Their ‘aaay’ game is back

SOMEWHERE on Earth, someone will probably send $999.99 through cyberspace for the red-and-black plaid shorts and white blouse Erin Moran wore as the pert Joanie Cunningham on the ‘70s television sitcom “Happy Days.” Or $79.99 for a signed cast photo featuring Henry Winkler as the Fonz with his TV pals. In the eternally optimistic universe known as EBay, “Happy Days” fans can, on any given day, mull over the purchase of 100 different reminders of a show that left ABC’s prime-time schedule more than two decades ago. Joanie may have loved Chachi in spinoff heaven, but “Happy Days’ ” tireless audience still loves tchotchkes.

These are the devotees of “Happy Days” creator Garry Marshall, who has more than a few tchotchkes of his own. He doesn’t run into his fans much in the producing and directing ghettos of Los Angeles and New York where he’s usually found, but he knows they’re out there. He discovered them after an early misstep focusing on his own backyard.

“I wanted to write about the Bronx,” Marshall is saying in his perfect Bronx-ese, uncorrupted by more than 30 years on the West Coast. “With [the short-lived ‘60s sitcom] ‘Hey, Landlord,’ I did a version of ‘Happy Days’ in the Bronx. It didn’t work, so the next time, [Paramount executive] Tom Miller said it should be in Milwaukee, where he was from. They used to say in those days, ‘Get the people you fly over.’ ”

Marshall speaks between bites of canned pears and vending-machine cheese and crackers, the kind of flyover cuisine that’s presented to him daily around 4 p.m. by dedicated assistants with a strong instinct for self-preservation. “I get low sugar and get cranky, so they quick-feed me,” he explains.

This ritual takes place in his homey, photo-filled office at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank. The 99-seater is Marshall’s creative sandbox, the small dream that popped up after he vanquished the big ones. Ever since the place opened in 1997, Marshall has been trying to resurrect and reimagine the show that helped send him on his way to becoming one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy directors. If Marshall’s yesterday was “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” his tomorrow is his yesterday revisited : “Happy Days” the musical. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: “Happy Days. ‘Aaay!’ It’s a musical!”

The show, which opens Friday and runs through March 12, may be premiering on the Falcon’s relatively humble stage, but Marshall enlisted the help of some creative guns accustomed to bigger venues -- Broadway, say, or the world. Songwriters Hall of Famer Paul Williams, known for such treacly evergreens as “Evergreen” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” wrote the score; Randy Skinner, whose work on “42nd Street” earned him his second Tony nomination in 2001, created the choreography.

“It was a great opportunity to write for characters that everybody loved,” says Williams, who appeared on an episode of TV’s “The Odd Couple” that Marshall directed 30 years ago. “These characters are like family. I’m not making the mistake of writing a handful of pop songs. I’m working with Garry and the dramaturge to focus on advancing the story with songs. I didn’t want to write ‘Grease 2.’ We wrote about the people and not the poodle skirt.”

With such high-powered talent, it’s reasonable to assume that Marshall’s ambitions for the show don’t end at the North Hollywood line. In fact, the musical was created for the Falcon so it could leave it.

“Happy Days” was part of the theater’s original business plan. Such as it was. Early on, Marshall shied away from establishing the Falcon as a nonprofit theater because he didn’t want to deal with boards or beg his friends for money. Then he remembered the happy days of his writer-director friend Stuart Ross.

“The guy who did ‘Forever Plaid,’ he’s got 112 productions of it,” says Marshall, 71. “It’s forever! So one of our thoughts was, if you start things here and they go on the road, then that’s a business.”

It took several years and regime changes -- not to mention productions of an unrelated “Happy Days” musical in Australia and England -- before Paramount Television would hand over the rights to Marshall. Then came another hurdle -- finding collaborators who understood Marshall and his clean-cut fans.

“I interviewed composers and big producers and it was almost to the ridiculous,” he says. “It’s not that anybody was silly or stupid, it was just that they said the way to do it is to make Fonzie gay. Or the way to do it is to make Joanie pregnant, and she has the baby. A million ideas, and I kept saying, ‘I don’t want to change it that much.’ They were trying to update it or give it a version they thought was more interesting, but almost all of it was not based on, ‘Here’s a great idea.’ It was all based on what’s sellable on Broadway.

Broadway, shmoadway. What about Milwaukee? The sitcom was written so long ago that mullets were practically avant-garde, and isn’t this the 21st century? Undeniably so, but in Marshall’s worldview, some things transcend space and time.

“Corny,” he says, “is how I make my living.”

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Some cool shoes to fill

BEFORE the Fonz, Samuel Beckett and Judy Garland had a run at making the words “Happy Days” their own. But in the annals of popular culture, the Fonz turned out to be the man. The ‘50s-flavored TV show was ordered up by Paramount to capitalize on the success of nostalgia vehicles “Grease” and “American Graffiti.” It scored an 11-season run, from 1974 to 1984, before finding eternal life in syndication on cable’s TV Land.

