Double the Challenges : Hard Roles and Harsh Reviews May Have Kept the Tony-Nominated ‘Romance/Romance’ Away So Long

New York swooned over “Romance/Romance” in 1988, when the musical leaped from the tiny off-off-Broadway Actor’s Outlet to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre. Bums, as the Brits say, filled seats, and Tony nominations weren’t far behind.

So, why has it taken five years for the show to reach the Los Angeles-Orange County area, where it opens tonight at Long Beach’s International City Theatre?

Author-lyricist Barry Harman thinks it was because of the demands of the leading role, originally filled by Scott (“Quantum Leap”) Bakula. “There aren’t a lot of Scott Bakulas out there,” Harman said.

Composer Keith Herrmann thinks it was because of the negative--no, damning--reviews “R/R” received when it first reached the West Coast at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 1989. (The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “ ‘Romance/Romance’ pays only the crudest lip service to the real thing. Bland/Bland is more like it. Commercial/Commercial, even Cynical/Cynical.”)

Herrmann, talking by telephone from his Morristown, N.J., office, speculated that Los Angeles producers were deterred at that point from proceeding with another production. “Whatever the case,” he says, “it didn’t happen.”

It is an oddity.

Consider that the musical was nominated for five Tonys, including best musical, best book, best score and best lead actor (Bakula) and actress (Alison Fraser). Consider next that the august competition included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and Mbongeni Ngema’s and Hugh Masekela’s “Sarafina!” Then consider that all the others enjoyed modest to epic Los Angeles-area runs.

One can understand the astonishment of International City Theatre’s resident director caryn morse when she discovered that “Romance/Romance” had never been staged here.

Sitting next to Harman in the living room of the Los Angeles hillside home of Harman’s relatives, morse recalled that when she and the theater’s artistic director, Shashin Desai, were assembling the upcoming season schedule in October, “It didn’t take long to decide on this title. We said, ‘Let’s do it!’ ”

(The theater is on a premiere trend this year: Following the Los Angeles-Orange County premiere of “R/R” will be the West Coast premiere of Larry Kramer’s “The Destiny of Me.”)

The show’s attraction on paper, at least, is obvious. Harman splits the piece into two distinct but referential halves: the first, “The Little Comedy,” based on the Arthur Schnitzler fin de siecle Viennese story of the same title; the second, “Summer Share,” freely adapted to the ‘80s from “Pain de Menage” by Parisian boulevard theater playwright Jules Renard.

The lovers in “Little Comedy” are idle rich deceivers of the first rank, posing as poverty-stricken for the other’s amusement. “Summer Share” imagines what happens when two married couples live in a Hamptons summer house and the temptation for cheating becomes nearly overwhelming.

On paper, it’s an elegant plan for doubling of stories and scores, with songs echoing in both halves played by the same actors (Susan Hoffman and Chuck Rosen have the Long Beach roles that Fraser and Bakula held on Broadway).

But it didn’t start that way.

“Originally,” Harman said, “Keith and I were writing a musical about a group in the Hamptons. But it just didn’t work.”

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Herrmann explained that during this first writing phase in 1985, “We got caught up in the themes of the excesses of the ‘80s and the BMWs and the stock market, but just going after wealth didn’t inspire music.

“I would also say that the divorce I was going through at the time had an effect,” Herrmann said. “Inspired by Renard, we arrived at the story of two mates who verge dangerously close to affecting their marriages. I suppose I couldn’t help but have my own experience transform the material.”

Because the new-and-improved piece was brief, a companion had to be found. Harman thought back to his first collaboration with Herrmann, a 1979 musical tribute to Broadway producers staged at New York’s St. Regis Hotel.

“It was rich with waltz themes,” Harman said, “and so I immediately thought of Vienna, and Schnitzler, Vienna’s great storyteller. And soon, we found the links between the two parts: the courage to have fantasies, how making choices is the way you get through life.”

The waltzes of Vienna give way to a pop sensibility in the Hamptons--a sound which, Herrmann gladly admitted, is as inspired as much by the theme of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as by Sondheim.

“We get our music ideas from everywhere these days, I think,” he added, “and since I was trained as a classical pianist but developed into a jazz player, I’m also greatly influenced by artists like Dave Grusin.”

For director morse, the challenge of “R/R” is less in balancing the musical styles than in persuading the actors “that they can sing and dance at the same time. They’ll tell me, ‘I can’t do this song after just dancing the polka!’ But it’s a case of getting into condition for it.”

A nagging question, though: Why the lower cases for both her first and last name?

Before she arrived at International City Theatre in 1985, morse explained, an artist friend had designed a poster for a production she was directing. “My friend used lower-case lettering in the poster’s graphic design, and I liked it so much that I decided to keep it in honor of her.”

Last nagging question: What does the Harman/Herrmann team do for an encore? Harman, a veteran scribe on “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” has adapted his own TV experiences with Herrmann into a musical-in-progress, “Every Thursday Night.” (Harman has also rewritten a 15-year-old show, “Haunted Hotel,” with music by Martin Silvestri.)

“We’ll see how things go,” Harman said. “Given the economics of doing new musicals anywhere anymore, we can only hope.”

* “Romance/Romance” opens tonight at International City Theatre, Long Beach City College, Clark and Harvey Way, Long Beach. Plays Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.. Through Feb. 20. $16. (714) 740-2000 or (310) 420-4128.