You can go home again

THIS was one case in which “almost” did count. Des McAnuff, La Jolla Playhouse’s outgoing artistic director, almost went to the Stratford Festival in his native Canada in 1983, but he headed south instead. He took up the reins of the playhouse and turned it into one of the country’s most celebrated regional theaters, known for its taste for adventure and its propensity for birthing Broadway musicals. When Stratford beckoned a decade later, McAnuff was again tempted but again opted for La Jolla.

Now he’s planning to join a new triumvirate that will run Stratford, distinguished by its embrace of the classics, in 2008. After two stints at the helm of La Jolla Playhouse -- from 1983 to 1994 and from 2001 to the present -- McAnuff, 54, takes his final bow April 15, leaving 25 Tonys in his wake, including the 1993 award for outstanding regional theater. As artistic director emeritus, he’ll continue to help raise funds and direct plays for the theater. A replacement has not been named.

McAnuff says the move to one of Canada’s most prominent arts festivals is “something I’ve always wanted to do. I believe in the importance of keeping pertinent productions of classics going. It only takes one missed generation to lose track of that literature, which would be an absolute tragedy. And the only way to keep it alive is to do pertinent productions about your own times. I believe strongly in this.”

That might not be what some would expect from a director who made his mark creating musicals when many in the theater had declared them all but dead. Three he developed in La Jolla -- “Big River,” “The Who’s Tommy” and “Jersey Boys” -- went on to make a Tony splash that included two best-director nods for McAnuff. But ask him to name his favorites from among the more than 30 plays he has directed in Southern California, and the titles he ticks off are well-ripened works such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Tartuffe” and “The Sea Gull.”

“When I came here, I was told by supporters of the theater that we weren’t allowed to do Shakespeare because the [Old] Globe did Shakespeare,” he says. “Also that Chekhov didn’t play in Southern California. So the first season I did Shakespeare and the third season we did Chekhov. My answer was, ‘You can’t tell a symphony orchestra not to play Mozart. If you want to be a great theater, you’ve got to do the great plays.’ ”

On the eve of his swan song as artistic director -- a new Page-to-Stage production of “The Farnsworth Convention,” Aaron Sorkin’s work about the birth of television, running through March 25 -- McAnuff reflected on highlights of his California career.

BIG RIVER: The Adventures

of Huckleberry Finn (1984)

When McAnuff began working with Roger Miller, the songwriter had seen only one musical, “Music Man.” During their first meeting, the director realized he needed to find an unconventional way of bringing out the best in his composer. The show won seven Tonys.

IN the script, which he may have read all the way through and may not have, there’s a scene where [Huck’s abusive father] Pap Finn says to Judge Thatcher, “Look at this hand, the hand of a hog.” He’s trying to convince him that he’s worthy of taking his son back. Roger mistook that for “hand for the hog,” in other words, clapping for the pig. So the only song he’d written when I met him was a song about applause for the pig, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Huckleberry Finn. I realized fairly quickly that if this was going to work, I had to accept that Roger wasn’t necessarily going to accept assignments. What I would often do with Roger is say, “Play all the songs you’ve written in waltz time because we don’t have a waltz time song yet.” “You Oughta Be Here With Me,” one of the songs of the show, came out of Roger’s trunk. “Leavin’s Not the Only Way to Go” is about his friend Willie Nelson. It had nothing to do with “Big River.”

MACBETH (1989)

McAnuff considers this his strongest work directing a classical production of Shakespeare. It starred John Vickery in the title role. At the time, the careers of McAnuff and his actress-wife Susan Berman were on the upswing.

OUR careers were dominating our lives, and we wanted to have a child. I started to identify with the play in a different way. I understood then how with a career, you want to have a child and you don’t. I said this to a journalist, and it was the only time I knew [his wife] to be really angry at me for something I said to the press. She felt it was a desecration, that I’d violated our relationship by talking about not having a child, talking about how I could relate to these characters because of career and work. On a personal level, that’s what the Macbeths are about. They can’t have a child, so his job becomes the child. She gives up her ability to have children to push him forward. Anyway, literally the next week, she said, “Guess what? I’m pregnant.” It was almost kind of mystical.

THE WHO’S TOMMY (1992)

The Who’s Pete Townshend initially told McAnuff through his attorney that he would be minimally involved in the production. But the two ended up spending many hours together working on the show, which went on to win five Tony Awards.

I got to know him really well, and he clearly in many ways is Tommy. Even though Roger Daltrey played Tommy, there was no question that the principal creator of “Tommy” is Pete Townshend, so he was projecting himself on that little child, and that had to do with his experience growing up after the war. I always saw it as a World War II story, that rock ‘n’ roll had essentially been born out of the turmoil of World War II. I felt that was what “Tommy” was about. The journey Tommy goes through is the journey Pete went on in terms of coming out of complete obscurity to sudden superstardom.

