Bard and the Big Top Blend in ‘Oops!’--and It’s No Accident

It wasn’t chutzpah when the Big Apple Circus asked one of this country’s most successful costume and scenic designers, Tony Walton, to direct its first proscenium stage show.

As far as Walton’s concerned, it was serendipity.

It’s not as if this multiple Tony Award and Academy Award winner and 1991 Theater Hall of Fame inductee needed a job. Walton’s credits include innumerable Broadway, ballet and opera productions, and his 19 films were with such directors as Bob Fosse, Sidney Lumet and Francois Truffaut.

He designed last year’s hit revival of “Annie Get Your Gun,” and he just earned a Tony nomination for this year’s Roundabout Theatre production of “Uncle Vanya.”

His director’s credits are fewer, but he’s not a novice, having helmed well-received productions at New York’s Irish Rep and Bay Street theaters.

But Walton leaped at the chance to direct the family-oriented “Oops! The Big Apple Stage Show,” which opens Tuesday at Cerritos Center on its national tour, because “I’m a circus fanatic,” he said with a laugh.

“The first book I was ever able to unscramble was called ‘Tony Joins the Circus.’ I was 3 or 4,” he said. “The first film that made any real impact on me was ‘Dumbo,’ so I’m sure that had something to do with it.”

The Big Apple romp, which the British-born Walton also helped write, is loaded with world-class circus acts. Based on a concept created by Julie Greenberg and Jeff Jenkins for a Chicago show, “The Midnight Circus,” it’s about a Shakespearean theater troupe and a circus company that accidentally are booked into the same theater at the same time.

Don’t expect a Cirque du Soleil-style “art circus” event, Walton said. “We’re going for something more funky.”

Funky, indeed. “Oops!” begins with the death scene in “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Just as Juliet is about to stab herself,” Walton said, “a bicycle wheel comes rolling across the stage and after it comes the man riding his back wheel, trying to catch up with it. Juliet tries to pretend [it] never happened.”

That’s just the beginning of the silly stuff--which includes juggling Hamlets--as the worlds of classic old-fashioned circus and theater collide and the serious actors and the circus performers begin to jockey for the spotlight.

One of Walton’s biggest challenges in mounting the show was communicating with his star aerialists, bicyclists, magicians, acrobats, clowns and jugglers, many of whom are Russian and Ukrainian. The solution? The artists’ own children--a gaggle of 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds who turned a possible hitch into an enjoyable plus.

“These tiny kids were functioning as my translators,” Walton explained. “I could never be quite sure what they were saying, but it was great fun. It was the best fun I think I’ve ever had in the theater.”

And his own four grandchildren, ages 4 weeks to 10 years, are another reason Walton was happy to do the show. Sharing his work with them, seeing the show through their eyes, was “a treat.”

Walton won’t be seeing the show here. He was speaking from the East Coast, after having been grounded by bad weather in Newark the night before, causing him to miss the debut of his design for renowned San Francisco choreographer Michael Smuin’s new ballet, “Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.”

He had just returned from Ireland the day before, after designing the Druid Theatre Company of Galway’s production of “On Rafterty’s Hill,” which was making a weekend stop at the Kennedy Center before going to Dublin and London. And he was already looking toward the July opening of one of his newest design projects, the Broadway revival of the 1939 Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman comedy, “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

But before this remarkably busy artist rang off, he had one more observation about the Big Apple show’s personal appeal for him: The title.

“The critics love to torture you with your title,” he said, chuckling, “and why should they struggle? Let’s just hand them a nice, easy one.”

* “Oops! The Big Apple Circus Stage Show,” Cerritos Center, 12700 Center Court Drive, Tuesday through Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $20 to $47. (800) 300-4345, (562) 916-8500; San Diego Civic Theatre, 3rd Avenue and B Street, May 30 through June 1, 7:30 p.m.; June 2, 8 p.m.; June 3, 2 and 8 p.m., June 4, 1 and 6 p.m. $17 to $44.50. (619) 570-1100, (619) 220-TIXS.