He Can Be Musical Without Borrowing From Musicals

“Give ‘em the old razzle-dazzle, razzle-dazzle ‘em,” James Naughton croons over the phone from his Manhattan pied-a-terre. He has to leave in a few minutes to see Barbara Cook in her “Mostly Sondheim” show at Lincoln Center, but he is taking a moment to step back into the role of Billy Flynn.

Naughton captured a best actor Tony in 1997 playing the slick lawyer in “Chicago.” The character’s “razzle-dazzle” style bamboozled jurors and the press, minted new celebrities and got guilty-as-sin murder defendants off the hook.

If Naughton is wont to break into Broadway song over the phone, one might suppose that a good deal of the same is in store during his five-show cabaret stand beginning Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s intimate Founders Hall.

In fact, there will be no reprises of his Tony-winning numbers from “Chicago” and “City of Angels,” the 1989 show in which he played a film-noir detective. There will be no songs from musicals. He says they sound dull out of context.

“It’s a great song in [“Chicago”], but not a good one to do yourself,” he said. “Once you’ve been on stage with seven chorines in their underwear, singing without them leaves one wanting something else.”

First performed in 1998, Naughton’s “Street of Dreams” solo show is an eclectic affair that includes songs by Duke Ellington, Hoagie Carmichael, country singer Hank Snow and pop-rock singer-songwriter Randy Newman.

Naughton says this is his chance to celebrate the musical variety he has relished since his boyhood in West Hartford, Conn. It also underscores the varied nature of his career. The Broadway musical has been good to Naughton, but he has done just three of them in 30 years as a theater pro. He does not hanker for a fourth.

His first love is drama, not musicals. Naughton’s New York debut came in 1971, when he played Eugene O’Neill’s suffering-poet alter ego in an off-Broadway production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” that also starred Robert Ryan, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Stacy Keach. Classic theater--including a lot of O’Neill, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams--has been a constant for him.

Now Naughton is building a reputation as a director of classics. New York critics praised his 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” His next assignment is directing his friend and Westport, Conn., neighbor Paul Newman in a production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” at the Westport Country Playhouse in June. Newman’s wife, actress Joanne Woodward, is the playhouse’s artistic director; Naughton is an artistic advisor.

At 56, Naughton still gets offers to act in musicals, he says. But he can’t see returning to the grind of performing eight shows a week for a year at a time. He devoted a year each on Broadway and on the road to “Chicago” and “City of Angels,” and more than a year during the late 1970s to his other musical, “I Love My Wife.”

“The rehearsal process has always been the most satisfying and fun part of the whole deal for me,” he says. “That’s where all the discovery takes place. And then you have to do it over and over again. That becomes your life, and I have a nice life without it.”

Until his junior year at Brown University, Naughton was keen on a ballplayer’s life. He played shortstop and third base on the college varsity team. But acting and singing always had been in the mix. After he played a role in a campus production of “Sweet Bird of Youth,” he enrolled in an intensive undergraduate acting course at Brown, then continued his training at the Yale School of Drama.

His career includes a good deal of television, but he hasn’t landed a role that would make him instantly identifiable. His most prominent recent credit has been a recurring part as Calista Flockhart’s father on “Ally McBeal.”

For many years, he has been a regular performer in the Williamstown Theater Festival, a summer repertory company in Massachusetts. There, during the mid-1980s, he played Jim, the gentleman caller, in “The Glass Menagerie,” opposite Joanne Woodward and Karen Black. He stayed on for the film that Paul Newman directed.

Michael Ritchie, the producer at Williamstown, is not surprised that Naughton is beginning to accumulate high-profile directing credits. “In 15 years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him angry, even in some of the most amazingly pressured situations. He’s like the captain of the ship; he can always see through the storm and help guide you through it. He’s very comfortable in his own skin, and there’s a level of trust that people pick up on.”

Naughton’s involvement in cabaret began at Williamstown. The festival includes an informal, after-show cabaret in which cast members from the featured plays often turn up to sing.

These for-the-fun-of-it solo excursions turned serious in 1997, when Naughton met jazz pianist George Shearing while they were performing a tribute to Cy Coleman. Shearing invited Naughton to work on some material, and suggested that Naughton put together a one-man show. “I’d been thinking about putting a show together for 20 years. If the likes of George Shearing thinks I ought to do something about it, that’s the kick in the pants I needed.”

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James Naughton, Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Thursday and Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. $46-$49. (714) 556-2787.