Of Wine and Rosy Summer Memories

Across piles of papers and books in his Cheviot Hills home, Ray Bradbury is describing a key moment of his boyhood, which, years later, found its way into his novel “Dandelion Wine.”

He was about 13, he recalls, when he became aware one day of the hair on the back of his hands--a seemingly mundane part of himself, yet evidence of something pulsing beneath the skin’s surface. And he suddenly realized: “I’m alive! Why didn’t someone tell me?”

He raises his hands, now spotted and veiny with age, to look at them anew, and something miraculous happens--something right out of “Dandelion Wine,” or any number of other Bradbury books. Time splits, the world realigns, and Bradbury’s face turns suddenly young, transformed by a boyish expression of wonder.

The 79-year-old man is 13 again.

An instant later, the universe snaps back into place, and Bradbury is himself--a snowy-haired gent with a warm, open grin.

Bradbury is engaging in this cheerful bit of time travel because, across town, the Colony Theatre Company is reviving a musical version of “Dandelion Wine,” which was a big hit for that company in 1981. Opening Saturday, the show will inaugurate the Colony’s new home in Burbank’s Media Center.

“Dandelion Wine,” published in 1957, is a chronicle of the summer of 1928 in a small Illinois town, as seen through the eyes of the Spaulding family--particularly 12-year-old Douglas. (In the musical, he’s slightly older.)

A collection of short stories linked into a novel, the book catalogs life’s little celebrations and incremental losses. In the former category are such things as the taste of cold ice cream on a warm summer evening, the smell of fresh-mown grass, and the first wearing of bouncy new sneakers. In the latter are such events as the moving away of a best friend, the discontinuation of the town trolley and the death of a seemingly invincible great-grandmother.

For Douglas, the losses begin to accumulate too rapidly, and he becomes haunted by the opposite of his earlier realization--”that you can die,” Bradbury says, “that your friends can go away, that some of the things you love are going to vanish.”

“The whole book,” he concludes, “is about learning to make do.”

Bradbury adapted his book for the musical, and Jeffrey Rockwell, a regular collaborator with the Colony, wrote the music and lyrics. The company’s founding artistic director, Terrence Shank, directed the ’81 production, after having helmed the theater’s productions of Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” (1977) and “Fahrenheit 451” (1979) at the Colony’s former home, the Studio Theatre Playhouse in Silver Lake. Shank, who left in 1984 to pursue career opportunities in South Africa and then Orlando, Fla., has returned to stage the new production.

Anticipating an exhausting workload this year as the Colony shifted operations from the Studio Theatre Playhouse, producing director Barbara Beckley initially planned to open the Burbank theater with something small and simple. Then she happened to listen to a recording from the ’81 production of “Dandelion Wine,” and she realized no other show would do.

“Anybody can do something out of the Samuel French catalog,” she says, “but this is what we do. We are the ones who have this unique relationship with Ray.”

And so the company is readying the musical, with its 25-member cast and five musicians, while hurriedly applying finishing touches to its sleek, new home in Burbank’s bustling shopping and entertainment campus.

“It’s like laying track in front of a speeding train,” says the weary but undaunted Beckley.

Memory suffuses “Dandelion Wine,” the musical, as it does the novel. The title, for instance, refers to the Spaulding family’s summertime tradition of making dandelion wine--liquid sunshine, which, when quaffed later in the year, restores summer’s warm feelings.

Listening to Bradbury talk about hometown Waukegan, Ill.--his inspiration for the book’s Green Town--is like sipping some of that wine.

Though present-day Waukegan has been subsumed by Chicago’s suburban sprawl, Bradbury remembers it as a wild, free place. It was “a green town, half into the wilderness,” he says. “There was a ravine that cut across the town. On my way to school every day, I went down through the ravine and up the other side--and along the way, I played Tarzan. All year long, I was down there, one way or another, skating on the ice, gathering leaves.”

The ravine had its dark side, though. It was the place where “I got the hell scared out of me,” Bradbury says.

