'Legally' bonded

After meeting at Harvard, they teamed up for good and wrote their way onto Broadway with a hit musical

Nell Benjamin and Laurence O'Keefe return to their theatrical roots, Harvard University, in ''Legally Blonde: The Musical'' (below left). (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)

CAMBRIDGE - Walking through Harvard Yard one chilly recent afternoon, Laurence O'Keefe grabs his wife, Nell Benjamin, and points to a brick dorm building.

"Can you believe the names they gave these dorms?" he asks, amused. "I was in Pennypacker and she was in Wigglesworth. I mean it. Those are the names! Pennypacker. P-E-N-N-Y . . ." O'Keefe, with a boyish twinkle in his eyes and a full head of auburn hair, has a habit of spelling things out, perhaps for the benefit of an interviewer. "It's straight out of Harry Potter!"

On the stairs of Widener Library, the two cuddle and smile. They seem straight out of a movie themselves - a 1930s film - with her red lips and blond hair, their playful banter, the way they complete each other's sentences, every now and then bursting into song.

The two are hopelessly, happily intertwined, and Harvard University is where it all began.

Larry and Nell, as they've come to be known, are an impressive duo, a husband-and-wife composer and lyricist team who have had an enormously successful run on Broadway and then on MTV with "Legally Blonde: The Musical." The show about sorority girl Elle Woods, who goes to Harvard to win back the affections of her ex-boyfriend, comes to the Opera House Tuesday.

As they playfully reflect on their year and a half with "Blonde" at New York's Palace Theatre, which saw 595 performances and 30 previews ("but who's counting?" says Benjamin), they also reminisce about their time spent in Harvard's Hasty Pudding student theatrical society and how the university prepared them for a world in musical theater.

It all began in 1989.

"You were a cradle robber," coos Benjamin, with a disarming blend of witty flair and mischief. She was a freshman when they first met and he was a junior, and she stalked him ruthlessly. "I never said it was a stable cradle," she whispers.

It was the last night of an audition for an improv show called "On Thin Ice." Unfortunately for Benjamin, each person had to pair up with a partner to audition, and there was no one around. O'Keefe, who had just finished auditioning, happened to be available. He came to the rescue.

"They said, 'OK. You are on the Mister Rogers show, and Nell, you are Jane Goodall and Larry, you are an ape,' " O'Keefe recalls. "I picked bugs out of her hair."

"After that, the small talk was pretty easy," Benjamin chimes in. "The ice was shattered."

After four months of Benjamin's stalking - that is, of running into each other - they went on a Christmas party date in New York, where they are both from. They've been together ever since.

O'Keefe majored in anthropology while Benjamin majored in English, but they put their real energies toward this other life that gave them real excitement, at Hasty Pudding.

"It's like they put you through the wringer, and by the time you are through with it you learn so much about how to write down your music and what your needs are, and how to do it by Thursday," O'Keefe explains.

Stepping into the Hasty Pudding building, they open the double doors to the recently renovated New College Theatre and toss their coats with childlike enthusiasm, running their fingers along the red felt seats and inhaling the faint paint fumes of the newly decorated stage. The memories come flooding back.

It may look different, but it feels the same, says O'Keefe.

He came to Harvard following in the footsteps of his older brother, Daniel O'Keefe, who wrote for "Seinfeld" and "The Drew Carey Show." His younger brother, Mark O'Keefe, was a Hasty Pudding book writer and went on to co-write and produce the Jim Carrey movie "Bruce Almighty" and the Adam Sandler comedy "Click." Laurence O'Keefe acted for a while but ended up composing for the Hasty Pudding show "Suede Expectations," even though he could barely write notes on a page.

"My notation skills were like a mental patient's," he says, laughing. "Like Mel Brooks whistling into a tape recorder."

Benjamin also wrote, acted, and did everything else Hasty Pudding allowed. Their first musical collaboration was in 1993, when they co-wrote the 145th edition of the Hasty Pudding show, that irreverent year-end tradition in which males dress in unconvincing drag to perform a revue of original and parody material.

"Of my nine groomsmen, only two of them have never worn a dress," O'Keefe says, laughing.

