STAGE REVIEW : Swados’ ‘Nightclub Cantata’ Opens Odyssey 1

An old show, “Nightclub Cantata,” is opening a new theater, the Odyssey 1, in the Odyssey’s new complex on Sepulveda Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

The space is a worthy successor to the Odyssey’s former flagship theater, and director Bill Castellino certainly knows his way around Elizabeth Swados’ musical setting of an eclectic group of poems by herself and others. Castellino did the Odyssey’s earlier staging of this show, in 1980, and has worked with Swados elsewhere.

The only question is whether “Nightclub Cantata” is worth reviving. It’s best approached with low expectations. While it might satisfy on that level, it’s too thin and disjointed to achieve the transcendent quality that Swados so diligently sought.

According to a statement from Swados printed in the program, her show is “about the wish to survive by being awake and aware; by exploring and feeling as many of the things that are around as possible . . . survival by living . . . really living.”

Translation: Here is a grabbag of songs by Swados. While a few of them bring the themes of “survival” or “really living” to mind, most do not--and these are such broad themes anyway that they’re meaningless as unifying concepts.

“Cantata” is just a composer’s showcase. And Swados was not enough of a composer at 25 (her age when “Cantata” opened in New York in 1977) to merit this kind of attention.

Specifically, she wasn’t a particularly theatrical composer, despite her theater-heavy resume. “Cantata” is not about interesting stories or probing characterizations. The number that comes closest to this, from Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” is undercut by an excessively cool, contemporary sound.

“Cantata” includes no melodies that demand to be sung; a laughable program note for “Are You With Me?,” describing this lackluster little song as “a tribute to the Cole Porter style of song writing,” betrays Swados’ basic blindness to the importance of melodic invention in theatrical songwriting.

Rhythm and wordplay and nebulous moods are the salient features of this “Cantata”--and these are features that might better be served by an album, the printed page, a combination of the two, or even a simpler concert format.

As it is, the attempts to “dramatize” this material often do little more than distract us from the text. This certainly happens in “To the Harbormaster,” when a singer echoes a speaker’s words, one half-beat behind. In the two-part “Adolescents,” the words of a boy and a girl drown each other out, then we hear about a kid who feels alone--but whose words are sung by two performers, for no particular reason. The same might be said for the use of two ventriloquists and two dummies in Swados’ “Ventriloquist and Dummy.”

The staging of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Waking This Morning,” with the singers grouped around a piano at the back of the stage, is designed to make room for a brief dance interlude, but the words are lost along the way.

One number which avoids this problem is new to the show. Swados contributed a setting of Robert Frost’s “Acquainted With the Night” to this revival. Without turning it into a solo, musical co-director and pianist Ross A. Kalling arranged it in a way that focuses our attention on one singer (Craig Zehms) who serves as the lonely voice of the poet.

Nor are all of the old numbers unfocused. The crisp unison work of the opening “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” works well, Kerima M. Reed effectively screeches her way through “Bird Lament” and through a grim memoir of the Holocaust, and she and Stephen McDonough embody a lovers’ communication gap with pointed authority in “Dibarti.” “Indecision,” which the program almost apologetically describes as a “super simplistic pop song,” registers more strongly than most of the fancier material.

But it all remains parts rather than a sum. It never comes together as did a similarly structured composers’ showcase, “Bittersuite,” which closes this weekend at the Burbage, not far from the Odyssey.

Lorraine Heitzman’s uncluttered set and Craig E. Lathrop’s lights help provide focus, but Lyndall L. Otto’s costumes underline the artsiness of the evening.

At 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m., 3 p.m. matinees on Dec. 3 and 17, indefinitely. Tickets: $15.50-$19.50; (213) 477-2055.