‘BIG RIVER’ RETURNS AS A FULL-BLOWN MUSICAL

SAN DIEGO — When “Big River,” the musical account of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” closed at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1984, it was little more than a play with a lot of music.

The “Big River” that opens a six-day run at the Civic Theatre tonight has metamorphosed into a full-blown Broadway musical.

It’s a different show than the one San Diegans saw at the La Jolla Playhouse three years ago. Since then, “Big River” has been expanded, contracted and rechanneled into the version that became the 1985 Broadway hit that won seven Tony awards.

Today the show is tighter, 20 minutes shorter than it was in La Jolla. More important are the structural changes. Besides expanding the musical portion, the creators gave greater voice to the slaves, who mirror the plight of Huck’s raft companion, Jim.

Director Des McAnuff, composer and lyricist Roger Miller and book writer William Hauptman worked on “Big River,” clarifying Twain’s basic tale of a white boy and a black man on a raft in the Mississippi River and their search for freedom.

The process of improving the musical has taken a toll, McAnuff said. McAnuff, the La Jolla Playhouse’s artistic director, has directed four productions of the show (including a version of “Big River” for Boston’s American Repertory Theatre before the La Jolla production).

“Creating a musical is like going through all these war zones,” McAnuff said last week in his La Jolla office. “It’s always painful to make changes.”

Like its namesake, the mighty Mississippi, “Big River” has changed drastically over time. The Boston production, and, to a lesser degree the one in San Diego, were really plays with songs--not musical theater, McAnuff said.

McAnuff and songwriter Miller began working with Hauptman’s script in late November, 1983, for the American Repertory Theatre production. They had only weeks before rehearsals began in January, 1984. Although American Repertory Artistic Director Robert Brustein wanted to do the play either with or without the music, McAnuff saw it as a musical and wanted songs.

“We scrambled like crazy, and I think we got six . . . or seven songs ready . . ., a song a week,” McAnuff said. “Roger wrote some of his best tunes: ‘Muddy Water,’ ‘River in the Rain,’ ‘Guv’ment,’ ‘You Ought to be Here with Me.’ We were working very fast, and I think a lot of our inspiration came from the pressure, frankly.”

McAnuff, who took time out for his own wedding and a brief honeymoon in New Orleans, described that time as an “extremely intense period.”

For the June, 1984, San Diego production of “Big River,” Miller wrote more music. There were 14 songs, including “I Huckleberry, Me” and “Waitin’ for the Light to Shine.” The production team also gave the show more hymns for choral singing, tunes such as “Amazing Grace,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” “He Leadeth Me” and “Shall We Gather at the River?”

“I think the version here was the most epic production,” McAnuff said. “Because of the size of the Playhouse stage, that--from a design standpoint--was very exciting. We made the stage much smaller for New York, because the stages are smaller there.”

Despite a successful run at the La Jolla Playhouse, McAnuff and his creative cohorts knew that “Big River” needed more work before it opened in New York, as producer Rocco Landesman intended. During the La Jolla run, they worked out many of the changes that were made in New York.

The greatest--and hardest--changes in the musical came in New York. By the time of the first New York preview at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, the running time for “Big River” had bloomed to marathon proportions, almost 3 1/2 hours.

The toughest cut, but the one that helped pull the plot together, was tossing out the Kentucky section of the book on the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud. Yet it allowed McAnuff to move songs, and Miller penned more songs and rewrote one duet as a trio, giving a stronger curtain for Act I.

It was in New York that “Big River” actually became a musical, McAnuff said, with more songs written to convey the action. While the Red Clay Rambler string band was dropped, a pit orchestra was added for Broadway and the road.

“There’s an attempt to include dialogue within songs, in the interludes,” Michael Greif said. “The separation between the book and the music has been blurred.”

Greif, a graduate of the UC San Diego drama program and a protege of McAnuff and the late director Alan Schneider, has directed the national tour of “Big River” that opens tonight. (McAnuff directed a six-month tour in 1986.)

Greif noted that Miller replaced the traditional hymns in New York with hymns of his own composition. Also in New York, McAnuff, Miller and Hauptman added the emphasis on the role of the slaves.

“The presence of these black people throughout has been portrayed stronger so that we see some of Jim’s community as well as Huck’s community,” Greif said.

Among those changes is a scene in which Huck and Jim watch as a boat loaded with captured runaway slaves crosses near their raft, underscoring the reward that awaits Jim if he is caught.

The last changes in “Big River” were made for the touring companies. While the music, the singing and the size of the companies are the same as the Broadway version, the set was altered to fit into a variety of theaters, many larger than Broadway houses. The staging was changed to fit the set.

The current tour, which comes to San Diego from an 8,000-seat outdoor theater in Kansas City, features Romain Fruge as Huck and Michael Edward-Stevens as Jim. San Diegans had a chance to see Edward-Stevens last summer when he played the role of John Henry in the Playhouse’s “Shout Up a Morning.”

The touring troupe will go on to Sacramento before playing the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa next month. After running for 2 1/2 years, the Broadway production of “Big River” is scheduled to close Sept. 20, four days after it will mark its 1,000th performance on Sept. 16. But “Big River” will not die.

Next spring, the musical adventures of Huck Finn will cross the Pacific. McAnuff and Greif are planning to rehearse a company in March for a tour of Japan.

Sayonara, Huck.