With These Guys, It’s Easy to Be Bard

Before he founded Three Dog Night in 1968, musician Danny Hutton scoured the explosive L.A. music scene as a record company talent scout and as a result naturally spent a lot of time at rock impresario Doug Weston’s legendary West Hollywood club and incubator for fresh talent, the Troubadour.

Now a spunky, unpredictable theater troupe by the same name as that club has taken many of Three Dog Night’s hit tunes to use in its fanciful adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” punningly titled “Twelfth Dog Night” and opening tonight at Grove Theater Center’s Festival Amphitheatre in Garden Grove.

Yet Troubadour Theatre Company artistic director Matt Walker admits that hardly anyone in his group really knew the once-ubiquitous band, which had a string of 21 top-40 songs from shortly after it formed in 1968 until it disbanded in 1975.

And Hutton definitely had never heard of this Troubadour.

In any case, Hutton said, “I believe this is the first time the band’s music has been used for Shakespeare. I definitely can’t think of any other example. And it makes sense. Our music is perfect for the theater.”

In another coincidence, during the show’s two-weekend run in Garden Grove--and before it moves to Fullerton’s Muckenthaler Cultural Center for another two weekends--Three Dog Night will perform in Orange County.

The band, which Hutton and co-founder Cory Wells revived in 1981--minus fellow lead singer Chuck Negron, who tours independently--will play Tuesday at the Orange County Fair.

“Aww, I’d love to see that [show],” Hutton said during a recent phone interview.

But he, nor any of the band members probably will catch it, given that they’re on the road through virtually the show’s entire run.

The link between the band and Shakespeare came about casually, when Walker and his fellow Troubadours were discussing “Twelfth Night” in the fall of ‘98, as the follow-up to their past three years’ worth of summer Shakespeare in partnership with the Grove Theater Center.

Arguably the Bard’s most perfectly realized comedy, “Twelfth Night” follows the company’s previous wild adaptations, including “Shrew,” “Spamlet” and “Clown’s Labour’s Lost.”

“We were just throwing around titles,” Walker said, “and somebody said, ‘Twelfth Night . . . Three Dog Night . . . Twelfth Dog Night . . . yeah!’ and that was it.”

Then, he said, most of the actors asked, “What is Three Dog Night?”

Anyone able to spin a record in the early ‘70s could have answered; the group behind such hits as “Joy to the World” and “An Old Fashioned Love Song” was everywhere, regularly selling out arenas, including the Forum, and landing three No. 1 songs on Billboard’s pop singles chart.

It’s that range, Hutton suggested, that makes the band’s material so friendly for the stage.

“Our appeal has been that we have never been stuck in a bag, a musical box. There’s several different emotions running through the songs, and that could work in something other than the concerts we do.”

For “Twelfth Dog Night,” the Troubadour group had to take apart Shakespeare’s play (Walker estimates his adaptation has taken nine months--”and it’s still going on through rehearsals,” adds producer and Grove executive director Charles Johanson) and simultaneously undertake a crash course on Three Dog Night.

“It surprised us that we knew so many of their songs, like they’ve been so much a part of the landscape and you didn’t link them with Three Dog Night,” said Walker, who plays the clownish Feste in the adaptation, which heavily borrows from the Italian theater tradition of commedia dell’arte.

“We hear that a lot,” Hutton said. “People sort of know the band, but they really know the tunes.”

The irony, though, is that the tunes are not the band’s, as Walker learned when he checked with music publishing-rights agencies BMI and ASCAP for permission to use them on stage.

Three Dog Night stood apart in an era where it was an article of faith that you performed only original material; this was, and remains, an interpretive band, covering the work of such songwriters as Hoyt Axton (“Joy to the World”), Randy Newman (“Mama Told Me [Not to Come]”) and Harry Nilsson (“One”).

“Not trying to sound bitter, but we got a lot of flak as ‘only a cover band,’ ” Hutton said, “when no one put that label on Linda Ronstadt or Santana. For us, a good song is a good song, and it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”

That the songs can be applied to a “Twelfth Night” speaks to Shakespeare’s malleability, Walker said. While the sophisticated comedy of mixed identities, love and exile incorporates music, Shakespeare never identifies specific melodies, leaving it--much like the set and setting--to each company’s imagination.

“When Malvolio is put behind bars, we have him sing ‘One Is the Loneliest Number,’ ” Walker said. “Sir Toby Belch’s anthem becomes ‘Mama Told Me (Not to Come),’ and our Viola sings her version of ‘Never Been to Spain’ when she arrives in disguise in the big city. There are unlimited ways to play with this, and we definitely like to play.”

Such as the possible summer 2000 venture Walker has in mind for his company: “Roswell That Ends Well.”

* “Twelfth Dog Night,” Grove Theater Center’s Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. 8:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday. $18.50-$22.50. Ends July 24. Also July 30-Aug. 7 at Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. 8:15 p.m. Friday-Saturday. $24.50 (dinner available for an additional $14.) (714) 741-9555.

* Three Dog Night plays Tuesday at the Orange County Fair’s Arlington Theater, 88 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. 7 and 9 p.m. Concerts included with fair general admission, $2-$6. (714) 708-3247.