This Bird Took Awhile to Fly

Hans Christian Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling” turned into a swan; “Honk!,” Britain’s pun-filled, lavish song-and-dance comedy version of the tale, has hatched into unexpected success for writer Anthony Drewe and composer George Stiles.

The show, staged by Trevor Nunn as a Christmastime family frolic at London’s Royal National Theatre in December 1999, turned out to be more than just a holiday crowd-pleaser. The Daily Telegraph rhapsodized that “the future of the British musical hasn’t seemed so bright in years,” and “Honk!” went on to receive the 2000 Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of the Tony, for best new musical. Its competition included “The Lion King’ and the ABBA spectacular, “Mamma Mia!”

“Honk!’s” professional Southern California premiere, presented by Music Theatre of Southern California, opened Friday at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, where it continues through Oct. 21; it moves to Glendale’s Alex Theatre on Oct. 26. International City Theatre will open another production of the show on Nov. 9 at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center’s Center Theater.

“Suddenly, we were sort of front-page news,” Drewe said of the show’s surprise success. “And that’s how it started to spread.”

The show has “spread” throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe, from Israel and Africa to several U.S. states. School and professional productions are slated for this year and next at North American venues. Drewe will direct productions in Chicago, Japan and Singapore, and he and Stiles will attend the premiere in Denmark, wondering how it will be received in Hans Christian Andersen territory.

“We are very excited, and not a little frightened,” said Stiles, in a joint conversation with Drewe by phone from their London base. “It’s like taking coals to Newcastle, as we say.”

Stiles and Drewe, both 40, met as students at Exeter University. They became creative partners in 1983, the year they graduated. They slowly carved out respectable careers in British musical theater, but stellar success eluded them. The sudden explosion of a holiday romp that they wrote in 1993, filled with “fowl puns” and eccentric farmyard fauna, has been “extraordinary, very gratifying,” Drewe said. “Honk!” isn’t fueled by humor alone. The tale’s earnest message of tolerance resonates as well. “There’s no doubt that it is a theme that everyone seems to be able to relate to,” Stiles said. “When the central character, Ugly, sings, ‘I’m different, I’m just different,’ everybody can relate to that.”

That message of acceptance goes down easy, of course, wrapped up as it is in sly jokes tailored for adult ears, Monty Python-esque characters and big, pulse-y musical numbers. Adults shouldn’t expect it to be a “‘Sesame Street’ sort of thing,” stressed Bill Shaw, artistic director of Music Theatre of Southern California.

“It absolutely isn’t in any way a lecture piece. The music and the characters are truly a hoot,” Shaw said. “It’s a rare opportunity for parents and kids to come and see a show together that they all can appreciate for its visuals, the fun things that happen, the message [and] the sophisticated dialogue.”

Shaw, who said he planned a special effects surprise for Ugly’s transformation scene, said that the show’s adult appeal is apparent as soon as the orchestra strikes up.

“I’d been playing the CD [before rehearsals began], and my crew were all singing the songs. When the crew starts singing the music, you know it’s good.”

The pastiche of musical styles was great fun for Stiles.

“For instance, when Ugly learns to swim with his mother,” he said, “we wanted to find a good theatrical equivalent for swimming. Rather than people doing lots of dodgy choreography with the breast stroke, we decided that a good analogy of swimming was dancing. So the music takes you through loads of very silly old-fashioned ballroom stuff, rumbas and tangos and bossa novas.”

One of the show’s biggest numbers involves a bullfrog, “a sort of ebullient amphibian,” Drewe said, “who has come to terms with his wartiness and tries to convey that message to the Ugly Duckling.” The song-and-dance extravaganza builds until a host of frogs and froglets are cavorting about in 1930s Busby Berkeley-style.

“If it was possible to flood the stage,” he joked, “it would have been an Esther Williams synchronized swimming number.”

Other characters in the show are the Ugly Duckling’s suspicious dad, Drake; a purse-carrying Queen Mother-type duck, and an Eartha Kitt-ish cat fatale who cohabits with a chicken and never dines on feathery fowl because it’s “like eating and flossing at the same time.”

The villain of the piece, with a taste for baby ducks, is a decadent feline who stalks Ugly because “he fancies the larger bite,” Stiles said. “There really wasn’t a baddie as such in the original story. So we developed this rather neglected and possibly moth-eaten moggy.”

