How Is the Fonz, Mr. C?

Tom Bosley owes a debt of gratitude to Rex Harrison.

“He made it possible for a lot of us actors to sing--or to act/sing,” says Bosley, who opens next Saturday at the Pasadena Civic in the California Music Theatre production of the Gershwin/Kaufman 1927 “Strike Up the Band.” (The show will also travel to the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.)

“I don’t really sing,” Bosley adds, “but I can carry a tune. When I was a kid, I was a boy soprano.”

In “Band,” Bosley plays cheese magnate Horace Fletcher, who attempts to engage the Swiss in a profitable cheese war: “It’s amazing that what was a farce then has become a satire. Going to war with Switzerland is as stupid as going to Grenada and fighting over sheep in the Falklands.”

But it wasn’t politics that drew him to the role: “Like thousands of others, I’m waiting for the writers’ strike to end. I’ve got a series (“Father Dowling”--he’s a crime-solving priest) that NBC ordered six shows of, but we have no scripts, no staff. . . .”

Bosley’s also got more free time since his exit from “Murder, She Wrote” and the end of a 9-year stint pitching Glad bags. (No, he was not amused to see the amicable parting relayed in headlines as “Glad Trashes Spokesman.”)

The most enduring identification for Bosley (a 1960 Tony-winner for “Fiorello”) is as “Happy Days’ ” superdad Howard Cunningham.

“The peculiarity of being a TV performer as opposed to a movie star,” he says, “is that when people see Robert Redford in a restaurant, if they do talk to him it’s, ‘Please, Mr. Redford, may I have your autograph?’ When they see me, it’s ‘Hi, Tom’ or ‘Hi, Mr. C.’ or ‘How’s Fonzie?’ ”

Even the Tom Bosley sound tips people off. “I can be in an elevator with my wife and no one’s paying any attention--but when she says something to me and I answer, everyone turns around. So lately, I just stand there and don’t say anything.”