Bringing 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' to the stage is a delicate operation

Director Jack O'Brien is one of America's go-to guys when it comes to staging musical comedies. Also, he's a droll conversationalist.

Seattle audiences have seen O'Brien's productions of "Hairspray" and "The Full Monty." Next up: a touring production of the 2005 Broadway tickle-tuner "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels." It opens Sunday at the Paramount Theatre.

When we were talking about "Scoundrels" last week, O'Brien said, "You've got to be careful with the egg whites." The subject was fitting particular performing talents into specific roles.

Egg whites? Huh?

"You know, how when you're making a souffle, say, and you're folding the beaten egg whites into the rest of the ingredients? You have to be very careful. If you're heavy-handed, you'll lose the frothiness."

Hmm. That's an ingenious way of making a point.

The specific point in this case is that John Lithgow does scoundreling one way and Jonathan Pryce does it another. Lithgow, who originated the role of Lawrence Jameson on Broadway, was debonair and suave. "With Jonathan, you have something else," O'Brien said. "You want to take advantage of that impishness of him."

Lithgow, of course, was a different sort of egg white of the Michael Caine variety. Caine starred as Jameson in the 1988 caper movie on which O'Brien's musical is based.

When asked about the current fashion of turning screenplays into stage musicals -- "Hairspray" and "The Full Monty" are examples -- O'Brien bristles slightly and becomes mildly defensive.

"It's not as if there was something naughty or strange about adaptation," he said. "Shakespeare never came up with an original story. All his plays were adaptations of available material.

"All that matters is the quality of the story."

Then O'Brien reverts to droll mode: " 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' is a Buick. It has great bones."

The bones resemble the skeleton of the hugely successful screen-to-stage musical comedy "The Producers." Two scamps engage in ingenious larceny. The "Scoundrels" scamps, however, are competitors, not cronies. Their story is a sort of "this town ain't big enough for both of us" tale. Instead of pistols at dawn, however, it's swindles at dusk for Lawrence Jameson and Freddy Benson. They are Riviera scammers. Their modus operandi is to bilk wealthy women. Whichever man can fleece $50,000 from Christine Colgate, a particularly tempting heiress, gets to be cock of the walk. The other must resign himself to leaving town.

Playing skanky Benson in contrast to Pryce's polished Jameson is Norbert Leo Butz. Steve Martin played Benson in the 1988 movie. Butz, as Benson, won the 2005 Tony Award for best actor in a musical.

"Norbert really didn't have to audition for the role," O'Brien says. "I had seen him in 'Wicked' and I liked his work. He was in a sort of down time. He had had vocal problems in 'Wicked' and he'd injured his back. I just asked him to come in and meet with me. I knew he was right for the part -- he's adorable, you see the devil in his eyes."

For 25 years, O'Brien, 67, was artistic director at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego (where "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" premiered in 2004). Now he is a freelance director. He has a house in bucolic Connecticut and an apartment in Manhattan. He is emotionally unattached -- except for two Norwich terriers: "Trudge is the little girl and Winston is the little boy."

After finishing his Seattle chores next week, O'Brien returns to New York where he'll direct Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," a three-play dramatization of the characters and the dynamics that fomented the Russian Revolution. It opens at Lincoln Center in November. His production of Puccini's operatic trilogy "Il Trittico" opens at the Metropolitan Opera in April.

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