Broadway gets the business

BROADWAY can be an addiction.

“I can’t imagine not having theater as part of my life,” says Tony Award-winning producer Dori Berinstein, the writer and director of the documentary “ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway,” which opens Friday.

“I think people who are passionate about it and start to get involved in the theater community can’t stop,” says Berinstein, whose latest production, “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” is nominated for seven Tonys. “It’s so thrilling and fulfilling on so many levels because you become such a family when you are creating a show. Everybody is working so hard on the same page.

“And when you have the show that gets an audience response, that is ecstatic. When you have a play where people are moved emotionally and maybe changes the way they think about the world, it’s really powerful to have a part in that. I think you just can’t let go.”

“ShowBusiness” chronicles the story of four musicals over the course of the 2003-04 season, from rehearsals through the Tony Awards:

* “Wicked,” the lavish $14-million prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” with music by Stephen Schwartz, which initially met with mixed reviews but has become an international phenomenon.

* “Avenue Q,” a sleeper from Broadway newcomers that examines life’s foibles as an irreverent puppet show.

* “Caroline, or Change,” an esoteric examination of race relations by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori.

* “Taboo,” the controversial musical about Boy George that Rosie O’Donnell put up $10 million to import from London.

Inspired by William Goldman’s classic book “The Season,” which chronicled the 1967-68 Broadway lineup, Berinstein initially covered with her cameras all 37 plays that opened during the 2003-04 season. But once she got into the editing room, she knew the focus had to be on these four diverse musicals. “We ... decided, after a great deal of trial and error, that this was the best possible story to tell that would give our audience not just an honest but a very exhilarating ride behind the curtain.”

Among the individual stories told in “ShowBusiness” is that of Scottish actor Euan Morton, who had played Boy George in London for 18 months before reprising his role on Broadway.

“The script changed a lot here,” Morton recalls today. “We had such big personalities involved with Rosie and Boy George. We were under such media scrutiny. I remember on Day 4 of rehearsals, Michael Riedel [of the New York Post] called the show a turkey!”

Though Morton lost his U.S. work visa when “Taboo” closed, he soon returned to New York, where he has lived for nearly three years. “I’m doing quite a few things,” he says. “I recorded and released an album last year. I have been doing gigs at high schools and universities.”

And he’s still very much of the theater scene, having just completed a run off-Broadway opposite Alfred Molina in “Howard Katz.”

Tesori, who is currently writing “Shrek: The Musical” for a 2008 Broadway opening, says that every season has its share of such backstage drama.

“The energy comes out of all of these people trying to do something in a very small space on a very small island,” she says. “It happens every single year. It’s how I have made a living for a long time.”

Tesori, who also wrote the music to the lavish Tony Award-winning “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” says there is just as much pressure for small shows to succeed as for the multimillion-dollar productions.

“Ultimately, it is a business,” the composer says. “I think there’s a responsibility -- I am certainly aware of it with ‘Shrek’ as well -- that there is a group of people putting up a lot of money and everybody is trying to do the best they can. It’s just inherently like anything: People’s expectations have a dollar bill attached to it. And that equals pressure.”

susan.king@latimes.com