PASADENA PLAYHOUSE PRODUCTION : HERE’S A MUSICAL THAT COMES IN THE ‘MAIL’

“Mail” got a big response at the Pasadena Playhouse Sunday night. The house was full of Industry folk in their 30s, and they could identify with the show’s hero, a young writer who was starting to feel burned out even before he’d had a career.

What made it especially easy to identify with Alex was the fact that he was played by Michael Rupert. “I want it all!” Rupert once sang in a show called “March of the Falsettos,” making this seem a perfectly logical request. As a performer, Rupert continues to write the book on jumpy, sensitive guys who can’t hear anybody’s music but their own.

In “Mail,” he also wrote the tunes, a couple of dozen of them, to lyrics by librettist Jerry Colker. The first act--the more original one--is compulsive and frantic, as Alex watches his career and his relationships come unglued, like so many pieces of junk mail, the show’s guiding metaphor. It’s a stress-attack set to music.

The second act is calmer, as Alex starts to take the other people in his life into account: his girl (Mara Getz), his friend (Brian Mitchell), his Dad (Robert Mandan), his agent (Jonelle Allen.) The curtain line is “Together.”

So Alex finally gets his head out of the mirror. How he does so is a bit obscure, though. Choreographer Grover Dale supplies a nifty image for “being in the other guy’s shoes” (the shoes dance by themselves, and not on film, either), but how this connects with the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstake isn’t clear.

Actually the junk-mail idea, having served its purpose of establishing Alex’s derangement, is pretty much abandoned in Act II. “Mail” tends to be fairly cavalier in structure, as in the sequence where Rupert and Mitchell curse each other out, only to discover that they are friends to the end.

How come? Because it’s that time in the evening; just as it’s time for Alex to start talking man-to-man with his Dad, and to start looking at his girl as a person with feelings, not just as a “relationship.”

In life, people do come to such changes of heart unassisted, but it’s more satisfying on the stage when something tangible happens to prompt them. One might even say it’s what drama is all about. “Mail” is short on dramatic invention, trusting us to understand that it’s all happening in Alex’s head in the first place--all a fantasy.

“Mail’s” strength as an entertainment package compensates to a large degree for its soft structure. This is the best-looking show that we’ve seen at the Pasadena Playhouse since it came back from the dead--really a class item.

Where other Playhouse sets have seemed static and dull, Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral’s revolving set (lit by them as well) has glamour and wit. We see both Alex’s grungy real world and his dream world, with figures popping in and out like the White Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland.”

But the people carry real concerns. Mandan has a funny, frustrated number where he can’t quite articulate what’s driving him crazy about Alex, except that he doesn’t have “his ducks in a row”--which sounds lame, even to him.

Getz is even better as Alex’s long-suffering girlfriend, trying to tell the fool to get lost while sparing his feelings--she’s decided that his narcissism is something of a birth defect. Director Andrew Cadiff has encouraged his company to get under the text without forgetting that this this is a song-and-dance show. “Mail” needs work, but it may have a future.

‘MAIL’

A new musical at the Pasadena Playhouse. Book and lyrics Jerry Colker. Music Michael Rupert. Director Andrew Cadiff. Musical director Henry Aronson. Choreography Grover Dale. Scenery and lighting Gerry Hariton, Vicki Baral. Costumes George T. Mitchell. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Casting Eleanor Albano, Susan Chieco. Multimedia services Nelson/Sixta. Production stage manager Michael F. Wolf. Producers Susan Dietz, Stephen Rothman. With Michael Rupert, Mara Getz, Robert Mandan, Brian Mitchell, Jonelle Allen, Mary Bond Davis, Rick Stockwell, Robert Loftin, Bradd Wong, Michele Pawk, Kathryn Ann Wright. Plays Tuesdays-Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Closes July 5. Tickets $17-$25. 39 S. El Molino, Pasadena, (818) 356-PLAY.

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