By Channing Gray, Providence Journal Arts Writer

Curt Columbus would love to have written his jazz musical, Paris by Night, and been done with it. Just banged it out and turned it over to a director and cast. But that’s not quite how it has worked out.

This gay love story, which debuts this week at Trinity Rep, has been in the works for more than a decade. And Columbus was still in the middle of rewrites when he sat down the other day to talk about the show.

He’d been up most of the previous night working on lyrics to a new version of the final number, listening to an MP3 of the tune e-mailed to him by singer-actress-composer Amy Warren. Now he was tinkering with one of the scenes on his laptop.

“You get in a room with these actors,” he said of the Trinity troupe, “and everything changes.”

Columbus, Trinity’s creative head, has been engaged in something of a game of theatrical Ping-Pong with the actors. He’ll write a scene, and the players will tell him something’s missing, he said. So he’ll touch it up and then be told that he has overwritten.

“You have actors saying, ‘I think you should cut my monologue,’” he said. “And I’m saying, ‘What universe am I living in?’ ”

Actually, working on rewrites at this stage of the game is nothing unusual for a new play, especially one that has had such a difficult birth. It’s how Tennessee Williams worked, and O’Neill and Odets.

“They all worked on their plays in rehearsal,” said Columbus, “not in lonely garrets.”

What is unusual, though, is the musical’s subject matter. Paris by Night is a gay, interracial love story about a black American tattoo artist living in Paris in the 1960s. He falls for a handsome American soldier named Buck.

That, at first blush, might seem like an off-putting plot to some. But Columbus said the show is more about relationships than sexual orientation.

“When people say, ‘Is it a gay thing?’ I understand that,” said Columbus, who is gay. “But it’s not meant to be racy, it’s meant to be about love.

“A musical doesn’t have to be about sex to deal with sexuality. A lot of gay plays, if you will, tend to have sex in the forefront. This has romance in the forefront.”

Paris by Night, which opens in previews Friday, is Columbus’ first original theatrical undertaking. He is primarily known for his translations of Chekhov and a stage adaptation of Crime and Punishment. But in 1996, a composer friend pulled him aside and urged him to write a gay musical.

That would be André Pluess, a former student of Columbus at the University of Chicago, who for his senior project created a musical version of Dante’s Inferno that was “completely flawed and completely brilliant.” Not long after graduating, Pluess took a gig playing the piano to make some extra cash.

“Who knows what the show was called,” said Columbus. “We called it Homo for the Holidays, because it was a gay Christmas musical that was this terrible, gawdawful thing.”

It was at that point that a frustrated Pluess suggested Columbus write a gay musical of his own, and that he would compose the music for it.

At the time Columbus was reading a lot of gay writers, and had developed a fondness for Samuel Steward, a short-story author who was once the lover of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder. Paris by Night is inspired to a large extent by Steward’s The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo.

At the same time, he was revisiting a lot of films from his childhood, from one of his Francophile phases, movies like Charade and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And he was listening to a lot of female jazz singers. All these interests and influences came together to form the first draft of Paris by Night.

But that first version was met with anything but enthusiasm. In 1999, a reading was held in a gay-lesbian theater in Chicago, with Sam, the black tattoo artist, played by a white actor.

“It was a disaster,” said Columbus. “No one liked it.”

The script was tucked away and forgotten for about three years. That’s when Warren, currently playing Daisy in the off-Broadway hit, Adding Machine, came into the picture. She was part of a wacky adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters that Columbus had undertaken with Pluess, who has turned out to be more an “instrumental shaper” for Paris by Night. Warren asked if she could try her hand at writing some of the songs, and Pluess was surprised to find she was a natural tunesmith, one of the best he’d encountered.

So Columbus and the two composers went back to work on Paris by Night. By the time Columbus left Chicago for Providence in January of 2006, they had recorded a couple of songs and Columbus continued to struggle with the book.

At Trinity, Columbus was going over some of his projects with associate director Craig Watson, when Watson suggested the theater think about staging Paris by Night.

“Oh, come on,” said Columbus. “It’s not finished.”

“Let’s do a workshop,” replied Watson. “What have we got to lose?”

The first reading took place in the summer of 2006, with a second one in December of that year.

“If anyone,” said Columbus, “had said when I got here in January of 2006 that a year and a half later I’d be producing a musical that’s been sitting in a drawer for a decade, I’d say they were crazy. It’s been a whirlwind.”

In a way, Columbus said it was coming to Trinity that allowed him to complete Paris by Night, which is being directed by recent Brown/Trinity Consortium graduate Birgitta Victorson. He said that because he has gotten to know everyone involved in tweaking the script, he has not felt “violated.”

It’s also a piece well suited for a company such as Trinity. Paris by Night is a chamber musical written for an intimate space, more along the lines of the Fantasticks, which was done here last season. Scenes are set by means of suggestion, not complicated set changes.

All that has to be done to transport the audience to, say, the top of the Eiffel Tower is use a little creative lighting and have a character announce the location, as in, “Wow, here we are at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

The show is scored for jazz trio — piano, bass and drums — and the songs, said Columbus, are written for “actors who can sing, not singers who can act.”

“We’re not interested in that American Idol, Broadway sound,” said Columbus, “which personally makes me crazy.

“Amy [Warren] has an unbelievable voice, but she didn’t want to write for that voice. She wanted to write for an actor who can tell a really interesting story and use a song to continue to tell that story.

“Listen to someone like Billie Holiday and her voice is less about technical range and more about emotional range. And that’s great jazz for us. It lives in an emotional range and not technical flamboyance.”

Company member Joe Wilson Jr., who was first seen by Trinity audiences as a New York import in the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, plays the part of Sam, the expatriate tattoo artist. Rachael Warren, one of the big voices in the company, is Marie, the lovely chanteuse who has a couple of male admirers.

Buck, Sam’s love interest, is played by a fitness trainer-actor from New York named James Royce Edwards, a young hunk with a fine voice, someone the company didn’t have within its ranks.

“He’s got this open-hearted, childlike quality, which is exactly what we wanted for the character.”

He’s also easy on the eyes, according to Columbus. A young woman in Trinity’s education department downloaded Edwards’ picture from www.jamesroyceedwards.com for her screensaver, he said.

Edwards has a complicated song at the start of the second act that he has to pull off while boxing. Everyone who auditioned for the part in New York got winded by the end of the number. But not Edwards. He just ate another power bar, said Columbus, and continued singing.

But the show is not just about guys taking off their shirts, said Columbus. There is something in it for everyone.

“I can imagine several return visits to see some of the girls,” he said.

The show, in fact, features a couple of parallel love stories, one gay, one straight. And love is what this show is all about.

“My hope is that people who see it will leave feeling more romantically inclined toward the person they have spent the past 20 years with,” said Columbus.

“That’s what happens at the end of great musicals. They inspire you to be in love again.”

Paris by Night opens Friday in previews and runs through June 1 at Trinity Repertory Company, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets are $20-$60. Call (401) 351-4242, or log on to www.trinityrep.com.