'Sleepless in Seattle - the Musical' set to stir Pasadena audience As his actors run through a crucial scene - one in which hopes are dashed and the plot is thickened - director Sheldon Epps watches with a contemplative eye. "Good," Epps says at the scene's end, his elegant baritone filling the Pasadena Playhouse rehearsal space. Let's do it again. But this time, I want you to take every pause out. The actors look up. "You may get them back," he says reassuringly. Let's try it. Afterward, amid approving nods, Epps explains. The content is not farce, but the texture of it is. Accelerate. Accelerate," he says. You were taking more time than you needed. Attention to tone and timing is essential in this production, the world premiere of "Sleepless in Seattle - the Musical." The show, which opens a three-week run Sunday, is based on director Nora Ephron's 1993 romantic comedy in which strangers must decide if they will keep a date with destiny and each other. The answer is clear almost from the start, but that's beside the point. "This isn't about suspense, it's about anticipation," Epps says later. People want to see how the journey unfolds, what magical events push the lovers together. In re-imagining that journey for the theater, the creative team has tried to enhance the magic - through music, staging and design - while maintaining dramatic momentum. "Even though you know what's coming," says Epps, "if you move the events along quickly enough there's hope the ending will still sneak up on people." The musical, which has a book by Jeff Arch and a score by Ben Toth and Sam Forman, stays true to the plot of the movie (for which Arch wrote the original story and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay with Ephron and David S. Ward). Young Jonah calls a radio show seeking a new love for his dad, Sam, a widowed architect in Seattle. Sam ends up talking on the nationally broadcast program about how much he misses his wife, intriguing listeners around the country, including Annie, a Baltimore reporter who's engaged to a nice guy but finds her soul stirred by this voice in the night. The TriStar Pictures film was a box-office hit, its fans drawn to its unabashed love story, stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and a now-famous final scene atop the Empire State Building. "When you take a project with such iconic source material, you have to figure out how to transform it into a creature for the stage so you aren't just doing 'the movie' and sticking some songs in," says Epps. That can be a tricky proposition, so tricky that the production's premiere was postponed for a year. The show has been revamped and new songwriters brought in. Epps, the playhouse's artistic director, assumed directing duties in January. The decision to delay was difficult, he says. But it gave us time to get things where we want them. 'Great things' happen In the mid-1980s Arch had taken a break from writing after critics ripped his 1985 off-Broadway play "For Sale." The birth of his second child in 1989 prompted him to try again. How could I tell my kids about going after their dreams if I didn't go after mine? His play had lacked "a big ending," he says. So he began what would become his first produced screenplay with the finale - an Empire State Building rendezvous inspired by memories of a college girlfriend sobbing over Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's thwarted reunion in the 1957 movie "An Affair to Remember."