Pasadena Finally Brews ‘Cup of Coffee’ : Stage: Preston Sturges’ comedy, which became the film ‘Christmas in July,’ kicks off the Playhouse’s 75th anniversary season on Sunday.

Consider this while drinking your cup of coffee.

In 1940, nine years after he had written a stage comedy about a young, go-getter salesman who wins--or thinks he wins--a $25,000 ad slogan contest, Preston Sturges revised his unproduced play for the Pasadena Playhouse.

The production never happened, because on the momentum of the good word-of-mouth of Sturges’ first film as writer-director, “The Great McGinty,” he rushed his play before the cameras. The movie, after about six retitlings, became “Christmas in July.”

The play, on the other hand, kept its title--”A Cup of Coffee”--and promptly went back into Sturges’ trunk.

In a whirl of ironic fortune redolent of a Sturges movie, “A Cup of Coffee” has not only been plucked out of the trunk, is not only getting a second life, but is finally opening Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, 52 years late, at the start of the theater’s 75th anniversary.

“This is the first time that we’ll see the play as Sturges intended,” says Larry Carpenter, who directed the world premiere of the Depression-era “Coffee” at New York’s SoHo Repertory in 1988 and is directing the Playhouse production. “That was a baby theater in New York, with 100 seats, and when producers saw this sweet nine-character comedy in such a small place, I think they viewed it as a small play. But in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, Sturges was writing for Broadway. This needs a Broadway-scale house, and the Playhouse is that house.”

Were it not for SoHo Rep artistic director Marlene Swartz, Carpenter emphasizes in a phone interview from New York, “Coffee” would still be an obscure footnote in Sturges’ stupendously roller-coaster career.

“Marlene’s a big, big Sturges fan, and she asked his youngest son, Tom, about the plays. Of course, there was ‘Strictly Dishonorable,’ his one Broadway hit, and the almost unknown ‘The Guinea Pig.’ He also had written the book for a musical (“Make a Wish”) that already had sets, costumes and songs, but no story.”

What caught Swartz’s attention, though, was “Coffee,” with its mix of innocents and shysters, social undercurrents, ironic satire and machine-gun verbiage--the stuff of the great Sturges film comedies. Missing, Carpenter notes, is the over-arching cynicism of Sturges’ later work; instead, “this is a very sweet comedy, with some serious reflections on a young man learning from disappointments and growing up.”

Swartz contacted Carpenter, who had been running the American Stage Festival in New Hampshire for eight years. “We sat in an Italian restaurant for four hours talking about Preston Sturges,” he says. “After all that, I knew I wanted to try it.”

Working from an original manuscript filled with Sturges’ typed stage notes in the margins (“He is sweeping, then stops, or keeps sweeping until the audience settles down”), Carpenter found it to be “hilarious and real. Like his film comedies, it begins with a real problem. He creates more or less believable characters with incredible heat and spirit, then puts them in situations that are like a three-ring circus.”

In other words, an immediately producible script. Carpenter’s recent challenge has been to expand his original SoHo staging to the much larger Pasadena plant. As he sees it, though, this is nothing compared to his original problem: He had to envision the play from scratch and couldn’t rely on the film of “Christmas in July” as a model.

“They’re not alike at all, so forget looking at a video of the movie. There was just the script, and when we got stuck, we referred to Sturges’ stage directions. One line wasn’t getting a laugh, and we couldn’t figure out why until I glanced at his note, which said simply, ‘Sourly.’ After that, we got the laugh.

“The movie goes in another direction altogether--starting with the casting of Dick Powell as Jimmy the coffee salesman. With Michael Heintzman (the only carry-over from the New York cast) as Jimmy, I think we have someone closer to the younger, hungry innocent Sturges envisioned, like Eddie Bracken,” the star of Sturges’ “Hail the Conquering Hero” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”

“Where the play has a very involved subplot involving the family running Baxter Coffee Co., and how they try to woo Jimmy back when he thinks he’s won the slogan contest, Sturges opted for show-biz action over character comedy in the movie. He had to make it cheap and fast. The differences are fascinating.”

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