STAGE REVIEW : Stop da Music! Is This the Real Durante?

“Let’s do a musical about Jimmy Durante.”

“Yeah--but who could we get to play him?”

Oddly enough, that’s not the reason “Durante” is a bust at the Shubert Theatre. Lonny Price plays the Schnozzola, and he’s pretty good, once you get over being offended by the very notion of someone being allowed to imitate the great Durante. Is nothing sacred? No, but that’s not Price’s fault.

Joel Blum and Evan Pappas aren’t bad, either, as Jimmy’s old partners Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson. When the three pals are doing the old strutaway-in-their-cutaways, we may not literally see Clayton, Jackson and Durante, but we get the sense of what they offered audiences of their time. Hot-cha!

As a retrospective of Jimmy Durante routines then, the show has some entertainment value. We purists might not see the point of it--why not watch Jimmy himself on videotape?--but there’s no law against it. An hour of “Durante” would make a nice cabaret show, especially if the cabaret was decked out like the speakeasies where Clayton, Jackson and Durante used to play.

A full-length Broadway musical, “Durante” is not. “We gotta come up with some sort of story here,” it keeps saying in effect. But it can’t find one. The notion of “story” implies the notion of trouble, and Jimmy never got into any.

He did, it seems, rather neglect his first wife, Jeanne, for his pals. She died in the early 1940s, and some people suspect that she was the “Mrs. Calabash” to whom he used to say good night on TV--a notion that librettists Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth could have done something with, but didn’t.

They do see that there’s some drama to be found in Jimmy’s insistance that Jeanne stay home rather than the join the act. (She was a singer, and actress Jane Johanson suggests she was a good one.) But the show bends over backward to avoid the suggestion that there was any meanness, sexism or jealousy in Jimmy--it was all Lou Clayton’s fault, really. Jimmy was just too loyal to him.

These scenes work so hard to be tactful that they avoid any chance to be dramatic. Yet they don’t make us think well of Jimmy or his wife. He comes off like a wimp, and she comes off like a crybaby who won’t speak up.

Actress Johanson does present Jeanne’s case to the audience in a soulful ballad that contains a line which would have immediately qualified the real Jeanne for a place in Jimmy’s act: “I want him to be the most possible man he is capable of.” Absotively!

Forget “Durante” as a story then--a piece of advice the show’s creators might well take to heart, if this is the best they can do. Maybe what the show really wants to be is “Sugar Babies.” It has the same director, Ernest O. Flatt, and the same razzmatazz milieu--lots of gals, trumpets, plinking pianos, flyaway scenery and cigarette smoke.

And comedy, some of it the real stuff from the Durante vaults, some of it imitation. Standing in the middle of it, Price never touches Jimmy’s sublimity, but it’s a decent and respectful impression, with plenty of energy and a certain sensitivity, too.

He’s particularly interesting when Jimmy is young and just starting out. We think of Durante as the quintessential old salt, but he was once a raw kid with a big nose, and Price is able to touch a bit on the pain that went with that. There is a play in Jimmy Durante, but this one isn’t it.

Plays at 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Closes Nov. 19. Performances Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets $20-$45; (800) 233-3123.