STAGE REVIEW : Strong Cast, but a Trimmed ‘Flora’ Still Creaks a Bit

It’s hard to believe that when “Flora the Red Menace,” John Kander and Fred Ebb’s first Broadway musical, opened in 1965 it was George Abbott’s 105th Broadway show. Already! It had a cast of thousands, a book by Abbott and Robert Russell (based on Lester Atwell’s novel, “Love Is Just Around the Corner”). It lumbered through 87 performances before flopping--for everyone except its then unknown 19-year-old star, Liza Minnelli, who walked away with a Tony for best actress in a musical.

A new and seriously slimmed-down “Flora,” which opened Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, can’t bear much resemblance to the massive original (which this writer did not see). This reconsidered “Flora” is true to its Depression-era setting in at least one major sense: It’s an economy version, which is mostly good news.

This tighter, trimmer “Flora” comes to us via New York’s 65-seat Vineyard Theatre. It has a lively cast of nine, an extensively revised book by David Thompson, a five-musician band and a spruced up score. This means it has a genuine Federal Theatre Project feel to it (something the company capitalizes on). No one can accuse this show of being overproduced, but its flavor is right on the money. Even the set pieces, in this day of super technology, are mostly hand-carried on and off stage. (Michael J. Hotopp designed the sets, including some handsome Depression-era mock murals.)

The bad news--yes, there is some--is that Thompson’s rewrite, which is nicely punctuated with humor, hasn’t entirely written out the creakiness in the book and that this “Flora” should be trimmer and tighter still. Especially Act I, which noodles around for too long before making its points or getting off of them.

This tale of bright young people struggling to make it in a world that has crashed about their ears resurrects the quality of innocent hope that was the fodder of idealized American movies about the period. Hungarian Flora Meszaros (Jodi Benson), a brash and resourceful budding fashion designer, won’t take no for an answer--not from prospective employers, not from the friends she helps, not from the man she wants. She shares her studio (a former ballroom) with her equally appealing and destitute friends and if hanging on to her stammering boy-friend Harry (Peter Frechette) means joining the Communist Party, then so be it, she’ll join.

That’s where things in “Flora” really take off, at the first meeting at Communist Party headquarters, when, in a crackling number called “The Flame” Flora discovers dedicated Leninist Charlotte (a smashing Lyn Greene), her rival for Harry and the real red menace of the piece.

Which takes nothing away from anyone else. This is a uniformly hard-working company, imaginatively put through its paces by director Scott Ellis and vigorously headed by Benson (a.k.a. the voice of the Little Mermaid in the Disney movie of the same name). The show includes some slick tap dancing by Louise M. Hickey and Dirk Lumbard (in a new number called “Keeping It Hot”) and engaging characterizations by David Wohl, Bob Walton and Sharon Brown. David Ossian is stuck with playing the mean employer and that addresses one of the problems that still plague this “Flora”: stereotypes. Also an unsolved book and an unresolved ending.

Thompson has made the language light-hearted and warm, but we still get tall doses of moralizing. Act I’s graduation scene should be dispensed with in favor of plunging right into the story. “The Kid Herself,” an early number that tries to give us a whiff of the real Flora, goes on too long, while “Quiet Thing,” brings things to a virtual halt while Flora “recovers” from having found a job.

This is the 1990s. We move faster, eat leaner and don’t like to dawdle. “Flora” connects to enough contemporary problems (and Thompson notes them) to set up instant recognition: We know about homelessness, the greed of the rich, the crashing of savings and loans. Glasnost itself plays right into the hands of this revival.

Act II has much more consistency and builds and delivers the show’s high comedy point, followed by “Flora’s” most stylish song called “Where Did Everybody Go?” Harry’s “The Joke” is another beauty (also new). It crowns a particularly tender performance by the terrific Frechette. So it’s doubly disappointing when the show ends with a gimmick that’s more expedient than satisfying or complete.

Ellis has brought “Flora” a good way down the road to perestroika, but it still has a distance to go. If it’s to be any kind of menace, there’s more work to be done.

At 39 S. El Molino Ave. in Pasadena, Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays 2 and 7 p.m., until March 18. Tickets: $23.50-$28.50; (818) 356-PLAY.