NEW YORK - At last. 'A Class Act.' Don't think masterpiece. Think restoration of form. Your guess is as good as mine how many trunk musicals we have now - you know, shows in which someone acquires the rights to rummage through the trunk of a composer, lyricist, choreographer or team and patches together an evening celebrating the source. Nowadays they're commonly selected and patched together in a way that, with the staging, implies a storyline, like such Stephen Sondheim trunk works as 'Marry Me a Little' and 'Putting It Together.' Or they skip even the pretense of a story and simply form a concert, a la 'Smokey Joe's Cafe' or 'A Grand Night for Singing' or a festival of dance, like 'Fosse' or 'Jerome Robbins' Broadway.' I've savored all of the above and many more, but with each new trunk show I've become more eager to get back to shows that aren't afraid to be biographical - to give us the genesis and context of songs we've known for years and others that we might welcome as buried treasures. Critics, mainly, have scared book writers away from '... and then he wrote ...' approaches. But in throwing out the cliche, book writers stopped providing any biographical detail - a case of the baby going out with the bath water. Until the emergence of 'A Class Act,' whose five Tony Award nominations include Best Musical, the late Edward Kleban faced an ignominious fate. He was the Tony-winning lyricist for the phenomenally successful 'A Chorus Line,' but he was the least celebrated of the primary contributors (Michael Bennett, Marvin Hamlisch, James Kirkwood, Nicholas Dante), and he had no other success. He wrote the words and music for hundreds of other songs, and not one clicked. Barbra Streisand once selected one of his songs for an album, but then discarded it. He was hired to help director John Gielgud fine-tune the smash revival of 'Irene' for Debbie Reynolds but was fired for over-stepping his neophyte turf. Kleban submitted five songs to Neil Simon for the musical version of 'The Heartbreak Kid' but didn't get the scoring job. Kleban, who died at age 48 of cancer in 1987, never realized his ambition to have a hit on his own, writing both lyrics and music, and having it performed 'in a large building, in a central part of town, in a dark room, as part of a play, with a lot of people listening who have paid a great deal to get in.' But that's what's happening in 'A Class Act,' at Broadway's Ambassador Theatre, for which Kleban has a posthumous nomination for music and lyrics. All this for a show he died without knowing would ever exist. Book writers Linda Kline (Kleban's final companion) and Lonny Price (another friend) have patched together an unusual, appealing nugget about his life and plugged nearly two dozen of Kleban's songs into it. They frame their story as a series of chronological recollections from a memorial tribute. He's recalled as a lovable, often infuriating, compulsive-obsessive, phobic perfectionist who was his own worst enemy, sabotaging most of his best opportunities. Dubbing himself a heterosexual sissy from Mississippi, Kleban was institutionalized at 18 but rebounded as a record producer at Columbia. He was conflicted about everything. He had to be coerced to accept 'A Chorus Line' because he didn't want to collaborate with anyone - even the newly celebrated composer Hamlisch. Although some of the characters in 'A Class Act' are real, including Hamlisch (Jeff Blumenkrantz), Bennett (Davis Hibbard) and BMI musical theater workshop guru Lehman Hibbard (Patrick Quinn), events are fabricated, and the woman are fictional composites such as debutante girl friend Sophie (Ann Van Cleave subbing for Randy Graff at the performance attended), ambitious boss Felicia (Sara Ramirez), lover Lucy (Donna Bullock) and the provocative Mona (Nancy Anderson). The acting tends to be over-emphatic, as if to play against the reality of an unusually candid (but always sympathetic) musical bio. Price is the centerpiece. As well as co-writing the book, he directed and plays the central role with an authenticity that makes it difficult to separate him from the performance. His Ed Kleban is a balding, neurotic, middleaged nebbish in rumpled clothes who will have every audience member thinking: Woody Allen! Inevitably the show's high points occur in the second act when bits and pieces from the preparation of 'A Chorus Line' kick in, including the tentative beginnings of the song 'At the Ballet' and Kleban's reluctance to contribute the lyrics that would become the showbiz anthem 'What I Did for Love.' 'A Class Act' will always be more an insider's musical that a singular pop sensation, but its appeal sneaks up, and it closes the deal the instant those familiar 'Chorus' strains kick in. Editor's note: This play was seen as part of the Trib's spring Broadway theater trip.

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