Reality and the act blend for participants in ‘High Fidelity: The Musical’

Joey Anaya had a customer last Sunday afternoon at the Curtis Theatre in Brea, and he couldn’t bring himself to be as mean as his character probably would have been.

Anaya, who plays the snide record store clerk Barry in “High Fidelity: The Musical,” was working the register before the show, when the set turns into an actual store where patrons can buy weathered slabs of vinyl. As show time neared, a middle-aged woman laid a copy of the folk album “Joan Baez/5” on the counter.

That was the kind of choice likely to kindle Barry’s wrath, particularly in the 2000 film version of “High Fidelity,” in which actor Jack Black plays the clerk as an arrogant, self-appointed critic prone to decimating others’ favorite songs with profane rants. Anaya, minding the shop in character before the show, might have improvised a similar outburst, but he opted for the high road.

“Ah, Joan Baez?” he enthused. “Joan Baez, No. 5? For you? My goodness, $3. Three whole dollars, no more, no less.”

When the woman left, Anaya shrugged and explained, “It’s a cast member’s mother. Kind of wanted to be nice to her.”

Still, the two dozen or so people who milled around the stage got a taste of the true Barry when fellow cast members brought items to the counter. Anaya compared Isaac Hayes’ album “Juicy Fruit (Disco Freak)” to the candy mentioned in its title — “Much like its namesake, it loses its flavor after about a minute” — and he dismissed a cassette of “The Very Best of Conway Twitty” by questioning whether Twitty had a best of any kind.

“High Fidelity,” which began life as a 1995 novel by British author Nick Hornby and became a Broadway musical in 2006, centers on the connection between characters and audience. The protagonist, record store owner Rob Gordon, narrates the novel in first person, and in the film and stage versions, he constantly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewers about his desultory personal life.

The Curtis Theatre production takes that intimacy a step further — thanks in part to a real-life Rob. That would be Parker Macy, the owner of Creme Tangerine Records in Costa Mesa, who contributed most of the vinyl props.

Macy, who often buys entire collections from people looking to part with them, donated a supply that he estimated as close to 3,000 discs for the “High Fidelity” set. While Creme Tangerine doesn’t have an official specialty, Macy said he has to be careful to choose records that are likely to entice customers and pass on the rest.

The supply at the Curtis could pass for a typical record store inventory: everything from Bruce Springsteen and Peter, Paul and Mary to the soundtracks for “Grease” and “How the West Was Won.” (Springsteen, incidentally, appears as a character in the musical.)

“They might have just been beat-up copies that I couldn’t use,” Macy said. “Better to give them to somebody who might use them than fill up the rooms of my house with them.”

When “High Fidelity” opened on Broadway in 2006, early signs indicated that the show might be consigned to clearance status as well. Critics were mixed, with the New York Times calling it “a show that erases itself from your memory even as you watch it” and concluding, in reference to the lead character’s habit of summarizing his life in “top five” lists, that the production belonged on a similar list of most forgettable musicals.

The run at New York’s Imperial Theatre closed after 14 performances. However, Anthony Galleran, who directed the musical at the Curtis, didn’t even need to see it performed before vowing to stage it himself.

Galleran, who counts “High Fidelity” among his — wait for it — top five favorite movies, found the musical script available online and directed it for the first time in 2011 with the Hunger Artists Theatre Company in Fullerton. The main difference with the Curtis production, he said, is the vastly bigger stage, which allows more breathing room for the sizable cast.

Whether the musical or the film, Galleran considers the core virtue of “High Fidelity” to be its protagonist — a character that he found more than a little familiar.

“The things that John Cusack, as Rob Gordon, was saying were things I related to, and I didn’t know other men felt that way,” he said of the movie version. “Just the nature of that approach to life and love and almost arrested development, emotionally at least, really, really spoke to me.”

So how realistically does “High Fidelity” portray the life of a vinyl shop owner? Macy hasn’t seen the musical yet at the Curtis, but he said he took the story with a grain of salt.

“For me, the movie is always just a laugh,” he said. “Hopefully, nobody actually ends up behaving like Jack Black does in the movie to a customer. Otherwise, I’d have to reevaluate their employment.”

If You Go

What: “High Fidelity: The Musical”

Where: Curtis Theatre, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays through June 14

Cost: $26 for adults, $23 for seniors, $21 for children

Information: (714) 990-7722 or https://www.curtistheatre.com