Reaching for Revelation : Musical focuses on five women who visit a group therapist to discuss their personal and professional problems. With counseling, each reviews key elements in her life.

Author Doug Haverty and composer Adryan Russ are facing each other across a table in a rehearsal room at Group Repertory Theatre, and they’re fretting. They had just seen a preview performance of their musical, “Reaching Up,” at Group Rep (where it opened Dec. 3), and weren’t sure if they were going to have enough time tonight to work on rewrites for their musical, “Reaching Up,” opening this week at the Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, Fla.

Hold on. Did we just miss something?

“Reaching Up” is either opening in North Hollywood, or it’s opening in Sarasota. It can’t be happening in both places at once.

Or can it?

True to the baroque history of a show that’s gone through three titles, more than half a dozen directors and productions and a dizzying off-Broadway theater life, Haverty and Russ’ work about and performed by women has run the gantlet that almost any contemporary American musical must endure to be noticed.

Indeed, the making of “Reaching Up” is the story of how new musicals depend on a completely different system of support than in the halcyon era when Broadway musicals tried out in Boston and Philadelphia before hitting New York.

Even a sure cash cow like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” doesn’t take the old route to Broadway any more: In its case, London has been the tryout city for the current Los Angeles run at the Shubert Theatre. In Haverty’s and Russ’ case, the route was truly serpentine.

Haverty’s book tale, on the other hand, is truly straightforward.

Five women (New Age-y Sage, businesswoman Liz, career mom Molly, inactive pop singer Dena and lesbian mom Chlo) visit group therapist Grace to discuss their nettlesome lives and career problems. Their self-revelations are sung and, when needed, their dilemmas are re-created with the women doing “role play.”

“Role Play,” in fact, was the second title of the show (the first, “Getting Better,” was scuttled early on).

It came out of Russ’ experiences in group therapy, “in which role-playing was an important technique to review key events in our lives. I saw the dramatic possibilities in this kind of setting, because every woman in our group was so different, and each had a story to tell.”

Russ (who wouldn’t pin down her age except to say that “I’m a little older than Doug,” who’s 41) toyed with the idea and brought it to her class at the L.A.-based Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. “Doug was the one person in the class who came up to me and actually made suggestions,” Russ says. “They were so good that I asked him if he would like to write the book.”

Russ, after all, was first and foremost a musician. In the ‘60s, when she worked with the Peace Corps in Colombia, she liked playing the guitar, then checked out the Los Angeles music scene and stayed to have her songs recorded by, among others, Barry White and Audrey Landers.

Haverty, meanwhile, had been developing a knack for writing plays with central female characters. His work ranged from “Hello, This is the Bottom Drawer,” at West Hollywood’s Callboard Theatre in 1980, to 1991’s “Could I Have This Dance?” which went on from a staging at Los Angeles’ Colony Studio Theatre to win the American Theatre Critics Assn. best play award in 1992.

But even though they made a creative pair, Russ and Haverty found that their musical, in Haverty’s words, “was a tough one to get produced, because when you send producers the script, they don’t know what it is. It doesn’t make sense until it’s on its feet, being sung.” After a Lehman Engel-sponsored workshop performance at a Dorothy Chandler Pavilion rehearsal space, Haverty--a member of Group Rep’s playwrights unit secured a Group Rep production of what was then “Role Play” in 1989.

“That production was supposed to run for six weeks,” Haverty says, “but it wouldn’t die. Therapists came and brought their patients back with them, and families came and brought more of their family back with them.”

But it looked to be a hit with no future.

Another staging for Colony Studio subscribers was well-liked. But only when the Colony’s Barbara Beckley and Michael Wadler mentioned to New York producers Marj Feenan and Zeke Zaccaro that they had an ideal small ensemble musical for women did the show go east--to New York’s Village Theatre Company.

By the time its nine-month run ended in January, “Role Play” was rewritten and retitled “Reaching Up,” and was a going concern of co-producers Richard Frankel and Marc Routh. Their current plan is to gear the show back to Broadway, after the Florida tryout, and then take it on a national tour.

The current North Hollywood show, directed by Group Rep artistic director Lonny Chapman, is actually part of the theater’s 20th anniversary package of shows revived from past Group Rep seasons.

“It’s a kind of valedictory,” Haverty says. “But meanwhile, it’s been crazy keeping straight which is the Florida show and which is the Group Rep show, because the Florida edition is about three drafts ahead of this one. I mean, six years later, we’re still writing new songs!”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Reaching Up.”

Location: Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays. Closes Jan. 15.

Price: $12.

Call: (818) 769-7529.