STAGE REVIEW : G. B. SHAW ILL-SERVED IN ‘CAN TELL’

The magical history of “My Fair Lady” is enough to make it clear that there is gold in them thar plays by George Bernard Shaw when you add a little well-conceived music to them. Shaw’s brittle wit, the improbabilities of his characters and the sheer, incisive fun lend themselves to musical transmogrification--on one condition: that one duplicates the level of wit and snap.

Room for Theatre’s adaptation of Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell” is the latest entry into these musical sweepstakes and, from its very first moment, kicks off on the wrong note. Not the wrong musical note (we’ll get to the music later), but the wrong psychovisual one. Four slender chorine types, who look like they flew in from Las Vegas, do not set a Shavian mood--even if they are rather blankly advocating women’s rights as they mince through a few chorine-type gyrations. The body language doesn’t match the words.

This particularly wrong choice finds its refrain throughout the evening, even though the four “ladies” themselves (Donna Brown Deicken, Sherilyn Draper, Sha Newman and Deborah Tranelli, who serve as a scene-changing chorus throughout the show) are never again asked to sink quite as deeply into the wrong century. In fact, they become a smart device for bridging scenes musically.

The jarring refrain shows up in some of the other choices made by lyricist James Ploss and composer Roger Perry who create a number of songs that feel more contemporary American (and entirely too sugary) than brittle Shavian.

If the justification is that the formidable Mrs. Clandon and her wayward children are, indeed, American, that ignores the fact that the author is not. The play on which the musical is based calls for something considerably more sophisticated--whatever its nationality.

Shaw created unusual situations peopled with independent individuals (especially women) and requires an equally fresh and emancipated style to match his panache.

Look at the situations he sets up: A successful American novelist, who long ago rejected traditional values and her stuffy English husband, visits England and is beset by (a) her three grown, unconventional children who clamor to know who their father was, (b) the sudden reappearance of that father and (c) assorted romantic entanglements.

The expectations are infinite and some even are met. “We’re Respectable,” a duet between Mrs. Clandon and her old friend and solicitor, Mr. McComas, is a fine reminiscence of more rebellious days. “It’s in the Character,” the waiter Walter’s paean to his profession (a typically Shavian aside), crackles with uprightness. And the “What a Day”/”You Never Can Tell” finale to Act I manages to be both rousing and appropriate.

But songs that ask “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this wonderful?” are neither in this context. And lyrics that croon “I’m confused as a child in a toy store” don’t cut it when they come out of the mouth of daughter Gloria, a confirmed feminist. Gloria, played with elegance and restraint by Lauri Landry, may be tremulous at discovering love, but she would never be simplistic.

Not all the casting is as fortuitous. Bob Gorman is terrific as Walter the waiter and Leah Ayres is a knowingly irresistible Dolly, but Doug Savant as her twin brother Philip forces his attempt at style. So does Chris Taylor, the basso almost profundo father of this brood, who substitutes surface gruffness for a grasp of character.

Something of a similar problem prevails in Maureen Arthur’s pivotal Mrs. Clandon, who goes through the right motions with a dismaying absence of conviction. Not so the spirited Stephen Breithaupt whose Valentine (Gloria’s suitor) seems endlessly resourceful. Stanley Grover and James Wickline fill the bill as McComas and a Mr. Bohun, respectively.

The same unevenness that’s in the company is reflected in the production values at Room for Theatre. Cut-out sets and props (Mary Angelyn Brown), storybook lighting (Geoffrey Rinehart) and--with the exception of the Las Vegas overtones--costumes (Diana Eden) serve the production well, but Cheryl Baxter’s choreography is much too bland. Ditto the flat piano accompaniment.

Book writer Norman Cohen has tracked Shaw’s play well enough, but the music and lyrics careen so wildly from rightness to wrongness, and director Stewart Moss seems to have picked up so completely on this dichotomy, that it ends up rending the whole enterprise. A lot of good intentions here are lost in a collection of misguided or merely unimaginative choices.

Performances at 12745 Ventura Blvd. run Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., until July 28 (818-509-0459).