Straight From the Heart : Theater: Material for off-Broadway hit ‘Closer Than Ever’ came from songwriters own lives. It opens in Poway tonight.

“Closer Than Ever” is closer than ever to the hearts of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, its songwriting team.

They tick off the origins of each song like veterans pointing to battle scars--with pride and pain.

“There”--the song about the husband who was “never there,” is the story of Maltby’s first marriage. “Another Wedding Song,” with the lyric “You are the first to be second,” Shire wrote to sing for his second wife, Didi Conn, at a party after their wedding. “If I Sing” is a song they wrote together for their fathers--bandleaders both.

They’re all part of the deeply personal score of a 25-song musical revue drawn from the crises, joys and rites of passage of the songwriting team and their middle-age friends.

The Los Angeles-based Shire just turned 55. The New York-based Maltby turns 55 in December. Both have been divorced and remarried with children from both unions. Both believe that their lives give them a unique vantage point on capturing the issues that face their contemporaries--from dealing with relationships, to exercise classes to that nagging question of who takes care of the baby when both parents work.

Pasadena Playhouse will mount its production of “Closer Than Ever” at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts tonight through Friday.

The four-person show, which played for eight months Off Broadway, has been a critical and box office success for Pasadena. The company is bringing the show to Poway right from its Pasadena closing.

For Maltby and Shire, who are in New York working on a musical version of the film, “Big,” “Closer Than Ever” has been a breakthrough that solidified their reputation as an American songwriting team that writes with the sophistication of a Sondheim about emotional matters very close to the bone.

“It’s been a natural evolution,” Shire said, describing their trajectory from “Starting Here, Starting Now” in the 1970s to “Baby” in the 1980s to “Closer Than Ever” in the 1990s.

“Each show is concerned with things we are going through at the time.”

It wasn’t always that way.

The pair met as freshmen at Yale in 1955.

“We both went there wanting to write The Big Show,” Shire recalled in a phone interview from Maltby’s New York apartment. Their first attempt at a musical was “Cyrano” in 1958, based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

“ ‘Cyrano’ didn’t have a great deal to do with our lives,” Shire said. But, at that time, their ambition was simply to write “something snappy and interesting and funny.”

“It’s beginning with ‘Baby’ that we suddenly realized that we were forging a style that was related more to what was really going on in our lives,” Shire said.

“And in life in general,” Maltby added.

“Baby” began with the birth of Shire’s first child 16 years ago.

“Francis Coppola, the filmmaker, was my brother-in-law then,” said Shire, who at the time was married to actress Talia Shire. “We were having discussions about musicals, and I told him we didn’t have anything exciting to write about. And, he said, ‘I think you should think of things that are more personal. What’s the single most exciting thing that’s happened to you in the last couple of years?’ I said, ‘Being present at the birth of my son.’ ”

In that moment, the idea for “Baby,” a show about making babies, was born. It played Broadway in 1983 and received high marks for the pair’s musical score but criticism for the clunkiness of the book by Sybille Pearson.

But it also helped the pair find the voice that they use with such confidence in “Closer Than Ever,” Shire said.

“With ‘Baby,’ we realized it was very satisfying to find contact between the musical form and what we were experiencing. We started writing more about things that were starting to happen to us instead of love songs that have nothing to do with us.”

Then, too, some of the songs that were cut from “Baby” on the way to Broadway went into what they called “Urban File.” That file was to become “Closer Than Ever” several years later.

The song, “The Bear, the Tiger, the Hamster and the Mole,”--about a woman championing the single parenthood of mothers in the animal kingdom--was one of the original “Baby” songs. Also from “Baby” is “Like a Baby,” “I Wouldn’t Go Back,” “Patterns” and “Fathers of Fathers.”

Over the years, the pair added to the “Urban File.” There was no urgency--no plans for a show. But that doesn’t mean the work came easily.

“They were all painful to do, and they all took a long time,” Maltby said of the songs.

“There wasn’t a song that didn’t take a month and maybe two or three to finish. And that’s leaving out the time when it was just a germ for two to three years. What attracted us to each song was that they were the startling stories of the sort that only a real person would tell.”

In the years between their joint musicals, they pursued separate careers.

Maltby is best known as the co-lyricist of “Miss Saigon” and Tony Award winner for his conception and direction of “Ain’t Misbehavin.’ ” Shire has written film scores for “All the President’s Men” and “ ‘night Mother,” and won an Academy Award for best song for “It Goes Like It Goes” from “Norma Rae.”

They have also worked with Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber--the two giants of musical theater today. In fact, Sondheim used Shire as the model for the perpetual bachelor Bobby in “Company”--at least until Shire got married shortly before the show opened. Maltby directed and co-wrote Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance.”

“Closer Than Ever” began to take shape when Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, asked the team to contribute a song to a topical revue called “Urban Blight” in 1987. They contributed six out of the seven songs in that show.

The following year, Maltby’s assistant, Steven Scott Smith, a playwright and director, asked if he could use those songs and others from the “Urban File” for a cabaret evening. The resulting show, which he called “Next Time, Now!” opened in January, 1989, at a club in Greenwich Village and was an immediate success.

They decided to expand the show into a full evening at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. One act was expanded to two, a cast of three increased to four, and the title was changed to “Closer Than Ever.” The pair wrote new songs for the work, and Maltby and Smith became co-directors.

The show quickly became an Off Broadway hit that ran for eight months. However, they say, they are even happier with the Pasadena Playhouse version because some of the replacements for the New York cast--whom they also praised highly--are older. They say that makes the actors understand the work better.

They hate to see this particular production end--because they feel so close to it. But it is ending. And now they are moving onto “Big”--making that show as personal as possible.

“It’s amazing how, as we’re getting deeper and deeper into it, it’s a myth about hanging on to your childhood and the ambivalence most grown men feel about having the little kid inside,” Shire said.

That’s a slant that makes “Big” sound like a Maltby-Shire show.

“It began to be a principal of ours,” Maltby said, “that the people on the stage should be at least as interesting and complex and funny as the people we knew. That sent us into a whole different range of subjects to look at in songwriting.

“It’s a matter of writers finding their own voice. For better or worse, this is ours.”