"National Pastime," an original musical with music and lyrics by Albert M. Tapper and book by Tony Sportiello through April 19, Bucks County Playhouse, New Hope, is hoping to get called up to the big leagues, aka the bright lights of Broadway.

"I wrote the music and lyrics to the show. We started working on it a few years ago and it's played now in five different cities. We are hoping that from Bucks County we take it to Broadway," says Tapper in a phone interview.

"The book writer is Tony Sportiello and he had written this short play and he sent it to me and he said, 'What do you think about turning this into a musical?'" I read it. I said, 'It's the perfect story for a musical.'

"It has all the elements that an old Broadway musical had. It's got romance. It's got sports. It has a mysterious thing. It has a little bit of a scam to it. It's just a lot of fun."

Tapper describes the production as a screwball comedy in the vein of Frank Capra and Billy Wilder movies of the 1930s.

"It has a similar feel to that because it takes place in 1933," explains Tapper, "and it's [set] in a radio station where the station is not doing very well because we were in the midst of the Depression and they are not getting any revenues.

"The stores in the little town in Iowa [where the play is set] are not doing very well. They remembered a time when the station really was successful and it was when they used to broadcast baseball games."

The station manager decides to air broadcasts of a fictional team, the Baker City Cougars, in the hopes of increasing the station's and the town's prosperity.

The music is true to the time period represented in the play, including advertising jingles for fictional shops like Chuck's Sporting Goods and Harry's Hardware, along with real products like Alka Seltzer and Rinso that would have been in use during the period. A trio of "Jingle Girls" performs the songs during commercial breaks at WZBQ, the radio station that is the setting for most of the play.

"It was interesting because since it was 1933, I had to write music that was consistent for the period," Tapper says. "My normal tendency is to write more contemporary music and more rock and roll type music. I realized that you couldn't do that. In 1933, they didn't have that sound."

"So, I went back and listened to a lot of music from that period and I had a ball just writing new music that had a sense of nostalgia to it. There's a lot of songs in the show.

"One of the songs in the show is called 'Watch Me Shine," and when I wrote it the producer said, 'Gee, I really like that song. The only problem is, it sounds like the Supremes recorded it.'

"So, I said, 'Well, I'll change it and make it the Andrew Sisters.

"The fun part of writing it was really writing it so that it was consistent with this theme of the show and the period in which the show takes place "