An Optimistic Tune Carries On : Theater: Criticism of ‘Stage Door Charley,’ which begins its run in Costa Mesa next week, doesn’t distress the romantic lead, who says, ‘These things take time.’

The voice of a health professional came on the line. “Dr. Wilkinson’s. Can you hold please?”

I figured I had dialed a wrong number. Why would Tommy Tune have me call him at his doctor’s office for an interview?

I hung up and redialed.

“Good morning. Can you hold please?”

Same voice. I squeezed in a question.

“Where have I called?”

“Dr. Wilkinson’s. Hot Springs.”

So Tommy Tune had flipped. I knew the nine-time Tony Award winner and his new show, “Buskers,” were taking a drubbing on the road. After eight weeks of a pre-Broadway tryout, the show was “still foundering” earlier this month, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Dallas Morning News more or less summed up the critical consensus back in April when it said that Tune was not just the show’s “main attraction” but “also its main problem.”

The downbeat notices must have gotten to him, I thought, especially the ones that said he couldn’t cut it as a romantic lead. And the so-so grosses can’t have offered much solace. Gossip in theatrical circles had it that the show, unless much improved, might not get to Broadway.

Even in Costa Mesa, where “Stage Door Charley” is due Tuesday for a two-week engagement under its nom de voyage , officials at the Orange County Performing Arts Center are holding their breath. A one-week booking, fine. Two weeks? Oh-oh.

The health professional’s voice came back on the line.

“Is this a medical unit?” I asked.

“This,” she informed me, “is a spa-resort.”

By now the phone was ringing in Tune’s mud bath.

“I’m so glad you got through,” he said. “I was so worried about this place. They haven’t had a long-distance call here in years. I’m in Calistoga. You know, the famous water? They put you in mud, and then they put you in the water--and you feel better instantly.”

Tune, 56, didn’t sound depressed at all. Asked if the notices were correct--I was tactless enough to say, “Still foundering?”--he fairly chirped: “Oh, definitely.”

Come again?

“We’re still definitely not a hit,” he said. “But you know what? This is the process. These things take time. I’ve been through this so often.”

Broadway’s acclaimed director-choreographer and sometime performer elaborated: “When I did ‘My One and Only,’ you should have read the reviews in Boston. It was a disaster. The same thing with ‘Grand Hotel.’ It was a little bit easier with ‘Nine,’ but that had only one set.”

All three went on to become Broadway hits.

“It’s very hard to get things in gear with a new show,” Tune went on. “We’re changing things every day. There’s a new scene, a new song, a new dance, a new story line, new character motivations. Every day.”

Does that mean we’ll be seeing a different show in Costa Mesa from the one that just played San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Cleveland and Louisville?

“It will be a lot different,” he said, “as different as we can make it.”

The show, which takes place on the eve of World War II, is about London street performers and has a long and complicated history. In the 1960s, television writer A.J. Carothers got together with Disney composers-lyricists Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman of “Mary Poppins” fame to do a musical version of a Charles Laughton-Vivien Leigh movie, “St. Martin’s Lane,” made in 1938.

They named the musical “Piccadilly” and optioned it to Paramount for stage and screen. Paramount eventually lost interest, however, so they reworked it and gave it a new name: “Blow Us a Kiss.” Then a British stage producer picked it up in the 1970s. But again it didn’t get on.

By the mid-1980s, Tune protege Jeff Calhoun got wind of it. He read the script, heard the score and brought it to Tune. The show was re-tailored for the star and signed for Broadway. But Tune and the producer became embroiled in a legal battle. He said she couldn’t raise the money. She sued him for breach of contract. The case went to arbitration. Tune won. New producers stepped in.

“You can’t go forward unless you’re funded,” he said. “It was totally about that. The money had to be raised and put in an account on a certain day before we could go on. It wasn’t. So I said, ‘OK, then I can’t do it.’ I really don’t want to talk about this. It’s over. I’m a gentleman. Justice was served.”

The new producers called the show “Busker Alley” but changed it to “Stage Door Charley” after a marketing survey revealed that many people had no idea what busker means. (It’s British vernacular for street performers.)

When Tune and company reached San Francisco, though, the producers renamed the show yet again. It is called “Buskers” now--except in Orange County, because center officials preferred to keep the title “Stage Door Charley,” to conform to previous advertising.

Titles, shmitles . Tune says those changes don’t faze him either.

“Do you know about the title changes they had to make the first time around with ‘Hello, Dolly’?” he asked. “That show was [once] called ‘Dolly, You Damned Exasperatin’ Woman.’ I tell people, and they don’t believe it. I’m the only one who remembers it.”

Of course, when it comes to monikers, Tommy Tune wins hands down. His real name is Thomas James Tune, and it has not changed. “I was never called Thomas.” Not even in church? “It was always Tommy.”

Other aspects of Tune have remained the same over the years--his lifestyle, for example. Since he’s on the road most of the time--he calls himself a theater nomad--he has come to prefer the luxury of spareness.

After making his home base for a long time in a mid-town Manhattan apartment taken over from Michael Bennett, who took it over from Tennessee Williams, Tune now lives in a penthouse suite on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But he still lives without furniture and sleeps, as always, on a mat instead of a bed.

“I’ve broken down just a little,” he said. “I have one piece of furniture in the living room. It’s something like a double-ended chaise. It’s for when people come. I have a lot of meetings, and they have to sit on something . Oh, and I now have four bar stools around a counter in the kitchen.”

In the theater, however, less is not necessarily more.

Tune likens the creation of “Stage Door Charley” to filling in the sketch of a landscape with many new details and fresh layers of color until a full-bodied painting blossoms from the canvas.

“If the sketch is sound,” he said, “you know what to do. But every once in a while you have to block out a piece of it and paint over it and hope there will be no pentimento . If little ghosts of things show through that no longer apply, you adjust them.”

That, he explains, is what Calhoun--who is directing and choreographing “Stage Door Charley”--and the rest of the creative team will be doing in Costa Mesa as well as in Houston, its next stop. Then the show goes back into full-time rehearsal for five or six weeks and begins the last leg of its pre-Broadway tour.

“When you work on a new piece,” Tune said, “the first thing you get is the heart of it. That’s what you go for. After that, you add the sets, the costumes, the lights, the sound design--and the heart vanishes in all this technical swirl.

“So you go back to the heart, because you now have to enlarge it. It was small when you began. But now it has to be bigger to match the scale of everything else you’ve thrust on the show. That’s what we hope is happening. The producers came to see us in San Francisco, and they told us we’re heading in the right direction. They were very there for us.”

Does that mean we should discount the nasty rumors?

“As far as I know, we’ll be opening on Broadway at the St. James Theatre on Nov. 2,” Tune said. “Every show you take to New York is a crapshoot. So anything is possible.

“But I believe we’ll open. The producers are already in for several millions of dollars.”

* “Stage Door Charley” opens Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 7:30 p.m.; matinees Saturdays, Sundays and July 6, 2 p.m., through July 8. $19-$49.50. (714) 556-2787.