STAGE REVIEW : WHEN ‘TIME’ GOES OUT OF WHACK . . .

Theater needs to take itself seriously if everyone else is going to, but what happens when people take themselves seriously instead of the work?

Something like “The Time Machine” happens.

This musical adaptation of the H. G. Wells story at the Gene Dynarski Theatre opened New Year’s Eve with unparallelled self-confidence--so much of it that choreographer Cate Caplin and composer Steve Altman even told first-nighters before the curtain went up that they were a “privileged first audience.”

How privileged was not clear. Only the good intentions were.

“The Time Machine” was intended to impress. It was intended to take us out of the old year with a bang. It took us out with a howl--partly of pain at the shortfall between expectation and reality, and partly of amused disbelief at the unintentional comedy. If George Kelly had not already written “The Torchbearers,” we could have handed him the script.

This Vernmor production (a contraction of the names of adapters Bob Verne and Saba Moor, who also directed and assisted in the choreography) has all the earmarks, but none of the appeal, of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland deciding to put on a show--transported (by time machine?) to 1986.

Steve Altman’s holophonically recorded score, instead of being revolutionary, is mostly rock and mostly loud--enough to drown out the singers (which isn’t too loud). When the songs can be heard, they can’t be understood. Choreography (by Caplin and Moor) is elementary Las Vegas tacky, performed entirely by non-dancers unaware of the severity of their limitations. (If anything, they seem deeply pleased with their achievement.)

Indeed, if the perpetrators of this “Time Machine” didn’t repeatedly demonstrate how seriously they were taking themselves, one would have sworn it was all a put-on.

To whit: The curtain goes up on a Victorian drawing room (by designer Robert Zraick) while the taped overture plays for several minutes to an empty room.

When people finally enter, the shock is great. We have an English maid (Joan Davis) who does an incomprehensible imitation of a cockney accent and five “Men of Knowledge” (Gary-Michael Davies, Michael F. Hoover, Mark and Brian Siegel, and designer Zraick) who sing badly and do worse imitations of stuffy Victorian English upper-class types.

Yet this is only the start of a long line of problems, beginning with the undramatic musical adaptation and me-Tarzan-you-Jane dialogue by Verne, Moor and Altman.

In their limply stitched-together version of the story, our time traveler (Davies) visits the gentle Elois of the future (these are so gentle they seem lobotomized) and their enemies, the vicious Morlocks. He witnesses an abduction, encourages a love affair, partakes in a simulacrum of battle (some woeful fight staging here) and returns to his 1899 drawing room failing to generate a shred of tension.

Except for some skillful tidbits of magic by Hoover and good costumes for the Morlocks by Zraick, the show has delusions of “Star Wars” scuttled by naif , high-level ineptitude.

This ranges from the embarrassingly bad acting, singing and dancing, to lumbering set changes and a complete absence of pacing.

On an even cruder level we have such mindless bloopers as plastic drinking glasses in 1899, food described as blue when it looks green, skull caps that look like skull caps instead of like skin--and an entire number sung by Alx (Verne) with a hood over his face. Hello, out there? Has anybody here even seen a professional show before?

The time warp in this “Time Machine” is that it looks like something rejected by the ‘60s that has wandered by mistake into the ‘80s--and the only constant in the lapse is an astonishing capacity for entrepreneurial smugness and me-generation quality-blindness.

Performances at 5600 Sunset Blvd. run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 2 and 7:30 p.m.; (213) 465-0070.