THEATER REVIEW : ‘Hell’ Hath No Focus, but the Tunes Are Catchy

“A Few Hours in Hell,” the new play that opened last week end at the Progressive Stage Company, sports one of those titles that dares the critic to ignore its potential permutations. Even before setting foot in the stage company’s capacious G Street lobby, I facetiously thought of writing, “In retrospect, this play is closer to a week in purgatory . . . “ Midway through the performance, however, I seriously muttered sotto voce, “Let’s give them British accents and call it ‘A Fortnight in Limbo.’ ”

“A Few Hours in Hell” is a two-act cabaret revue that surveys in song and dance--but mostly song--the traditional catalogue of the seven deadly sins and a potpourri of related moral predicaments. Writer Kent Brisby and composer Stu Shames apparently started from scratch and assiduously reinvented “The Fantasticks,” only without that evergreen fable’s romance or whimsy.

Not that writing an entertaining morality play is duck soup. In 1933, when Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill collaborated on “The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petits Bourgeois,” neither audiences nor critics were eager to beatify the duo that wowed Europe with “The Three-Penny Opera.”

In Brisby and Shames’ revue, the devil is an ill-tempered master of ceremonies who narrates every vignette, a solo turn for each deadly sin. In spite of some attempts to update these catechetical archetypes--the gluttony character overdoses on drugs rather than food--Brisby’s images are gratingly conventional.

The woman who enshrines envy predictably covets her neighbor’s pool, yard and dog, and Dorothy the Greedy Bitch is one of those mink-clad dumb blondes who marries and quickly disposes of a succession of rich husbands.

Conventionality, however, is not this work’s major problem. For a morality play, it lacks a coherent point of view, and that’s a mortal--not a venal--sin. Are Brisby and Shames poking fun at these pillars of conventional morality? Are they reinterpreting these tenets or giving a new vision of proper human behavior? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the poor souls who went to hell for their excess? Are we to learn something from them? Or are Brisby and Shames just using this conceit as a springboard for what they hoped would be devilishly good fun?

To be sure, in the second act, the duo dispenses modest doses of sociological exculpation. The drug addict had abusing parents and greedy Dorothy grew up in terminally insecure middle-class discomfort.

The show’s climax vacillates between an “Up With People” moral that croons, “When a person is down, every day’s a new beginning,” and a final plot twist that implies that these poor folk are fated to succumb to their inherited vices no matter how much they want to kick their habits. (Speaking of habits, I would be remiss not to note that the revue includes a guy trendily prancing about in nun drag.) But the motivation or purpose behind Brisby’s cardboard-thin book never comes into focus.

Still, the revue is not totally without redeeming social value.

Shames’ tunes are infectiously melodic, and his polished, mildly jazzy, 1950s cabaret-style arrangements are more than a cut above average. Shames presides at the piano, ably assisted by percussionist Ric Lee and guitarist Peter Calderwood. Shames needs to team up with a writer of equal talent, someone who will save him from corny rhymes and couplets that don’t begin to scan.

Under the undisciplined direction of Brisby and Gingerlily Lowe, the nine-member troupe of actors barely copes with the material.

Laura Preble’s feisty characterization of Lizzie the Terminally Angry is the show’s strongest, and she really knows how to sell a song. As the drug addict Oleo Miller, Ronald Christopher Jones craftily elicits credible sympathy from a part that teeters on bathos. As the devil, who might be fear-inspiring, seductive or some clever amalgam of those traits, T.J. Johnson is merely overbearing and off-putting. Al Lane’s minimal set and lighting is forgettable, save for the glowing “HOT” sign over the musicians’ roost, and Cheryl Lindley’s patchwork costumes shouted budgetary deprivation.

“A FEW HOURS IN HELL”

Music and lyrics by Stu Shames; book by Kent Brisby. With Kim Breslin, Kat Fitzpatrick, Jill Harris, T.J. Johnson, Ronald C. Jones, John Ara Martin, Brian Alan Michael, Laura Preble and Natalie Turman. Directed by Kent Brisby and Gingerlily Lowe. Set and lighting design by Al Kane. Choreography by Cheryl Lindley and T.J. Johnson, costumes by Cheryl Lindley. Performances Thursday through Sunday at the Progressive Stage Company, 433 G St., San Diego.