STAGE REVIEWS : IT’S A BUMPY ROAD FOR ‘GETTING ACT TOGETHER’

“I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road” at Laguna Moulton Playhouse is a musical with a message--which it rarely lets us forget, despite director John Ferzacca’s infusion of gently self-deprecating humor and the clean and buoyant vocal work of the solid cast.

Heather is a nightclub singer on the eve of a comeback tour who is previewing her new act for her longtime manager, Joe. Heather’s songs are personal statements on the complexities faced by modern women, but her male chauvinist pig manager is simply not prepared to cope with her new-found honesty. Unfortunately, Gretchen Cryer’s and Nancy Ford’s 1978 paean to feminism hasn’t aged as well as its 39-year-old heroine. Time has turned many of the script’s observations into quasi-cliches (“If you can’t give me room to grow, then get out of my life!”), and there’s no subtlety in sight in such numbers as “Miss America” and “Put in a Package and Sold.”

It’s not that the messages aren’t just as valid today as they were in the ‘70s: Certainly women remain torn between their multiple roles; certainly society still clings to its double standards; certainly the battle of the sexes rages on. But there is a self-righteous strain in this story that renders the characters more vehicles than real people, and the problem is most apparent in the relationship between Heather and her manager. Teri Ralston’s Heather is earnest and bright--perhaps too bright to still be vulnerable to the opinions of such an obtuse male.

Perversely, the welcome humor Michael Miller finds in the caricature of the dense male rescues the role from insufferableness, yet it undercuts the likelihood that these two ever shared a genuine friendship. The relationship between Heather and her 24-year-old guitarist, played by Jeffrey B. Schlicter, similarly misses, brushed off as a humorous aside rather than what might have been a neatly ironic comment on Heather’s concern with being rejected by men on the basis of her age.

Ferzacca’s production is first-rate musically, thanks to Mark Turnbull’s meticulous musical direction and the fine, spirited backup singing of Schlicter, Carolyn Miller and Laura Pryzgoda and the contributions by the on-stage rock group composed of David M. Perez, Bob Hawkins, Andy Hedden and Will Brady. Jacquie Moffett has designed a strikingly cool and contemporary set that is enhanced by Charles P. Davis’ lighting design.

“I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road” will play through May 4 at Laguna Moulton Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. For information, call (714) 494-0744.