King Arthur for a day

It might be an experience British actor Jeremy Irons would just as soon forget: bluffing his way through a mid-’80s performance in London as “My Fair Lady’s” Henry Higgins, with conductor John Mauceri feeding him his lines onstage.

Mauceri, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, recounted this tale of theatrical woe the other day during a break from rehearsing the musical “Camelot,” which will open and close Sunday night at the Bowl and star Irons as King Arthur.

It seems Mauceri had been asked to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra for a recording of “My Fair Lady” with an all-star lineup including soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and John Gielgud. But Peter O’Toole, who had been cast as Higgins, dropped out, and Mauceri asked Irons to step in.

Irons obliged -- and the recording was deemed so successful that the cast was invited to do a live performance of songs from the show at Albert Hall. Unfortunately, no one remembered to tell Irons.

“He got the phone call saying, ‘You’re all ready for Saturday, aren’t you?’ ” Mauceri reminisced. “He said, ‘Saturday?’ ... And they said, ‘Yes, we’re doing “My Fair Lady” at Royal Albert Hall.’ So he said, ‘Well, of course!’

“Jeremy was not prepared to do it from memory, so what happened was I would just give him the line before he would sing it, because I was always slightly off camera,” Mauceri said.

The live performance was videotaped by the BBC and became a Christmas TV special that was later released on video.

Despite this musical trauma, Irons, 56, was more than game to join Mauceri at the Bowl for another Broadway show. The cast of “Camelot,” which was Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1960 follow-up to “My Fair Lady,” also includes Melissa Errico as Guenevere, James Barbour as Lancelot and Paxton Whitehead as King Pellinore.

The actor sandwiched the requisite three weeks of rehearsal and one night of performing between a recently completed role in the HBO miniseries “Elizabeth I” and a trip to Budapest, Hungary, to film “Eragon,” a children’s fantasy adventure film. His plane leaves Monday.

This time, Irons has had time to learn his lines -- although it’s been an immersion course.

“My day is completely mapped out,” he said the other day over an eccentric lunch of a bagel with cream cheese and a single banana pancake. “I get up at 5 and learn lines until 7, when I go to the gym until 8. I get in the car at 8:30 and go to my music coaching at 10. I rehearse straight through from 10 till 6, I go home, I make phone calls, I read the paper, I have supper, and I’m in bed by half past 9, every day.

“And I quite like that -- normally I don’t go to the gym every day, and I certainly don’t have voice lessons every day,” he said. “I’m really enjoying the routine.”

Irons said that for the first time he has even begun to appreciate Los Angeles. “Strangely enough, this trip I’m enjoying it more than ever,” he said, seated beneath a table umbrella at a neighborhood-y Studio City cafe -- outside, where he could roll a cigarette. “I don’t think I’ve ever given Los Angeles a chance. Places like this, for me, make Los Angeles come alive.

“And I’m even beginning to enjoy the car culture -- I quite enjoy sweeping out in the morning and driving myself to work. The Santa Monica Freeway and the 101, I’m really beginning to enjoy it.”

Irons likes challenges. “I go off sailing -- that’s very physical, it’s dangerous, it has risks, but it’s different from what I normally do,” he said.

So is doing live theater. “It is a bit like a vacation. I love contrast, and doing this is very different from filming.

“Normally with a musical you have previews. On this, we’ve got one dress rehearsal, and then bang, we do it once. There’s no good finishing the evening and saying, ‘I wish I could have another go at it.’ ”

Irons -- perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning role as slippery socialite Claus von Bulow in the 1990 film “Reversal of Fortune” -- is not bothered by the fact that he is not a trained singer but instead what Mauceri calls “a non-singing musician” (in contrast to the less flattering “non-singing actor”).

Because he studied violin as a child, Irons can read music, so a conductor is able to speak to him in musical terms, Mauceri said. And, Mauceri added, some of Broadway’s most memorable musical roles were written for non-singers -- including King Arthur for Richard Burton.

“Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe and Meredith Willson created major roles for men who didn’t sing,” Mauceri said. “It probably started with Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ in 1951, whose whole range was like four notes. Then you had Henry Higgins for Rex Harrison in ’56 and the very next year Robert Preston doing ‘The Music Man.’ It’s a kind of central part of the history of Broadway.”

“Camelot” requires more than four notes from Irons, but he feels up to the task. And as for following in the hallowed footsteps of Burton, as well as Richard Harris in the 1967 movie and on tour, Irons said evenly: “They were two great voices and two great performances, but of course you put it out of your head.

“They’re both dead -- someone’s got to do it.”

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‘Camelot’

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

Price: $4 to $110

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.hollywoodbowl.com