Ray Roderick has worked with some great directors over the years — Bob Fosse and Trevor Nunn, to name a couple. Then, a few years ago, he switched from performing to directing and choreographing.

His latest project is "I Love a Piano," a touring production showcasing 64 — yes, that's sixty-four! — tunes by Irving Berlin.

The touring version of the musical debuted recently in Boston, and Salt Lake City is among the first stops on the tour.

During a telephone interview from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he was busy directing an all-new one-man comedy, Roderick explained that the Berlin revue covers nearly 70 years in the legendary composer's career. "These are great songs, and we've really found that audiences just adore these Irving Berlin songs. They're some of the best ever written."

"I Love a Piano" tells the story of ... well, a piano. Not a big, flashy grand piano, but a lowly spinet with one bad key. "The piano's life story begins in 1910 in Tin Pan Alley, and we watch it travel through the lives of several Americans during the first half of the last century," Roderick said.

Each of the production's segments touches on significant moments in time — the Roaring Twenties ... the stock-market crash ... World War I ... the Great Depression, when the little piano is homeless ... the movies ("and all those great songs from the Fred and Ginger movies") ... a dance marathon in the '30s ... World War II, when the piano is commissioned for use in a stagedoor canteen in New York City ... and the postwar years, when some theater folks find the piano in a junk yard and use it for auditions for "Annie Get Your Gun."

Roderick, who recently directed Michael McLean and Kevin Kelly's "The Ark" off Broadway, said the idea for "I Love a Piano" began nearly 17 years ago during a benefit for Helen Hayes. "We used this sort of thread to connect the songs, and it was suggested that we turn it into a full-fledged musical. It's a revue, but we wanted to put the songs in context where they could live truthfully. It's a very hopeful world that Irving Berlin (wrote about). He saw the world with crystal clarity, and there was always hope."

One of the more challenging aspects was trimming down the number of songs to use in the show. "Where do you go and what do you omit? That was so painful, but we'd be performing all night if we did all the songs. There's some debate on how many songs Berlin wrote. Some say he wrote 4,000 'trunk songs' that never got published, but more than 1,000 others were published.