 1959 doesn’t make it special.”

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It took a lot of convincing--and then, several studios (finally landing at Paramount) and several directors (finally hooking Herbert Ross) and five years--before “Footloose” was made.

It proved such a hit, one of the early examples of a sleeper connecting with the prime moviegoing youth crowd, that Pitchford was showered with offers for sequels and TV series spinoffs.

“By that point,” he said, “I was soooo tired of it, and needed to go on to something completely different to rejuvenate myself.”

Which also explains why it was made into a Broadway show, especially considering that it featured dancing and a bevy of Top 40 songs (most composed by Tom Snow, all with lyrics by Pitchford) performed by Kenny Loggins, Sammy Hagar and Deniece Williams.

The irony is that Pitchford began his multifaceted show-biz life “having the life of a real New York actor.” His roles in the original productions of Stephen Schwartz’s early musicals, “Godspell” and “Pippin,” forged a 25-year friendship with the composer and his wife, Carol, as well as other Broadway luminaries, including “Cabaret” composer John Kander.

But Broadway was about the furthest thing from Pitchford’s mind after the back-to-back successes of “Fame” and “Footloose,” as well as a string of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations and awards in their wake. Pitchford also had songs recorded by top pop artists, from Dolly Parton (“Don’t Call It Love”) to Eric Carmen (“Make Me Lose Control”) and also ventured into filmmaking with a short, “The Washing Machine Man” (which aired on Showtime), and the HBO-produced “Bloodbrothers: The Joey DiPaolo Story.”

“Don’t forget,” he said, “that Disney had basically taken over the Broadway musical by the ‘80s and ‘90s. . . . Even if I had wanted it, there was no viable career for a lyricist-writer like myself on Broadway. Why should I even think about it?”

Carol Schwartz gave him a reason.

She was such a fan of “Footloose” that she doggedly urged Pitchford to adapt it as a stage musical.

“She kept telling me, ‘Dean, there are so few shows out there that celebrate kids and parents coming together in understanding. You need to do this.’ I just gave in after a while.”

But his original notion was strictly minor leagues: Fiddling a bit with his screenplay story, Pitchford fashioned the show as a rental for schools and nonprofessional companies through licensing by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization’s Theatre Library in 1994.

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Pitchford assumed this would put a period on the “Footloose” phenomenon, but he was wrong. Interest in something bigger stirred inside both the Dodger Endemol Theatricals organization and Cablevision-owned Radio City Entertainments, the theater-producing entity at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.

After further adaptation, and the addition of nine songs, a workshop convinced Dodger producers--who were flush with the success of “The Who’s Tommy”--that “Footloose” could cut loose on the Great White Way.

Pitchford was further convinced with the involvement of Walter Bobbie as director, a hot commodity after his acclaimed revival of Bob Fosse’s “Chicago.”

After a Washington, D.C. tryout, the show hit Broadway in late October and promptly set in motion the touring company, which has been on the road since January.

“Walter cut to the heart of the matter instantly,” said Pitchford, “when he obviously wanted to avoid turning this into a big flashy spectacle, which it easily could have become. He said right off, ‘Let’s get the human values of this story right.’ ”

Fans of the movie will immediately notice distinct differences between the original and stage version. While the movie opens with Ren already living in Bomont, the stage version introduces him while he’s still in Chicago.

Several of the movie set pieces, such as a “chicken race” between Ren and bad boy Chuck on tractors, have been replaced by more character-driven scenes and songs.

Most notably, while the movie was Ren’s story, the musical book balances Ren’s dilemma--adjusting to the town, missing his father--with that of the Rev. Shaw Moore, the Christian leader of Bomont, who urged the ban on dancing after blaming a dance outing as the cause of his son’s death.

“I had had this balance in the screenplay,” Pitchford said, “but test screening audiences wanted the story to focus on Ren and less on the reverend, so a lot of scenes with John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest as the reverend and his wife were trimmed or removed. The musical finally let me restore what I had wanted all along.

“I discovered something else during the process of getting this show ready: There is nothing in all of my creative activity as special as taking the subway to Broadway in the morning, grabbing a coffee and sitting down in a theater facing 30 people onstage and creating a show onstage. You’re making this thing together, and for several weeks there, it’s yours.

“Kander told me to enjoy this time, because the show would soon be taken away from me by the process of opening--the publicity takes over, the performers take over.”

Kander noted something else to Pitchford.

“ ‘This will always be your baby,’ he said. He was thinking of ‘Chicago,’ which had been done in the ‘70s, and then, boom, it comes back strong 20 years later,” Pitchford said. “A movie is done, and that’s it. A show never goes away, and I have to take care of it.”

* “Footloose,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. today-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, $18-$52.50. Ends Sunday. (714) 740-7878 or (213) 365-3500.