The story behind the story is as good as the story itself. In fact, it is the story itself.

It starts in a New Hampshire seaport nightclub, the Galley Hatch, where a gorgeous young Irish-American woman is singing a song much too old for her in a manner also too old and too funky for her. The year is 1982. "I was 12!" jokes Barri McPherson today — soft-eyed, sandy blonde, still gorgeous, maybe even more gorgeous — with a touch of the hand to take the curse off the measured untruth.

In that nightclub in 1982 she is approached by a 33-year-old Brooklyn-born, Bronx-bred scrabbling songwriter named Mark Schoenfeld — white, Jewish — who has grown up in an Eastchester housing project with Dion and the Belmonts, rock 'n' roll and black soul music in his ears and in his heart.

He has a commission to write a soul number for Island Records and — says scrunched-down, longish-haired, beret-clad Schoenfeld today — "I needed a white girl to sing it with a totally innocent, pure sound. Barri was young and beautiful, and I didn't want her to think I was picking her up. I wanted to put the moves on, but didn't."

He took her to a recording studio. "When I met Mark there was definitely a creative communication," she says.

"That's all?" he murmurs gloomily.

And then? "And then I went home to Massachusetts," says Barrilynn Kathleen McPherson Sirr, one of the five daughters of jazz singer Joe McPherson and dancer/dance teacher Jean McPherson — the daughter who first sang with a band at 15. "I said: 'Dad, you won't believe it, I met a guy today...'"

And? "And that was it. I never heard from Mark again. He disappeared. I got married and had another baby. I was actually pregnant but not married when I first met Mark."

"And I got married," says Mark Schoenfeld. "Had a couple of kids and went through a long period of anxiety and depression and being unwilling to take jobs to make ends meet. Had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol or anything like that. Just wouldn't take a job at Wal-Mart. I'd rather take a bullet, wouldn't you? People who knew me, people who met me, used to give me money, used to give me cars. Amazing, how you can survive through the kindness of strangers."

Fast forward to a night in August 1991. Barri McPherson Sirr now lives in a Boston suburb with her husband, Geoffrey Sirr, a nuclear health physicist, and their two sons.

"I was still trying to be a singer, when this friend of mine in New York called me and said she was doing this private gig in Brooklyn, and would I like to come in on it. I said, 'yeah.'

"We were on our way along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights when I heard this voice, a man's voice with some music behind him from a boom box on a table, and a crowd around him. I recognized Mark's voice, and I went over and it was Mark's voice, and it was Mark.

"There was no way I was going to leave him there, so I brought him home to stay with my husband and me, and he stayed with us pretty much until spring, and somewhere in there we decided to write songs together, and ended up writing Brooklyn. . . "

Schoenfeld cuts in: "An eight-minute song that told the story of what the whole show became." It also tells, transformed, the drama of that Brooklyn Heights encounter in terms of a Street Singer (Tony Award winner Cleavant Derricks) who with his golden saxophone magically reunites a young stranger from France with the long-lost, Brooklyn-bred father she has never known and for whom she has come looking from across the ocean after her mother, the Parisian dancer he impregnated and abandoned years earlier, has died. The mother's name was Faith. The name she gave her daughter was Brooklyn. And that is the name of the Broadway show that, after an enthusiastic six-week run in the summer of 2003 at the New Denver Civic Theatre, Colorado, arrives in full fettle at the Plymouth: Brooklyn The Musical, book, music and lyrics by Schoenfeld and McPherson.

Brooklyn The Girl is played and sung by Eden Espinosa, who not long ago kept things popping as two of the witches in Wicked.

Things you learn covering stories like this: MacPherson with an "a" is Scottish. McPherson without the "a" is Irish.

"My mother's a dancer, my father's a singer," says Barri McPherson. Except that your father didn't leave your mother. "No."

"That character, Paradice" — a salty, sardonic hooker who has all the juiciest lines — "is based on my own personality," says Mark Schoenfeld.

That's the black woman in you? "Yes."

Well, they had this one song, "Brooklyn." Some people were quite affected by it as a sidewalk fairy tale. "So we started writing narrative, and because it was sort of artsy and . . . " His creative other half spreads her hands: "Huge . . . "

". . . no one knew what to do with it," he continues. Their friend Scott Prisand, who wanted to quit Wall Street and tackle Broadway, knew what to do with it. "He got us together with certain directors." One of them was Jeff Calhoun, who had done the Roundabout's Big River. Calhoun got them to Denver — and, now, to Broadway. Had they ever been to Denver?

"No," says Schoenfeld. "No," says Barri McPherson. "And I've never been to Broadway." Shows you what a gig at the Galley Hatch nightclub on the New Hampshire waterfront can get you.