Ah, the '80s, an era caught up in the void between Woodstock and the onslaught of the Internet. Mobile phones, CDs and MTV were in their infancy, while America's oldest president, Ronald Reagan, was weighing in on such matters as the Berlin Wall and Iran-Contra.

People latched onto the Rubik's Cube, Cabbage Patch dolls and Trivial Pursuit. They also loved mullets and shoulder pads, "Dallas" and "Miami Vice." Maybe the New Kids on the Block and the DeLorean car didn't last, but Madonna, Aerosmith and Garfield did.

Get ready to take yet another trip down memory lane when "The Wedding Singer," live and on stage at the Benedum Center beginning Tuesday, joins a growing list of movies such as "Hairspray," "Footloose," and "The Producers" that successfully made the transition to Broadway.

It's 1985 and wedding singer Robbie Hart, harboring dreams of being a singer/songwriter, is living in his grandmother's basement in New Jersey. He's willing to settle down, but his girlfriend leaves him stranded at the altar. Weddings turn into his worst nightmare. Then along comes Julia ...

The concept started with Adam Sandler -- the "Saturday Night Live" alumnus who starred in the movie "Wedding Singer" with Drew Barrymore. But the real story actually starts back in the '80s, in college, where he had a gifted roommate named Tim Herlihy.

At first there were five of them sharing a room at New York University, all of whom wrote "a little." When Sandler decided he wanted to be a stand-up comic his freshman year, they all tried to give him new material. Herlihy's jokes always got the biggest laughs.

But Herlihy was a business major and went on to be an accountant before going to law school. Writing was a sideline.

When Sandler made it to "SNL," Herlihy would help him with the sketches and one day he decided that he could write full time.

Sandler got him a two-week audition on the NBC show and Herlihy pulled through with a couple of sketches. They shared one year there before Sandler went off to stake his own career. Herlihy became head writer and producer before following in Sandler's footsteps.

The pair teamed up for "Billy Madison" in 1995 and put together a string of comedies -- "Happy Gilmore," "The Wedding Singer," "The Waterboy," "Big Daddy," "Little Nicky" and "Mr. Deeds" -- that have grossed more than $100 million.

The two have remained close over the years, with Herlihy becoming executive producer for Sandler's more recent flicks, "Anger Management" and "Click." They have their first Disney film, "Bedtime Stories," due out at Christmas.

Herlihy says that they don't really think about their friendship that much. "Some people have noted that our sum is greater than the parts, and I believe that's true," he says. "We've got the benefit of knowing each other a long time. We can almost finish each other's sentences and know where we're going because we have such a shared history. Writing together, I'll tell a joke and he'll say, 'We did that nine movies ago.' Besides, we live on opposite sides of the country, so we're not sick of each other yet."

It was Sandler who suggested writing about a wedding singer and Herlihy who put the story in the '80s. "Those were my formative years," he explains. "Some people are stuck in a decade -- I stopped listening to pop music in the '90s after Nirvana broke up."

The musical version of "The Wedding Singer" came about in a different way, though. New Line Cinema was looking for something similar to "Hairspray," which it had transferred to Broadway, and the powers-that-be settled on "The Wedding Singer," which it also owned.

But Herlihy had a clause in his contract that said he had to give his approval. Being a businessman first and foremost, he said that they would "have to let me help write it."

So Herlihy co-wrote the musical with Chad Beguelin of New Line. "Every day I wrote, I realized how lucky I was," Herlihy enthuses. "It was a thousand-to-one shot that I would get a talented guy that I got along with that well."

The script sticks to the movie like glue, except that the audience gets to see the wedding, a scene that was not in the original. But the test audience "demanded it -- they were so invested in the characters."

Though Sandler sang music of the period, the new musical score "comes out of pop culture," where a song will sound like a "Whitney Houston anthem" and lift other bits and pieces from the era. As Herlihy puts it, "They're great '80s songs from 2005," except for two songs that he wrote with Sandler for the movie: "Somebody Kill Me" and "Grow Old With You."

The heartfelt romance still lies at the core. "Falling in love is the subject of so many movies and songs," explains Herlihy. "But it's funny to talk about falling in love to guys like us."

In fact, Sandler worried that the characters were too sweet. Would people be able to identify with them? Now Herlihy thinks of his wife and says, "There are people like that, actually."