By Mervyn Rothstein
14 Mar 2009

McAnuff's specific focus on theatre began with the musical Hair — an interesting coincidence in this year of that musical's Broadway revival, which will probably be up against McAnuff's Guys and Dolls for the Tony as Best Musical Revival.

"As a teenager I was much more interested in music than in theatre," McAnuff says (though he did play Kurt in a high school production of The Sound of Music). "My instrument, like many people of my generation, was the guitar, and I composed and played in rock 'n' roll bands through my teens. Hair was a big influence because it revealed to me that the music that I listened to also had a place in the theatre. When Hair came to Toronto everyone who was in a rock band auditioned for it. I didn't make it into the Toronto company — I was only 17 — but I did get to the last callback. And it inspired me to really think of the theatre as a canvas for my own work."

In his last year of high school, he composed a science-fiction rock musical called Urbania "that changed my life. The show was produced at the school and was perceived as a success."

He went to a new theatre program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto and then became part of that city's very vibrant alternative theatre scene in the 1970s, writing, composing, acting and directing. He composed music to a stage version of Michael Ondaatje's novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and it was done at the Folger Theatre in Washington.

Then McAnuff arrived in New York on a Canada Council Grant to spend the summer. "It was 1976, just before I turned 24, and I met Michael David, who was executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The next year we did a 1920s play called The Crazy Locomotive, by a Polish playwright named Stanislaw Witkiewicz." McAnuff directed. "Glenn Close was in the cast. I ended up staying in New York. I hadn't planned on moving here. I came with a trunk and I still had my apartment in Canada. But because of this project I became the Chelsea Theater's dramaturg. And in 1978 Michael and I went off to form the Dodger Theatricals, and we've worked together ever since."

In the late '70s and early '80s, McAnuff worked as a director for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater. And then, in 1983, he was asked to interview for the job of artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse. "It was a brand new operation. The search committee asked me to describe my dream theatre to them. When I finished, they said they'd like me to come out there to build my dream theatre. When someone asks you to fulfill your dreams, it's hard to say no."

These days, he says, his prime interest, among many, involves his home province and the Stratford Festival, where he was named sole artistic director last year. "We did that wonderful Caesar and Cleopatra with Christopher Plummer last summer, and I hope to be able to bring it to New York. But the most important thing to me is to lead the world-renowned Stratford Festival into the future."