STAGE REVIEW : Trying On a Musical ‘Ice Cream Suit’

In the 1960s there was a wonderful production of Ray Bradbury’s “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” at the Coronet Theatre. It was warm, funny, affectionate. Right for its time, perhaps. Or right for this writer’s time. Or simply right.

Now the play has been made into a musical, with book by Bradbury, music by Jose Feliciano and lyrics by Feliciano and his wife, Susan. It opened Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, and it is not so wonderful.

It is still the same fond and humanistic story. This time five young Latinos, who are down on their luck in East L.A., pool their money to buy a vanilla ice cream suit. The idea is to share this garment--hour by hour the first night, later day by day. Gomez (Tony Plana), who engineered the plan, is a bit of a scoundrel and the others know it.

They’re not sure he can be trusted. But the poet Villanazul (James Dybas) would love to wear such a sparkling suit to a poetry contest; lovesick Martinez (Joey Cuevas) hopes the woman he yearns for will finally notice him in such fine duds; guitar-playing Manulo (Tito Larriva) intuits that the suit will enhance his wilting sense of self-worth. As for Vamenos (Nathan Holland), the fifth cog in this wheel, he’s there by default. He had the final 20 bucks needed to acquire the coveted outfit, but--yikes!--he hasn’t had a bath in months. Still, they decide to take their chances and the suit, of course, pays off in expected and unexpected ways.

It’s easy to see the temptation to set such a tender and big-hearted story to music. But the cleverness stops at the Bradbury play (which had first been a short story). The musical approach confuses sweetness with quaintness and suffers from something of an identity crisis. It feels very 1950s, stylistically and chronologically, yet an effort is made here to allude to the violence of changing times and modern gangs.

Granted, it’s a Band-Aid (and mildly racist) effort. When the guys come to the store to look for their ice cream suit, the older Anglo owners of the shop (the comically befuddled Al Checco and Paul Lyday) assume they are about to be attacked. It’s a stuck-on nod to modernity not followed up by evidence that we’re really out of the ‘50s or even ‘60s. And “Style,” the snappy song Checco and Lyday sing and dance to, is a nostalgic item as peculiarly extraneous as the scene they play.

Such a self-conscious approach is a big part of the problem. Not only does the show move predictably along its appointed rounds, stopping for songs and dance numbers, but the five young men are never more than stick figures indulging in a lot of ethnic posturing and rarely developing any depth. The transformation in their lives remains, ironically, as cosmetic as the gleaming suit they share.

The song-and-dance numbers are not designed to coalesce with the action, but to interrupt it, which also slows things down. The format is old-fashioned. And undernourishing.

Feliciano’s music is vivid enough in the rowdier instances, such as the sharp “One White Suit,” “Hey! L.A.!” or “Mickey Murillo’s Red Rooster Cafe” (though Armelia McQueen’s Mickey had miking problems Sunday and could hardly be heard over the band). But it is not distinguished when it comes to ballads, and the lyrics contributed to those ballads with his wife range from dull to mindless--nowhere more so than in Manulo’s “All of My Life” (“All of my life / I’ll try to live . . .”) or Celia’s “Someone Tell Me,” gamely delivered by Kay Cole, or the “To Think” duet by Martinez and Celia, which hardly sounds as if they thought at all.

For a set, Deborah Raymond has provided periaktoi, or pivoting triangular columns, representing different locales against a night-time Los Angeles skyline. Martin Aronstein designed the complementary lighting scheme and Zoe DuFour the appropriate costumes. Charles Rome Smith, who had staged the Coronet production of the play, has directed the musical, as briskly as it allows.

Nancy Gregory’s energetic choreography is not especially imaginative or fresh. Among the dancers whirling Danna d’Amore and Linda Cevallos deserve singling out. And the acting by all concerned is limited only by the incompleteness of the characters as drawn. Because this musical version of “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” is flawed at the center, lacking the very magic it works so ardently to promote.

At 39 S. El Molino Ave. , Pasadena, Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 2 and 9 p.m.; Sundays 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 21. $33; (818) 356-PLAY or (213) 480-3232.