STAGE REVIEW : ‘Bad Dreams’ Out of Tune With Good Be-Bop

David Higgins is on to something in “Bad Dreams and Be Bop” at the Gene Dynarski Theatre in Hollywood. There’s a certain feel and sound to the show, even a certain shape--best characterized as shapelessness.

It’s a stream-of-consciousness bad dream, a riff punctuated by be-bop, with some great music contributed by Joe Romano and his band, and some very live super-solos by John Densmore (formerly drummer for the Doors) and Niche Saboda (on the sweetest sax).

Would that acting and direction matched the music’s high energy.

Part of the problem with the Higgins play is that it keeps dropping the ball. Structurally, the show is more cinematic than theatrical. Where theater condenses and implodes, film distends and unspools. It’s hard to build up a head of steam with a series of disjointed scenes that have no particular forward thrust and seem randomly selected as moments in a story.

If some of this failure lies in the way Higgins has chosen to examine the short, unhappy life of drummer Kelly McHenry (Scott Allan Campbell), a man intensely driven by his music, alcohol and skag (heroin), a lot of the production’s weakness lies in the flaccid way the actors play the people who fill out Kelly’s tunneled existence: his pliant girlfriend (Michele Lamar Richards), his agent Bobby (Reni Santoni) and Bobby’s wife (Georgia Bragg), who also happens to be Kelly’s sister, though neither of them seems to care and you wonder why the playwright does.

There are other more peripheral figures such as club owner Mel (a nice turn by Sati Jamal), drummer Davey Tough, Kelly’s idol (played by Densmore) and finally, stalking Kelly in the shadows, Lt. Anton (Richard Hilton), a surly cop who wishes Kelly nothing good.

The piece, set in 1950-52 and constructed “in dreams, flashbacks and memories,” begins at the end and weaves its way in and out of the fairly banal story. Playwright Higgins, who knows the underworld of music from 20 years of personal experience, approaches its sleaze with total cynicism.

Something in the detachment of the writing--the colloquial broken sentence or dangling, half-articulated thought with which Higgins ends a scene or fades to black--has a curiously magnetic power. But the production’s pacing by co-directors Darrell Larson and Susanna Styron is far too slack, particularly in contrast to the dynamic musical bridges and lively montage of slides showing Kelly at his most relaxed.

The juxtaposition of this aural and visual element with the live acting only points up the weakness of the latter. Campbell is a coiled and compact Kelly, with a lot of the tough street kid about him. He’s a time bomb waiting to go off.

The people around him don’t half match his density. Hilton’s Anton comes closest. He has a controlled nastiness that substitutes inner fuming for outward brutishness, if only we understood better what he is fuming about. The reason is too deeply buried in the script.

Santoni as the agent has a laid-back way about him that works well for a while, but ceases to when things start to go wrong. His attitude and his actions finally don’t gibe. Richards’ Pam has a certain appeal. There is something sexy and sincere and depressingly submissive there, good for a camera perhaps, but too unresilient for the stage.

Weakest of all is Bragg as Kelly’s sister/Bobby’s wife. She’s vocally faint and detached to the point of blandness. If her character has been given the least definition, Bragg certainly does nothing to compensate for it. The balance of the company, mostly locked into cameos, is fair to adequate.

Shirley Thompson’s costumes create a nice sense of period. Dave Taylor’s complex lighting works well everywhere but in the bedroom, where it’s often too dim. Sound by Kip Gynn is first-class.

The awkwardly placed set seems designed around the large central screen on which the slides are projected. Not only does this dwarf everything else, but coupled with the fact that the show does not credit a designer but does have an art director (Sam Minsky), it only underscores the play’s overly strained connections to film.

The music is beautifully taken care of here, but it might be more satisfying to hear “Be Bop” in a context that pays closer attention to pace, language and character than to the adorning technology.

Performances at 5600 W. Sunset Blvd. run Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $15; (213) 465-5600.