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In a tiny office above the heart of Times Square, Des McAnuff's cellphone refuses to stop buzzing. It's early evening, still a couple of hours before a preview of his revival of Guys and Dolls goes up at the Nederlander Theatre a few blocks south, and someone somewhere needs to know something.

“The phone's always buzzing,” McAnuff says, standing suddenly to seize the device from his desk. “Let me turn it off. It's actually driving me crazy.”

It was only a couple of minutes ago that McAnuff was on the phone – albeit his land line – sorting out some casting issues with the Australian production of Jersey Boys, which is set to open July 4. If his career in theatre falls apart, he could probably make it as a juggler: Guys and Dolls opens here on Sunday night, after which McAnuff and his girlfriend will take off for a few days' rest in the Bahamas, before they head over to London for the Olivier Awards, where the British production of Jersey Boys has five nominations, including one for McAnuff's direction. After which McAnuff will make his way to Southern Ontario, where he will plunge into three simultaneous roles: as the artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and as the director of both Macbeth, opening June 1, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opening June 20. Then, briefly, he'll jet off to Melbourne, Australia, to oversee the last couple of weeks of Jersey Boys rehearsals and previews before that production becomes the seventh edition in the franchise to be running concurrently.

But first? It would be really nice if he could find a few minutes to scarf down the take-out sushi that his assistant just ordered, before tramping off to the Nederlander.

“I guess the right word is compartmentalize,” McAnuff says, explaining how he balances all the demands. “I really try to just focus on whatever I happen to be doing, so that I don't let my work sort of spill into every nook and cranny of my life. Yesterday for example, I really did shut everything down. At a certain point you just have to say, I really can't answer that e-mail, I can't get on the phone about that, I really need this day.”

Guys and Dolls, his ninth show on Broadway, is a new experience for McAnuff. Though he has worked in theatre for more than 30 years, beginning in the Toronto alternative scene in the mid-1970s before landing at the La Jolla Playhouse as artistic director in 1983, he has never before brought a show straight to Broadway. But scheduling and other considerations precluded out-of-town tryouts for this production, headlined by Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham.

“You go through a preview process to learn,” McAnuff acknowledges, “and this is the centre, still, of the commercial theatre, perhaps in the world, so you're going to have a lot of people who are in the so-called ‘industry,' showing up at previews, passing judgment.”

He laughs: “I think back to the first Broadway show I did in 1985” – Big River, a surprise hit that ran 21/2 years – “and there was always that feeling, you know – somebody once described [the showbiz folk] as people who come into the theatre with fins sticking out the tops of their heads [like sharks]. I've never forgotten that.”

“But,” he adds, “I think there are also an awful lot of people who want to see you succeed.”

He's been thinking about doing Guys and Dolls for a long time, ever since he saw a production at Toronto Arts Productions in the 1970s. “I wasn't even into traditional musicals at that time; I thought of those as my parents' musicals. I'd done them in high school but I was into rock 'n' roll musicals – Hair – and I remember seeing it and going, ‘Gee, I'd like to do this, this is really special.'”

McAnuff says he felt the classic show, based on a Depression-era yarn by Damon Runyon, “was really the perfect idea for a musical. It exists on this mythic landscape that never really existed. Runyon, I think, used what I like to call a funhouse mirror to reflect New York, and it was a much more distorted funhouse mirror than the one Balzac used to create The Human Comedy.”

And McAnuff knows his Balzac: His first feature film, 1998's Cousin Bette, was based on a novel by the 19th-century French author. There's a large poster for the film on the wall here, next to one for The Iron Giant, an animated cult favourite he produced, as well as smaller posters for Tommy, Jersey Boys and his inaugural season at La Jolla. It's a comfortable office, not large, but with small personal touches, like a Guild Bluesbird guitar hanging on the wall, just above a small Vox amp. A pair of leather Ugg slippers sits neatly to the side. (He wears slippers everywhere: in the rehearsal room, in his Stratford office.) He has a comfortable life here in New York: He just bought a new home in Tribeca. Other people of his station, perhaps those less creatively restless, might be inclined to stay put and kick up their slippered feet.

But McAnuff never really intended to spend the bulk of his creative life in the United States. “I went away initially I suppose for a summer on a Canada Council grant, and things happen as they do, and you find yourself, you know, with a career you might not have expected,” he says.

“My primary objective in life is making sure the Stratford Shakespeare Festival continues to flourish,” he says. “In these challenging times, that's going to take up a lot of my energy, but that's a privilege.”

He's pleased with how last season turned out, despite the tumultuous departures of his co-artistic directors Marti Maraden and Don Shipley before the first show went up. (He telephones the next day to emphasize the value of their contribution. “That was a season we put together, and they should take a lot of credit for it.”) And he says the director's office is on solid footing now with the promotion of Dean Gabourie, who was made an assistant artistic director last summer, and the addition last fall of Elizabeth Bradley, the chair of drama at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, as a senior artistic associate. “I'm sure the team will continue to evolve over the years, but I think it's a pretty extraordinary group of people,” he says.

And McAnuff admits he can use all the help he can get. “The nice thing about Stratford is, it actually does have a pretty concentrated season. We start rehearsal around now, and we open the last show some time in August, so it's like the trauma ward, admittedly, while you're there because there's so much going on, but it is in this kind of concentrated period of time. And it's going all the time. Obviously I must love it, or I guess I wouldn't do it.”

After the season is over, though, he admits he'd like to take a bit of time for himself. He's been in the rehearsal room since March, 2004. “That's too much,” he says. “I need to recharge the batteries.”