It's no longer your grandparents' CLO.

Sunday, Pittsburgh CLO will announce a 2009 season that includes none of the musical comedy classics that used to be its bread and butter. But the Benedum Center summer season and the annual "A Musical Christmas Carol" no longer sum up the CLO, which also operates year-round in the cosier confines of the Cabaret at Theatre Square.

In its four years of operation, the CLO Cabaret has staged more than a half-dozen shows, most recently "Shear Madness."

Now taking its place in that lineup is "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," a musical revue about the contemporary mating game by Jimmy Roberts (music) and Joe DiPietro (book and lyrics). The title might sound familiar: in August, it finished an off-Broadway run of 12 years, making its name familiar even to those who have never seen it.

In all, "Perfect" logged 5,043 performances, making it the second-longest-running musical in off-Broadway history, behind only "The Fantasticks." It's also been mounted in more than 500 cities -- but never in Pittsburgh.

To direct it here, the CLO's Van Kaplan turned to James Brennan, who has many years experience as a performer and director on Broadway and beyond. At the CLO he has starred in "Me and My Girl" and "La Cage aux Folles" and directed "Crazy for You" and "The Sound of Music," and his acting and directing credits across the country are so extensive that the rest of this article could be devoted to listing them.

He's something of a chameleon. How else to explain a man who's played both Henry Higgins and Alfred Dolittle, both the Devil in "Damn Yankees" and Pseudolus in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"?

And he's a dynamo, as in his CLO performance in "Me and My Girl." It was admittedly some years after he played the role on Broadway, so "when my wife heard I was doing it," Brennan says, "she said, 'I'm coming to Pittsburgh to sit in the front row holding the defibrillator.' "

Brennan notes that the industry wants to classify you as a performer or director, not both, but he has persisted down both paths, and he believes they help each other. Mike Ockrent, the original director of "Me and My Girl," taught him to "always take the actor into consideration. When casting, assess what the script needs, but once in rehearsal, assess what the actor has to offer."

When Kaplan asked Brennan to direct "Perfect," he was pleased to discover he had not even seen the show, so he wouldn't be burdened with preconceptions. Although Brennan had long ago been sent the original script and asked to participate, "I had a conflict that wouldn't go away." But he says he thought from the start it would be a success, "because it had something for everybody -- it hits every conceivable audience demographic."

Simply put, "Perfect" is about relationships between men and women, from dating and marriage through the loss of a spouse to tentatively dating again. Brennan sums it up as "love springs eternal, love fosters optimism."

Although predominantly comic, "it definitely has moving moments."

"Comedy that's all intellectual doesn't land. If it has emotion it lands deeper. ... There's nothing better founded than a laugh of recognition. ... It's a great date night show with lots of elbowing each other, 'That's you!' "

Brennan's directing experience has been mainly with full-scale musicals, like the "Oklahoma!" he just completed at New Jersey's big Paper Mill Playhouse. But the mode of "Perfect," he says, is "theatrical transplanted to cabaret."

Still, cabaret is different. "It's not about plot. Skit comedy is about making a string of moments work. It's almost hit-and-run pacing."

The most important thing a director does is casting. "For cabaret, you have to use local performers, since the run is so long," Brennan says. He admits he was surprised at the strength of the Pittsburgh performing pool: "We had several choices for each role."

The resulting company of four is Kristiann Menotiades, Joseph Domencic, Christine Laitta and Ted Watts Jr., with regular CLO Cabaret music director Deana Muro in support. All except Watts ("he has the funny gene," says Brennan) are CLO Cabaret veterans, as are the designers, led by costume designer Barbara Anderson.

The cast is "really amazing," Brennan says. "They've absorbed more information than seems possible." He adds that they were very open from the beginning, and they'd better be. Laitta, for one, plays "everything from a 7-year-old to 80."

And they had just one week of rehearsal before starting "tech," which began with three hours of working on nothing but costume changes.

"I got to know them quickly," Brennan says in understatement.