That happened when he was 5, coming home at night after a showing of “The Phantom of the Opera.” “My brother hid under the bridge and, when I crossed over, he jumped out at me,” Bradbury recalls with a chuckle. “I ran home screaming.”

Years later, he returned to the ravine with his own kids, “and I realized you could still scare me. I wouldn’t want to go down there at night.”

Boyhood Fourth of Julys also linger in Bradbury’s mind. “I was a romantic when I was 5,” he says. “I stood on the lawn with my granddad, and when we’d fired off the last rocket and saw the last fire balloon go into the sky, I stood there crying. The Fourth of July would never come again. It was a whole year away. A whole year. How are you gonna live through it?

“All of these things I took personally,” Bradbury explains. “Time, as the enemy, stood between me and my celebrations.”

The musical version of “Dandelion Wine” began in different form, with music by Billy Goldenberg and lyrics by Larry Alexander. That version was performed at Lincoln Center in 1967.

The ’81 Colony production went into rehearsal with that score, but Shank had some new ideas and, after a couple of weeks, he and the show’s creators agreed that he should proceed with new music and lyrics. That meant, however, that he had to come up with them. So he turned to Rockwell, a young actor and composer who had written underscoring for several Colony productions. As rehearsals continued through the summer, Rockwell hurriedly wrote about 16 songs, which were rushed into the show.

The songs he came up with have “a Copland, very American” sound, Rockwell says. “There are period sounds: a couple of ragtimes, an old-fashioned tango, some of the dance music of the time. It’s an old-fashioned, symphonic theater score.”

Beckley says that, usually, she wouldn’t want the Colony to revisit a hit show. But because “Dandelion Wine” was rushed into production as it was being written, it never jelled as completely as it might have. “It’s always sort of sat there as something we’d like to revisit,” she says.

In a sense, though, one pressure merely has been traded for another. Instead of rushing a score into production, the company this time is rushing a whole theater into production.

“There’s a kind of extra excitement about it,” Shank says, “because you’re down there in what is going to be the concession area, having a musical rehearsal, and people are running by with paint cans and ladders and lighting equipment. You are aware, constantly, of this complete energy package that’s going on, and that does have a spillover.”

Four new songs either have been swapped for existing ones or added in new places. In many other places, melodies and lyrics have been tweaked.

Shank, meanwhile, is rethinking the show’s emphasis and tone. Whereas the previous staging tended toward the “pastoral,” he says, this one deals more forthrightly with the show’s dark side--with the sad memories that lurk among the happy ones, preventing people from moving forward with their lives.

“Now it is more of an exorcism,” he says. “An exorcism of the past, to be able to move on to the future.”

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Bradbury wasn’t much involved early in rehearsals and is making only occasional visits in the final days. “I don’t interfere with my directors,” he says. “I either trust them or I shouldn’t be doing it.”

Meanwhile, he writes two hours a day, maintains an active schedule of lectures and book signings, and happily haunts the big yellow house that he shares with Marguerite, his wife of 52 years. Activity, he says, is life’s best medicine.

“I had a stroke eight months ago,” he explains, “and for the first month, I was lying in bed; I couldn’t move. This hand wouldn’t move; my leg wouldn’t move. And I would talk to them; I’d say: ‘Up, Fido.’ And slowly, over a period of days and weeks, you talk to your leg and your arm, and they begin to twitch. Now I’m walking, writing, signing books. When I was in the hospital, I wrote a screenplay and finished a novel. It’s a way of surviving. You keep busy in your mind, and maybe your body will catch up.”

As he turns 80 on Tuesday, he keeps on testing the laws of time and space.

“People say, ‘Are you a fantasy writer?’ No. ‘Are you a science-fiction writer?’ No. I’m a magician.”

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“DANDELION WINE,” Colony Theatre, in Media Center, 555 N. 3rd St., at the corner of Cypress Avenue, Burbank. An entrance is off the parking garage, Level 4. Dates: Opens Saturday. Plays Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 10. Prices: $25-$28. Phone: (818) 558-7000.