There was something special, he says, about how Harvard forced him to focus on his studies but also gave him the opportunity to learn the things he was most passionate about, like acting, composing, and set design, on his own.

"If you wanted to do a play, there are a dozen plays every semester. You're not being directed by a teacher for a grade, you are being directed by your peers, which is great. Sometimes it's by somebody younger than you," O'Keefe says.

"Sometimes it's by somebody drunker than you," Benjamin adds, laughing.

"And there's something about putting up a show with people who have no idea what they are doing, which at the college level is wonderful. At the professional level it's terrifying," says Benjamin. In college, "everyone has to pitch in and help out in a last-minute crisis."

She remembers a production of "Othello" that was poorly planned from beginning to end. On opening night she was still embroidering Desdemona's handkerchief.

The Hasty Pudding experience is a profound learning experience, O'Keefe emphasizes. "You have to do eight shows a week for six weeks in a row, and then you do a tour in New York and Bermuda. It's such hard, hard work," he says, laughing.

"Well, it is grueling when you are a stage manager and you have to keep everyone from drinking and getting on mopeds," Benjamin says.

"As I recall, I was keeping you from drinking and getting on mopeds," O'Keefe insists.

"No. Surely not. I am sure your memory is faulty," Benjamin retorts. "Really, we got to learn how to write for the first time here."

After graduating in 1991, O'Keefe spent a summer in Russia, then went on to Berklee College of Music and then the University of Southern California to earn his master's in music composition for film and television. Benjamin, graduating in 1993, went to Ireland, where she got her master's at the University of Dublin in women's studies.

She eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she took a job writing for the doomed television show "Unhappily Ever After."

Meanwhile O'Keefe hooked up with Tim Robbins's ensemble group, the Actor's Gang. It was there he found fame by writing the off-Broadway hit "Bat Boy: The Musical," about the discovery of a half-human half-bat creature and the family that takes him under their wing.

Soon afterward, the couple collaborated on the short musical "The Mice," produced by Hal Prince, as well as the children's-book adaptations "Cam Jansen" and "Sarah, Plain and Tall."

The couple auditioned to be on the creative team for the musical adaptation of the hit movie "Legally Blonde" by sending some sample songs to producer Hal Luftig.

"We couldn't come up with the opening number for ages," Benjamin says. "How do you make these sorority girls funny without making fun of them? So, the night before it was due, [O'Keefe] said, 'You have any lyrics?' and I said, 'I don't have any lyrics. I just have a phrase, "Omigod, you guys!" ' "

"We ran to the keyboard and the piano. It wrote itself," O'Keefe says.

Jerry Mitchell, the choreographer and director, was sold.

"They are so great, they knew the perfect pitch and tone of the show," Mitchell says, chatting in the lobby of the Providence Performing Arts Center during a recent stop on the tour.

Watching the movie over and over again, the couple also did some field work at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house at the University of Southern California, where Reese Witherspoon boned up on Greek life on campus.

"When we went, they asked if we had any songs," Benjamin recalls. "And I said we have one called 'Omigod You Guys.' And they said, 'Omigod you guys, that's great.' " In fact, the sorority women kept repeating the phrase. " 'Omigod you guys!' I just said it! Omigod!"

The couple knew they'd struck gold. And they didn't need much research into the daunting world of Harvard; they knew it all too well. The show was a hit, spawning a soundtrack album, seven Tony nominations, and a reality show on MTV.

"To walk in the back door of the Palace, I cannot even tell you how that felt," says Benjamin, sighing.

"It feels really quite wonderful in one respect," adds O'Keefe. "There are doors open to you that weren't open before. Producers know that we have been through the crucible. You can count on us not to melt down or vanish or have a drunken binge at McSwiggins."

The Broadway run ended last Sunday.

"It is very sad to tell a cast they are fired when they were working their butts off," says Benjamin. "But we had a great year and half."

And they have the tour, which is doing well, says O'Keefe.

"So many tours have to cut corners, but they did a fantastic job reimagining the set," he says. "It looks really good."

Benjamin also has another project, revamping "The Pirates of Penzance" for the show "Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd)," which comes to the Huntington Theatre in May. But right now their attention is on "Legally Blonde."

Benjamin sums up their journey, from Harvard to Broadway, this way:

"It's great work if you can get it."