A “moggy,” he explained, “is a fairly specific British term for a rather lowly form of cat.”

The show’s plethora of puns seems to be part of its universal appeal as well, eliciting audible reaction from the audience.

“There are a couple of real groaners,” said Stiles, an unabashed admirer of what he describes as Drewe’s natural bent for the dubious-joke genre. “There’s a particular one in Act 2 where Drake sends the children off to bed and says, ‘Brush your beaks and don’t take all the water; my bill’s big enough.’

“That usually gets an enormous groan,” he chortled. “By that stage the audience has given in.” Making text and music accessible to both adults and children, in order not to bore one or mystify the other, wasn’t new to the pair, who feel that they “turned professional” in 1989, when Cameron Mackintosh produced their musical “Just So,” based on Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

“We adapted it as a musical for our age group, which at the time was thirtysomething, knowing that if we got it right, children were going to enjoy it too,” Stiles said. “Because the sweetness of the story of ‘The Ugly Duckling,’ and the sweetness of the ‘Just So Stories’ is still there; it’s just that adults can appreciate a different level on which we’ve written the show. So we wrote it for ourselves, but in the knowledge that children were going to come and see it.”

“The art is not to patronize children,” Drewe added, “but to trust them to come up to a level that you would not necessarily think they could come up to.”

The credibility that the pair earned with “Just So” changed what they describe as patchwork careers of intermittent television writing, “singing comic and topical songs on television and radio, and just sort of doing bits and pieces as well as writing shows,” Stiles said.

“And a bit of interior decorating, a bit of fruit-picking,” Drew joked. “Anything to earn some money.”

“We’ve been lucky enough to scrabble a living at it ever since 1989,” Stiles said, “and it’s been a fascinating journey.”

In 1992, Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment company purchased the film rights to “Just So,” and Stiles and Drewe came to L.A. to work on the screen version. The movie was never made, and the rights reverted back to the pair; last month they were back in L.A. talking to studios about a possible film version of “Honk!” “Honk!” didn’t begin as a potential blockbuster. Its first incarnation in 1993, as “The Ugly Duckling, or the Aesthetically Challenged Farmyard Fowl” at Britain’s Watermill Theatre in Newbury, was mildly received. Drewe and Stiles readily credit lucky timing for part of “Honk!’s” recent success. When the show had its first outing, “we were kind of writing against the grain,” Stiles said. “I think the taste for 10 or 12 years was very much for a slightly grander sort of opera-style musical, tackling more serious subjects. Certainly in Britain,” he added, “we were responsible as a nation for a lot of those.”

However, the popularity of “Honk!” has been something of a mixed blessing. While the award-winning run at the National opened new doors for the pair, and Stiles is delighted that “Trevor Nunn has said he’d like to see first sight of anything new that we do,” he and Drewe feel the pressure to meet or exceed expectations.

So, although they have written a new musical version of “Peter Pan” that will, “fingers crossed, open in London in about 15 months’ time,” Stiles said, they are also working on a new show, loosely based on another fairy tale, this time solely from an adult perspective.

“We want to surprise ourselves as well as everybody else,” he said, “by writing something now that isn’t perceived as a family or children’s show. Because you need to keep yourself fresh, make yourself do things that don’t come easily.”

Stiles and Drewe frequently collaborate with other writers and composers, but they clearly prize what they describe as the organic creative process they share.

“Anthony tells me when he thinks a phrase is not satisfying musically,” Stiles said, “and I pick endless holes in the lyrics, and we work through dialogue and stuff together. I suppose it’s like any writing team. You lock yourself in that room, and because we know each other very well, we can more or less embarrass ourselves thoroughly.”

“We were so nave when we started,” Drewe said. “We learned on the hoof as it were. So I think our abilities or lack thereof have sort of matured at the same rate.”

“And that’s why,” Stiles observed dryly, as Drewe laughed, “it’s taken us 16 years to [be successful].”

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* “Honk!,” San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, 320 S. Mission Drive, San Gabriel, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 21. $22-$42. (626) 308-2868. Alex Theatre, 215 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, Oct. 26-27, 8 p.m.; Oct. 28, 7 p.m.; Oct. 27-28, 2 p.m. $22-$42. (800) 233-3123. International City Theatre at Center Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, Nov. 9-Dec. 9. $27-$35; opening night, $50-$60. (562) 436-4610.