The Fonz’s latest hangout is somewhere offstage at the Falcon Theatre, presumably past the sign at stage right with an arrow and the simple declaration: “The Fonz.” A few feet away, the new Fonz appears to be talking to himself. Joey McIntyre, a lanky veteran of the ‘80s boy band New Kids on the Block, pauses as a voice offstage expresses part of his character’s internal dialogue: “You don’t listen to anybody.”

“Yes, I do,” McIntyre replies. “Elvis. James Dean.”

When Marshall was coming up with characters for the first television show he created without a partner, he peopled it with memories from his Bronx childhood. “White-bread” Richie Cunningham, as he describes the character immortalized by Ron Howard, was based on his own youth as an aspiring writer. Arthur Fonzarelli was a composite of several cool guys in his neighborhood.

“One had a motorcycle and he rode us on it,” Marshall says. “But it’s a character that has lasted because everybody in the world is a Richie or a Potsie, but they wanted to be Fonzie.”

Those are pretty cool shoes to fill, but McIntyre doesn’t appear daunted. While Winkler has worked with him on his character, he’s focused on putting a fresh spin on the formative hipster.

“I was a big fan as a kid,” says McIntyre, 33. “The Fonz is an icon. He’s one of the coolest guys ever.”

Back in rehearsal, Marshall, sporting a rumpled gray suit and tousled gray hair, is standing in the third row of the audience, pondering Fonz’s little chat with himself. He’s having a hard time hearing the actor offstage, so someone suggests that Fonzie converse with his own recorded voice projected toward the house.

“Comedy timing is never prerecorded,” Marshall retorts. Of course, in comedy, like romance, timing is everything. And Marshall is careful to get it right for both his characters and the general population. That means coming up with a nice blend of inside jokes for ardent fans and more sophisticated asides, or “winks,” that let the audience know you’re hipper than they think you are.

It’s that sort of comedic understatement -- perhaps not the first thing one would associate with Marshall -- that will bring “Happy Days” into 2006. The show does acknowledge that some time has passed, only it’s two years instead of 30. It takes place in 1959, on the eve of the turbulent ‘60s. Richie and his pals are going off to college and the Fonz’s old girlfriend, Pinky Tuscadero, has returned to town a fresh-faced feminist. As Fonzie’s fan base moves on with their lives, he’s in a quandary about where to go himself.

The Fonz didn’t continue on to the R-rated future that opened up for much of pop culture, and Marshall may not be about marketing to hipsters, but he’s about shrewd marketing nonetheless. A big proponent of G-rated entertainment, Marshall sees his constituency as the millions of American families who have to think twice about shelling out money for baby-sitters.

“It’s about money,” he says. “In New York and Chicago they pay $100 a ticket and pay the baby-sitters. The rest of the country can’t do that, so they bring in the kids. So you really have to fight for true family entertainment. You gotta say, family entertainment with some pizazz going on.

“I’ve been doing that for my whole career. In the middle of ‘Princess Diaries,’ there’s a Frida Kahlo joke. How many people know what the hell we’re talking about? But I throw that in just to keep them awake so the parent will go, ‘Stop dribbling your soda on your

Marshall is so interested in family fare partly because he’s so engrossed in his own family life. He likes to work with his close Italian relatives, with whom he can communicate using a kind of shorthand. He made a star of his sister Penny in “Laverne & Shirley” during the ‘70s. Now he works with his daughter, Kathleen, who oversaw construction of the Falcon, helps run it and serves as a producer on the new “Happy Days.” His sister Ronny Hallin was a producer on the TV series and came out of retirement to help him produce the musical. The Falcon family, both blood and borrowed, is close-knit, say various Marshalls and cast members.

“For most people on long-running shows, you do become a family, but sometimes it’s not such a pleasant family,” says Hallin. “This is always a pleasant family. People can’t wait to come back and work with Garry again. He’s not a yeller-screamer and he knows what he wants. People have confidence in that.”

One of the eager new recruits to the Marshall clan is Rory O’Malley, who plays Richie Cunningham. He says he marvels at the opportunity to move Marshall’s well-loved characters to another stage in their lives.

“I don’t know whether that was Garry’s intention, but it really does feel like everything is being wrapped up,” O’Malley says. “When you have an audience in front of you, wow, the people who grew up with the show, you can feel the energy. It’s a nice and tidy way of saying hello and goodbye to these characters, rather than to a TV show after 11 years.”

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‘Happy Days’

Where: Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays (except Feb. 25), 4 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 12

Price: $25-$37.50

Contact: (818) 955-8101