‘Moby Dick’ Swims Into London : Stage: Not exactly Melville, this musical ‘Whale of a Tale’ premieres in the West End next month. It’s the latest from British impresario Cameron Mackintosh.

LONDON —  Here’s an idea that just might bring in some cash: rework “Moby Dick” into a musical, make it something people can dance to, and perform it in a swimming pool.

You see, St. Godrick’s, an English boarding school for girls, is desperately short of funds. So headmistress Dorothy Hymen, in an attempt to generate income, has assigned her young charges to devise their own version of Herman Melville’s classic story about Captain Ahab and his search for the great white whale.

Hymen will play Ahab, the girls will play everyone else, and they’ll perform it in the school swimming pool on Parents Day.

Neat! But will it work?

That will be for London audiences to decide starting next month when “Moby Dick, A Whale of a Tale,” premieres in the city’s West End theater district.

The production, set at the fictional St. Godrick’s in the 1950s, is the latest offering from British impresario Cameron Mackintosh, whose previous successes, including “Miss Saigon,” “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera,” have made him the world’s leading producer of stage musicals.

“This is one of those shows that’s either going to close in six weeks or run for six years,” Mackintosh says. He likens it to a zany cross between “Hellzapoppin” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” but with its own flavor. The musical also will be reminiscent of the old English comedy films about St. Trinian’s boarding school where “salacious girls of good breeding,” as Mackintosh puts it, wreak havoc on authority and tradition.

Theater-goers will get a show-within-a-show as they watch the St. Godrick’s pupils rewrite and perform the once-somber story.

Budgeted at $1.8 million, “Moby Dick” will be a “modest-size musical,” says Mackintosh. While the cast is fairly large, the set will not be particularly elaborate. Much of the action takes place in the school swimming pool, which the pupils convert into a stage. And most of the props will look as if they were made by the girls.

Mackintosh is best-known for his grand-scale productions--the descending helicopter in “Miss Saigon” being particularly noteworthy. But he also achieved massive success with the spare Louis Jordan tribute “Five Guys Named Moe,” which has been playing to sellout crowds since he brought it to the West End just over a year ago. “Five Guys” is to premiere on Broadway in April and a Los Angeles production is in the early planning stages.

“Moby Dick,” the musical, has actually been floating around since 1983. Writer-actor Robert Longden, asked to contribute something to an upcoming jazz festival in London that year, recruited friend Hereward Kaye to help him compose a half-dozen songs for a “Moby Dick” sendup. They recruited a cast of out-of-work actors and dancers and put on the show.

But although Longden had bigger plans for his musical, it languished. Then, after another project fell through early last year--a jazz musical version of the “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” entitled “Full Swing”--he decided to make another attempt at staging “Moby Dick.” He neatly packaged scripts and demo tapes and mailed them off, unsolicited, to six top theatrical producers.

Mackintosh was in his New York apartment going through scripts when he put on Longden’s demo tape and found himself “tapping my foot and smiling” to what he calls “pop music with a dramatic edge.”

After reading the script, he phoned Longden. “I said, ‘This is a wild idea. I won’t produce it, but I’ll fund a production at the Old Fire Station,’ ” the theater he co-owns in Oxford.

Mackintosh put up about $45,000 and Longden assembled a cast and crew. Singer Tony Monopoly, who spent five years as a monk before entering show business, was cast as the lead.

The show was given a three-week trial run last fall. At first, recalls Mackintosh, “we were dragging people off the streets to paper the house.” But within a few days, he said lines were forming at the box office of the 150-seat theater.

Based on that success, Mackintosh raised funding from his regular investors and arranged to move the production into the 900-seat Piccadilly Theatre in London, where it will premiere March 11.

Although “Moby Dick” has yet to open, Mackintosh already is preparing to bring another musical to the West End. As a follow-up to his hit revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, “Side by Side by Sondheim,” he is producing a second revue of the composer’s works called “Putting It Together.”

“This has been in gestation for 10 years,” says Mackintosh. After the success of “Side by Side,” people kept asking him to add new Sondheim songs, he says. But Sondheim didn’t want to alter the mix, so they decided to wait for the right time to mount an entirely different production. “Putting It Together,” now being staged at Mackintosh’s Oxford theater, features three dozen songs and is set against “an abstract party,” says the producer. “They play truth-or-dare in the second act.”