The Pittsburgh diaspora has scattered embryonic artists far and wide -- Gertrude Stein to Paris, F. Murray Abraham to Texas ... and Lisa Lambert to Toronto.

If you don't recognize the name, that's Lisa Lambert, co-lyricist/composer for the recent Broadway musical comedy darling, "The Drowsy Chaperone," another name you might not recognize. But that's about to change, since "Drowsy," which ended its 21-month Broadway run in December, bounces into Benedum Center Tuesday for a week's visit.

Coming with it artistically if not in person will be Lambert, making a splash in her childhood home. Sort of. As Lambert tells it, her family was Pittsburgh on both sides, but her parents moved to Washington just before she was born. Her father's death brought them back here when she was 1, before her mother remarried and they moved to Toronto when she was 5.

That was in 1968. "We left Pittsburgh right after Martin Luther King was shot," she says. "We did a little trip to California right before Bobby Kennedy was shot. And I may be dramatizing this, but I think we entered Canada the day Trudeau became prime minister. We traveled through all that history in this white Plymouth Valiant."

So Lambert grew up and remains Canadian, as hard as that is for Americans to get a grip on, thinking of it as Minnesotan with a funny way of saying "out."

As to her claim on Pittsburgh, when she heard her interviewer was calling from Squirrel Hill, she effervesced. A long-time comedy club writer/performer, she has a built-in effervesce machine, but she insists the bubbles are justified: "I'm from Pittsburgh," she says. "All my family has ties to Pittsburgh."

Then comes a blizzard of names, some living, some not. Her uncle was Morley Harris; there was the Tucker-Speck Cousins Club and Joe Tucker, voice of the Steelers; uncle Alan Rubin was a "huge Steelers fan" and other Rubin uncles had a store in Vandergrift.

On her father's side, there were Friedmans and Goldmans. "As long as I can remember, all sides went to Tree of Life Synagogue." And her grandmother, Yetta Rubin, "would have loved all this; she and my aunt, Corrine Harris, were really into theater and big influences. I like to think they're going to be at the show in spirit."

"In Toronto, I wanted to blend in. I was really critical of my parents' American accent" -- which, in her mother's case, meant saying "aht" while Lambert was learning to say "oot."

She was smitten by musical comedy early, because her mother had a big collection of cast recordings. "I always wanted to be in theater." She did it all through high school, where her friends included Don McKellar and Bob Martin, her eventual "Drowsy" collaborators.

They did Shakespeare, listened to musicals in the basement and watched old Marx Brothers movies when they should have been doing their homework. As such things go, the goofing off led to their success. "We just kind of evolved together, graduating into doing sketch comedy around Toronto. It's pretty rare to find your group in high school -- usually people are trying to escape their peers in high school."

Though Lambert thinks of herself as Canadian, she also feels a shade apart -- or maybe that's how any comic writer feels. "I think Canadians tend to observe a lot. They watch the Americans and the Brits. It's a passive way of being aggressive, using parody and satire. The satirical side is very Canadian." Toronto's comedy clubs were a breeding ground for the off-beat, throw-back humor of "The Drowsy Chaperone."

The musical with the stupid name started out in 1998. Second City performers Bob Martin and Janet Van De Graaff were getting married, and Lambert had the idea to enlist McKellar and Greg Morrison to create and perform a 40-minute musical at the wedding, based on those silly old movie musicals they loved. They called it "The Drowsy Chaperone" and named the lead characters "Bob Martin" and "Janet Van De Graaff."

Bob is said to have responded, "What a wonderful show. I have some notes."

Thus began the character he added and played, "Man in Chair," who sits in his apartment telling the audience about his favorite forgotten cast album, commenting on the fictitious cast as walls fly apart and the album erupts all around him.

Lambert, Morrison, McKellar and Martin reworked their original story with the unique on-stage commentator, creating what they called a "musical within a comedy," and took it to the Toronto Fringe Festival and other Toronto theaters, where it closed in July 2001.

New York producers didn't think a show with such a silly title had a future, but a 2004 showcase found backers. Director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw was hired to direct from "Spamalot," there was a tryout in L.A., and then on Broadway it became the little musical with the ugly title that could, winning five Tonys, including Lambert and Morrison's score and McKellar and Martin's book, losing best musical to "Jersey Boys."

Toronto can be proud. Martin has been a writer on "Slings & Arrows," the darkly comic backstage TV series seen on the Sundance Channel. Lambert and Morrison write the music, including the show's clever title song. (In fact, "Drowsy Chaperone" shows up in the plot of the third season.)

"Drowsy" mounted a London production that was well reviewed but never caught on, and then the touring company started in September. Its problem is the same as when the show was looking for a New York producer: How do you sell that title? What is this show and how do people know what fun it is until they've seen it?

Also, the farther it goes from New York, does its loving mockery of old musicals seem too "in"? And after playing in intimate Toronto theaters and expanding to the 1,500-seat Marquis on Broadway, could it successfully expand again to the 2,800-seat houses on the road?

For answers to all these questions, check into the Benedum this week.

First Published: February 24, 2008, 10:00 a.m.