We started in November of ’91 and were in rehearsal by June of ‘92, so it was remarkably fast, a high-velocity experience. Pete’s an incredible raconteur and as a rock ‘n’ roll fan steeped in the culture of the British Invasion, I’d have lots of questions about “Tommy.” [We’d meet in New York at] the Royalton Hotel, where he used to stay in a suite on the top floor. It had this kind of Bauhaus theme. The chairs were all three-legged chairs, so we’d be getting into these intense discussions about “Tommy,” and every two hours, one of us would go ass-over-teakettle back over the chair. He’d be waving his arms and doing a windmill and go flat on his back, and I’d do the same thing. It took a month to get these chairs changed because of some contractual rule with the architect that they couldn’t change anything without approval. Because he was Pete Townsend, he made such a ruckus. It kept everything in perspective.

DRACULA, The Musical (2001)

“Dracula’s” healthy box office in La Jolla inspired producers to take the Frank Wildhorn musical to Broadway, but the New York critics creamed the show and it closed four months later.

YOU have to have kind of a clean canvas, and I think on “Dracula,” there were preconceived notions. Another vampire musical had opened -- “Dance of the Vampires” -- which the critics had performed a vivisection on just a season or two before. Frank Wildhorn had had a good commercial success with “Jekyll & Hyde,” which was not a critical success. Somehow the critics were determined to drive a stake through its heart. I actually was naive enough to think at one point that we might survive that because we’d done the best business of previews that I could ever remember. But it was not to be. Do I feel like I would have done anything different? No, I really don’t. I think we took the book seriously. I think it was quite scary. I think Tom Hewitt was extraordinary as Dracula. I think we were fighting an uphill battle.

700 SUNDAYS ... Billy Crystal

... A Life in Progress (2004)

Crystal’s Tony-winning autobiographical play sprang out of a two-man show he performed in Seattle with fellow comedian David Steinberg. After a benefit performance in La Jolla, McAnuff gingerly told him it should be recast as a one-man show.

WE did a postmortem a few weeks later. I’m sheepishly thinking, “How frank am I?” I basically went into this meeting and said, “I think you have to do this by yourself, and it has to focus on the personal stories because the personal stories were extraordinary.” Billie Holiday was his baby-sitter. His family had the Commodore Music label, and he grew up with the jazz giants. He had this unbelievable background and also, on a personal level, the loss of his dad. And he listened to me seriously for however long this took, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and he pulled out this page and it said, “700 Sundays,” and it was literally the story of the loss of his dad. And I just went, “Well, exactly. That’s what this needs to be. It needs to be a story about you.”

JERSEY BOYS (2004)

Four Seasons Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe left the creators alone to craft the musical about their lives. They didn’t see the show until opening night and, says McAnuff, “they cried like babies.” The show went on to win four Tony Awards.

WHEN we were putting this together, the aesthetic we adopted was to have musicians playing rock ‘n’ roll onstage: Even the band would be there as supporting characters. I wanted to get people who really played.

Two guys who came to mind were Donnie Kehr and Christian Hoff from “Tommy.” We played at the China Club during those days, particularly if Pete [Townshend] was in town, so I knew those guys were good players. Donnie was doing some act in Vegas. He plays bass drums, and he’s good on guitar as well as keyboards. I got him in. But I couldn’t find Christian. He’d moved from New York to Los Angeles and I lost track of him. He was raised on La Jolla Playhouse. He grew up in San Diego, and he’d been in youth theater here. I’d been proud of him in “Tommy,” and I was disappointed they couldn’t seem to track him down. We went to Los Angeles for auditions because we audition on both coasts. We’re leaving the parking lot on our way out, and just as I’m backing out, Christian pulls up with his two kids. He was at whatever his straight job was at that point -- he may have been teaching; he wasn’t really acting at the time. So we all piled back in. Even the accompanist had gone. But luckily he brought his guitar. He just blew us away and literally two minutes into his reading, I knew we’d found Tommy DeVito. He, of course, went on to win the Tony Award.

THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION (2007)

“West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin sought out McAnuff to direct his new play about the dawn of television and the race between an Idaho farmer and a Russian immigrant for control of the new medium.

IT’S this large -- epic, I think -- quite emotional piece about the invention of television. As you would expect from Aaron, it’s just very, very smart. And he has a vast general knowledge. I believe he knows more about the musical theater than I do. In fact, I’m sure he does. I wouldn’t want to know everything he knows about musical theater. And he has a wonderful social conscience. The play is about something.

For somebody who’s really spent more time writing for television and even film than for the stage, he has a great sense of the stage. He can really write picturing what’s happening in the stage house, so staging his work is a joy. Also, he’s written a play for 17, 18 actors, and that’s great to get to do because in these times in the American theater, we rarely get to do that.

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‘The Farnsworth Invention’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse,

2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays,

8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 25

Price: $29 to $35

Contact: (858) 550-1010