Los Angeles Festival : ‘BABBITT’--ALL VERY RESPECTABLE

Darn it! I hate to put the knock on a perfectly respectable show like the Mark Taper Forum’s “Babbitt: A Marriage,” especially when it’s ours. But after the exotic stuff we’ve been seeing at the Los Angeles Festival, it does seem a little, well, average.

‘Course, that’s what George F. Babbitt is about: being average. He makes a medium-honest living selling real estate, he’s more or less faithful to his wife, he’s all for the working man--if he stays in his place--and he’s almost sure that Zenith, Minn., is the best little city (and not so little, either!) that God ever thought up.

A great guy, George. But a show that’s built around him is bound to be limited to his horizons, unless it goes to work on him in some radical way, and this isn’t one of those Bolshevik adaptations. The Taper doesn’t hack up the text or put George in the White House in the 1980s, for instance--although you’d have to be a boob not to see the parallels.

Adapter Ron Hutchinson and director Steven Robman have some ideas about Sinclair Lewis’ story, but they pretty much stick to it. They do throw out his voice, which might have come in handy for wisecracks. George and his friends aren’t too swift on their own. It would have been fun to have Lewis around, some way.

But, darn it, this is a good stage version of “Babbitt” and I did like it. For instance, Charles Hallahan is just about perfect as George F. What you forget between readings of the book is that George isn’t just a yahoo. That is, it’s funny how he worships American vim and vinegar, but it’s also kind of sweet--the George Putnam effect. Those complicated hand signals that Hallahan goes through when he meets someone in his lodge have a real enchantment for him.

He’s also a lover. I don’t mean his fooling around with a certain tenant (Katherine McGrath). His real allegiance is to his old, failed college pal, Paul Riesling (Nicholas Hormann.) This is the person in the world he can really talk to, as opposed to the noises that he makes with the guys at lunch.

Next to this, his relationship with his wife Myra is pretty cut and dried. Frances Lee McCain makes her edgier than she is in the book, more like Paul’s bitchy wife (Julie Payne). There’s less reason to come back to her, so Hallahan seems all the more stuck when he does.

Hutchinson sees it as a darker story than Lewis did. Perhaps because he comes from across the pond--Great Britain. People over there don’t understand the American impulse to police other people for their own good, as happens to George when he steps out of line.

The show uses a slick device here, a barbershop quartet. In fact, two. The 139th Street Quartet (guys) and the Sundance Quartet (gals). They make some mighty sweet music, mostly composed by Mel Marvin. But as George starts stepping out, they start following him around, like so many musical bill collectors. Pay up, pay up.

The brown suits on the guys seem especially threatening, somehow. (Marianna Elliott did the costumes.) Marjorie Bradley Kellogg’s set works the same way. At first it’s sunny and cute, with a doll house representing George’s Dutch Colonial in Floral Heights, and a wicker cornucopia in the corner representing the Fruits of Success. But then the cornucopia becomes a wastebasket. Watch out, George.

As in the book, his salvation is his son--although, when you think about it, young Babbitt is just as likely to end up a wage slave as his father, especially with a new wife to support.

Jon Matthews makes the son not a chip off the old block, which enhances their alliance at the end. I also thought that Joseph Ruskin did a whale of a job as Babbitt’s nasty realtor father-in-law. “I remember that section when it was all trees,” he sniffs, as if trees were a lower life form than Dutch Colonials.

But, darn it--and you do hate to be disloyal--an evening with George F. Babbitt and his pals is a pretty limited adventure. Maybe I need to get up to the lake.

‘BABBITT: A MARRIAGE’ Ron Hutchinson’s stage version of Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel, at the Mark Taper Forum. Director Steven Robman. Music composed and adapted by Mel Marvin. Scenery Marjorie Bradley Kellogg. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Lighting Pat Collins. Musical numbers staged by Miriam Nelson. Vocal arrangements Mel Marvin and Larry Wright. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Sarah McArthur. Stage managers George Boyd and Mary K. Klinger. With Helen Page Camp, Charles Hallahan, Nicholas Hormann, Jon Matthews, Frances Lee McCain, Katherine McGrath, Jennifer Parsons, Julie Payne, Joseph Ruskin, Donovan Scott, 139th Street Quartet (Doug Anderson, Jim Kline, Peter Neushul, Larry Wright), Sundance Quartet (Sally Matthews, Gerry Papageorge, Marlys Sams, Jan Wyckoff.) Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $19-$25. 135 N. Grand Ave. (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300.