A Different Tune for Valentine’s Day

This Valentine’s Day has an alternative to noisy restaurants, crowded with lovers attempting to have that one magic evening.

Imagine instead sitting in the intimate darkness of a small theater where four actors tell life stories in song.

These are not necessarily love songs, although Cupid’s arrow makes the occasional appearance. These are melodies of aging, of loneliness and narcissism, of mothers and daughters, and finding one’s place in a sometimes indifferent world.

“Bittersuite: Songs of Experience,” now playing at the International City Theatre, is a mixture of musical and play, concert and confessional, said Caryn Morse, the theater’s general manager.

Begun in 1982 by lyricist Michael Champagne and composer Elliot Weiss, the “Bittersuite” project was patterned after another famous song cycle, “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” Champagne said.

Like the French show, “Bittersuite” tells a series of loosely linked stories through song--with every song a separate short tale.

“With ‘Bittersuite,’ we were trying to explore the way people in their 30s and 40s deal with personal limitations,” Champagne said. “Americans, as a people, don’t part with their dreams easily, I think. So recognizing what we can and can’t do is very dramatic for most people.”

Since “Bittersuite” was first performed in San Francisco and Los Angeles about seven years ago, Champagne and Weiss have revised the show several times. Champagne says the show emerges new every time.

Some of the changes have occurred as Champagne found himself concentrating on different aspects of his own experience. At one point, “Our Favorite Restaurant,” about a couple attempting to communicate their love, held greater interest for the writer. Now he finds more poignancy in “Fathers and Sons,” where the singer laments, “Now that the games and guns are finally put away, what do you say?”

“I’m more interested now in the overall difficulty fathers and sons have trying to reach each other in America,” the New York-based writer said. “As baby boomers get older and parents age and leave, that attempt to reach out becomes all the more desperate.”

The show is not without its lighter moments, Morse said. Songs such as “20th Reunion” get laughs at the expense of the class nerd, who never managed to lose his awkward adolescence. And “Narcissism Rag” pokes fun at the vanity displayed by a good-looking man.

“We didn’t really plan it this way, but I think it would be the perfect play for Valentine’s Day,” Morse said. “You really leave the show with a warm feeling.”

“Bittersuite” plays Friday, Saturday and Sunday through Feb. 21 at the 99-seat International City Theatre at Harvey Way and Clark Avenue in Long Beach.

Tickets are $16 and $14. For information, call (310) 420-4128.