Walking toward the Japanese teahouse-inspired building on a sunny autumn day, you hear music — shimmering Broadway-caliber voices singing an immensely catchy song. Step into the building and you see the energetic actors rehearsing in front of an expansive, almost movie-screen-like view of the bucolic valley beyond. They stop, the director steps in to offer guidance and suggestions, and they go again.

This is the Bingham Camp, tucked away in a lushly wooded section of Salem. And this is a rehearsal of the inaugural Bingham Camp Theatre Retreat (BCTR). The focus during this first year is developing Adam Overett’s musical adaptation of “Call It Courage,” the children’s novel written by Armstrong Sperry, over the course of 10 days. It all culminates in invitation-only performances this weekend — invitation-only because of the limited space in the building.

The retreat was created by Devanand Janki, who is a member of the well-known Bingham family that established the camp a century ago. He also happens to be a theater veteran who, on Broadway, played roles ranging from Thuy in “Miss Saigon” to Mr. Mistoffelees in “Cats.” He developed a career as a director and choreographer, winning a Lucille Lortel Award for his off-Broadway work in “Zanna, Don’t!” and choreographing the off-Broadway musical “Cupid & Psyche,” among many other projects.

The camp has been in the Bingham family for more than century, serving as a private home of sorts where people from out of town could stay. The family still uses it, Janki says, and it’s occasionally the site of weddings and retreats.

Janki — who grew up in Canada, Germany and Australia, the son of Douglas and Sheila Janki Bingham — spent many of his childhood summers at the Bingham Camp. Janki has been bringing his New York/Broadway friends there for several years to get out of the city.

“Inevitably, we end up being creative,” he says. “It breeds creativity, this location.”

They had held concerts, and they’d written plays and poems. Consequently, Janki had an idea bubbling in the back of his mind for years: to turn what has become a casual artists’ retreat into something more formal. This year, he did just that, establishing the Bingham Camp Theatre Retreat.

“It combines several of my loves, which are new work and my mission of trying to get more diversity into theater,” says Janki, who is of East Indian heritage. (He is the biological son of Sheila Janki-Bingham and Robert Janki; he was adopted by stepfather Douglas Bingham.)

He notes that it’s a model similar to, say, that at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford and at Sundance, which itself took inspiration from the O’Neill.

“But our focus is really on multiracial casting and color-blind casting and that kind of thing,” Janki says.

At the same time, he wants to bring in writers and directors of color.

It’s an effort that the people involved with BCTR certainly applaud. Hansel Tan, who plays the character of Viri in “Call It Courage,” says, “The industry — with a big ‘I’ — has a long way to go. Strides have been made. A lot has happened in the past five years that I am incredibly thankful for. It’s really pioneers like Dev and a lot of other performers and industry people who have come before us that are now conscious or more conscious of casting inhibitions ...

“It’s a little discouraging as a trained performer, a trained actor who’s done Shakespeare and everything else, to be told the only thing I can do professionally is ‘The King and I’ or ‘Miss Saigon.’ In a way, looking at that future is pretty bleak. The answer lies in new modes of looking.”

Which is exactly what Janki is doing with BCTR. He’s also providing a place where artists can get away from New York and spend time in a rural enclave where they can focus solely on the work at hand. Tan admits that the hustle and stresses of living in a big city can get to people.

“But something like this, and I don’t mean it lightly, is such a blessing,” Tan says. “It really reminds you of what it’s like to make art in an unfettered setting ... There’s a wonderful kind of freedom that this space brings to you — space, time and community. It’s such a gift to a performer.”

To the performers, yes, but to the creative team as well. Overett has been busily rewriting “Call It Courage” as he watches rehearsals — a huge benefit of a place like this, where he can see actors perform various scenes and then respond immediately.

“It becomes pretty clear when things work and don’t work,” he says. “You can say, ‘Oh, I have a different solution for this’ now that you see it. ... I’ll make some a fix over here and then spin it right over to the stage manager and then up it goes.”

“Call It Courage” focuses on a boy growing up in Polynesia who goes on an ocean voyage to face his fear of the sea. While the book takes place almost entirely in the boy’s mind and is populated primarily by him and his dog, Overett reimagined that.

“I thought it would be so theatrical to use people to represent everything else in his world, to allow them to play parts of the island, to play the voice of the sea god he fears so much, to give voice to his dog, who is his best friend, who he really hears talk to him in his mind, the way we all imagine our pets talk to us,” he says. “I love things that are theatrical like that, where people play many different parts or they play the voices we imagine.”

Overett had started working on “Call It Courage” more than a decade ago, when he was an actor in one of Janki’s shows. The duo worked on it but ended up back-burnering it — until Janki thought of it when he was contemplating what musical should be part of the inaugural theater retreat.

In addition to staging the Saturday and Sunday matinees of “Call It Courage,” BCTR is doing a reading around the camp’s firepit of Nandita Shenoy’s play “Esspy.” They had done an informal reading previously of Shenoy’s “Washer/Dryer,” which will debut off-Broadway next year.

Also part of BCTR are musical director Yan Li and artistic associate Dennis Corsi. The actors include Tiffany Chalothorn, Silvan Friedman, Graham Stevens, Jeigh Madjus, Kelsey Ryan Moore, Luis E. Mora, Anne Fraser Thomas and Tobias Wong.

Janki says the community has already been extremely supportive. Many local businesses are giving in-kind donations; a local farm, for instance, is providing vegetables for the week.

The BCTR folks, meanwhile, have invited students and teachers from local school drama programs to the “Call It Courage” dress rehearsal. They’ve held open rehearsals for supporters and people from the community.

This year, BCTR only consists of this one 10-day session, but Janki hopes it can expand in the future. There are venues like the O’Neill that nurture new plays and musicals, but they can only work on so many, he notes.

“There’s such a need for more places for people to develop their work,” Janki says. “There’s never a shortage of good new work out there.”