STAGE REVIEW : ‘Alice’ a Feminist Revue Without the Outrage

Oh, no! Not another feminist revue, Alice! Please say it isn’t so!

That might be one’s first reaction to the nomenclature--”feminist revue”--but “A . . . My Name Is Alice,” which opened Saturday at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, is more winning than its English primer title.

It has class and a decidedly optimistic (if slightly diffused) point of view, delivered by a sum total of 28 savvy contributors (from Amanda McBroom to Steve Tesich) and a director who understands the value of restraint (Julianne Boyd).

Boyd and film maker Joan Micklin Silver (“Crossing Delancey”) originally conceived of “Alice” as a response to the more militant feminist outbursts of the angrier 1960s. They took their time to collect their material and pare the show down to size, assembling and disassembling this collage of songs and scenes, until they had it the way they wanted it. That was 1983. In its present form, “Alice” is about many aspects of being female--good and bad--in a world populated by men and other creatures, all given their due.

And it doesn’t gripe.

Au contraire. Upbeat is the name of this game. If “Alice” can be chided for anything, it would be for managing to remain inoffensive. It has its occasional cliches (yet another sketch or two set in the confessional of the beauty parlor) and its sentimental indulgences (as in a daughter’s song to the mother she feels she has failed, or the sisters who learn to appreciate one another rather late in life). But these are bracketed by enough bracing self-mockery, good humor, keen observation and plain fun to serve as appropriate and even welcome pace-changers.

A lot of the show’s success rests with the five performers in charge: the quizzical Roo Brown, brash young Rozz Morehead, hip Susan Mosher, elegant Michele Pawk and big-voiced and big-hearted Avery Sommers. Each is distinct, talented and unstereotyped.

At about two hours with an intermission, the performers riff through “Alice,” moving with ease from the wistful (“At My Age,” wherein an inexperienced 18-year-old and a widow-of-a-certain-age share counterpoint tribulations about the trials of blind dates) to the sly (“I Like the Boys,” says Morehead in a celebration of the gentler, kinder elements in the opposite sex), to the out-and-out parodies of a kindergarten teacher-parent conference (Brown and Pawk) and a macho all-female basketball team (“Good Sports”).

The Act One finale, “Bluer Than You,” is an artful lesson in how to top the other person at feeling sorry for yourself (“My man called me such terrible names . . .” --”Your Man speaks to you?” or “When I get up in the morning . . . “--”You can get up in the morning?”).

It goes on like this, with the second half serving up more of the same and hitting such familiar locales as a male strip joint (“Pretty Young Men”) and the inevitable psychiatric clinic (“Honeypot,” raised a couple of notches by Sommers’ joyously sexual performance). Along the way we go through the seemingly unrelated but amusing vamping of a German-born French chanteuse (Pawk) and Morehead’s rousing declaration of independence when she tells her decamping boy-friend that parting as enemies beats the dickens out of parting as friends.

A delectable leitmotif that repeats throughout the evening is the reading of poems by Brown “from my collection, ‘For Women Only.’ ” The poems change, but their hilarious awfulness doesn’t.

Cliff Faulkner has designed a simple platform set, simply lit by John B. Forbes. But “Alice” is not about settings or costumes (by Shigeru Yaji). It is about lampooning at its merriest and mildest.

“Alice” lacks the outrage satire requires. And even though the show is only six years old, its targets are beginning to feel worn. They were predictable to start with and have since been hit by others. What this production has going for it chiefly is quality--in the performers and in the distinction of the individual sketches.

In this sense, “Alice” is everything that the long-running “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know” aspires to be but isn’t. You can’t rise much above written material any more than you can sink too far below it. Saturday night’s spontaneous ovation for “Alice” partially at least attests to that. A final word of commendation: Musicians James Raitt and Gary Scott are terrific.

At the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts in Balboa Park, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2. Until June 11. Tickets: $20.50-27.50; (619) 239-2255.