STAGE REVIEW : ‘Chapin’ True to Storyteller’s Moving Songs

Probably only five people in Los Angeles would argue that Harry Chapin was a great songwriter, as distinct from a guy who wrote a couple of great songs.

Luckily, these five are performing “Lies and Legends: The Musical Stories of Harry Chapin” at the Pasadena Playhouse.

George Ball, John Herrera, Amanda McBroom, Ron Orbach and Valerie Perri don’t admit any difference between Chapin’s best work and his second-best work. For them, every Chapin song was his best.

And they make the argument stick. If George Ball destroys you with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” in which a son grows up “just like you, Dad,” Amanda McBroom has previously destroyed you with the much less familiar “Tangled Up Puppet.”

Here, a mother finds that she can’t get close to her newly grown-up daughter, perhaps because she was too close to her before. The “perhaps” makes it a vaguer song than “Cat’s in the Cradle,” at least on paper.

But not the way McBroom sings it. She locates the mother’s specific hurt. She shows us how much the mother looks up to her self-sufficient daughter, an admiration that makes it all the harder to be shut out from her life. She tells us that the mother will survive: She’s self-sufficient too. She lets us imagine that the two women may find each other again, as opposed to the two men in “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

In other words, McBroom makes a story out of the song. We hear two dozen such tales over the evening, and their telling never gets in the way of the music. Credit director Sam Weisman for helping the cast think out each plot, and Tracy Friedman, who did the musical staging, for helping them figure out the right moves.

Playing the women in “Dogtown,” for instance, they pound their palms on the wooden piers of Gerry Hariton’s and Vicki Baral’s plain-cut set--not just a rhythmic device, but a way to nail down the despair of the empty-handed widows of Gloucester.

Sunday night’s premiere was, appropriately, a benefit for USC’s Institute for the Study of Women and Men. Chapin could identify with women, but he wrote best about men, especially uncertain ones.

John Herrera is the cab driver who keeps the change that he should have given back in “Taxi,” and Ron Orbach is the commuter who is about to break his marriage vows in “Halfway to Heaven”--a John Cheever story in the making.

Uncertain men do a lot of damage. Ball makes it clear what a rat the middle-aged disc jockey is in “W-O-L-D,” at the same time evoking a certain sympathy for him. Herrera brings Act II to a shattering close with “Sniper,” where a timid young fellow comes into his own, at the expense of 37 people.

There’s tragedy here, a darkness that lurks below the surface of many of Chapin’s songs in this telling. Though the show has fine physical energy--music director Kathleen Rubbico helping here, with her crisp direction in the on-stage pit--the stories told are more sad than jocund.

Usually, too, they’re understated. “I guess you are my wife,” says Herrera to Valerie Perri as his new bride in “Mail-Order Annie,” and that seals it. When the show ends with an audience sing-along, it’s a slightly false note. Chapin’s most convincing songs aren’t about jubilation. His people have a hard time touching, a hard time talking.

Yet because his music is lively, the stuff is there for a good time. An earlier version of “Chapin” in the mid-1970s didn’t have anything like the conviction of this staging. Chapin fans will love it, and Chapin non-fans will be surprised.

Plays in repertory with “Jacques Brel Is ...” Tuesdays- Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Closes Sept. 11. Tickets $17-$25. 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; (818) 356-PLAY. ‘LIES AND LEGENDS: THE MUSICAL STORIES OF HARRY CHAPIN’

A revue of Harry Chapin songs, at the Pasadena Playhouse. With George Ball, John Herrera, Amanda McBroom, Ron Orbach and Valerie Perri. Director Sam Weisman. Musical staging Tracy Friedman. Musical director Kathleen Rubbico. Original concept Joseph Stern. Scenery Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral. Lighting Martin Aronstein, based on the original light design of Hariton and Baral. Costumes Madeline Ann Kozlowski. Musical arrangements Stephen Chapin, Tom Chapin. Creative consultant Sandy C. Chapin.