STAGE REVIEW : THINK CASUAL FOR YOUR DATE WITH WILLIAMSON

“Nicol Williamson: An Evening With a Man and His Band” at the Hollywood Playhouse is the least-pressured one-man show you could ever hope to see.

It consists of Williamson singing some favorite songs and reading some favorite poems, more or less as he would in a friend’s game room after dinner and drinks--no strain, no hype.

The presence of a combo led by Billy Bremner says that we are not in someone’s game room, however. So does the fact that we have paid $17.50 and up for our tickets. Under those circumstances, Williamson might consider giving us a little more show.

Not a longer show. Not a fancier show. He doesn’t have to start changing his shirt for the second act. We don’t expect him to be Peter Allen.

But a show where the poems and the songs fuse in a certain way, so that it’s not just one nice bit followed by another nice bit. Above all, a show where we go home feeling that we’ve truly met the performer. For all Williamson’s casualness on Monday night, he didn’t open himself one inch.

What we saw was a sandy-haired Englishman in jeans who gets a kick out of singing American rock ‘n’ roll and who knows how to put across a poem when he’s got his mind on it. That’s a good premise for a one-man show, but it needs working out.

Williamson can sing. Sometimes he sounds like Hoagy Carmichael (as in Carmichael’s “Old Music Master”). Sometimes he sounds like Bing Crosby (as in an up-tempo “Old Man River”). Never does he sound like Johnny Cash, Little Richard or the Big Bopper, but that’s fine. Each man to his own fantasy.

When does he sound like Nicol Williamson? Maybe in Randy Newman’s “Love in Cherokee Country,” where a man celebrates his doleful romance with the ugliest squaw in town. The paradox seems to appeal to him. The songs and poems of regret also strike a chord. Roger McGough’s poem “Separate Ways” concerns the strange tenderness and excitement that can seize two lovers after they have agreed that it’s over. Williamson explores it with the respect of a veteran.

The poems tend to bring more out of him than the songs, reminding us what an incisive actor he can be when he’s challenged. But he needs a director to keep him concentrated and to the point.

He opens Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with a welcome lack of reverence for its protagonist, but he ends by making it seem a trivial poem. He emits some hair-raising yelps, like a fox in a trap, in a passage from Beckett’s novel “How It Is” but the words are so rushed that the piece doesn’t build.

His selections are obviously personal. He does “Gunga Din” and “Mia Carlotta,” staples of elocution classes of 30 years ago. He does a spoof of the woman who wrote “There are fairies at the bottom of my garden,” with comic emphasis on the word “fairies.” In lieu of changing his shirt at the top of Act II, he sings “Granada” in a Groucho Marx mask.

He does a lot with accents, most amusingly in a survey of British speech from Cork to Perth to London. His American accent isn’t bad either, except that we say “carburaytor,” while he says “carburettor.”

None of it is unprofessional. But it is a bit of a grab bag, and we’d like to know more about why Williamson picked it out. Why do “Gunga Din” instead of “The Face on the Barroom Floor”? What happened the weekend that Williamson spent with Beckett in Paris? What frightened him so much as a child about Walter De La Mare’s “De Profundis”?

If the prospect of chatting with the audience strikes Williamson as absolutely loathesome, then he’s programmed the wrong kind of show for himself. This isn’t John Gielgud doing “The Seven Ages of Man.” We’re in jeans tonight. So, give.

Shows are at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 1445 N. Las Palmas Blvd.; (213) 466-1767.