STAGE REVIEW : You’ve Heard ‘Blues in Night’ Before

What could sound more inviting to a blues fan than an entire evening of blues songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s? With such composers as Bessie Smith, Ann Ronell and Jimmy Cox and such performers as Freda Payne and Obba Babatunde, how could it go wrong?

“Blues in the Night,” which opened Wednesday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, does not exactly go wrong. It just does not really go right. The problem lies not with its performers (which also include Leilani Jones and Joanne Jackson) but with what they’re made to do--or not--by director Sheldon Epps.

Epps, who conceived the show eight years ago and has produced it off and on Broadway, in London and on tour, has taken the straightest, shortest road from point A to point B. It’s a road paved with cliches. “Blues” is not a book musical, but there is a standard-issue situation and some recycled linkage about memories and having seen better days.

You’ve heard it all before.

The characters, too, are stereotypical, nameless people down on their luck. What they share is the loneliness of the cheap hotel they inhabit. They are a still-dashing Saloon Singer (Babatunde), an upbeat Big Mama known as the Lady From the Road (Jackson), a mysterious Woman of the World (Payne) and a young if not-so-fresh Girl With a Date (Jones).

No question that what you’re promised is what you get: Plenty of blues, which means plenty of gorgeous Bessie Smith, but also Johnny Mercer, Andy Razaf, Alberta Hunter, Vernon Duke and Duke Ellington. Among many others.

If this were a straight cabaret act, the music and the singing would suffice. Both are strong, and Sy Johnson’s orchestrations, Perry Hart’s musical direction and the superior group of five musicians headed by Rahn Coleman provide a solid backbone. It’s when Epps tries to string it all together and make each segment connect that he gets into trouble.

Have we ever known a Big Mama who was not full of bounce and optimism? Jackson does the best she can with the trite patter she’s given about remembering, leafing through the old scrapbook and pulling something out of the trunk that she can wear, attach a song to and cheer herself by.

Payne’s Woman of the World has no such doggerel to contend with. Only exposed nerves. Hers is the tortured silence (except when she sings) of the jilted woman. As for Jones, her Girl With a Date hovers between eager innocence and lonely disappointment.

Babatunde’s Saloon Singer is the least encumbered of the characters, a handsome devil who knows his powers of seduction and believes in the brightness just around the corner. Not only is the singer a stylish dancer for whom Patricia Wilcox has devised some happy-go-lucky choreography, but he has some of the sharpest numbers in the show.

While Epps does mix it up, allowing the singer/dancers to team up or intercut one song with another, there is too much symmetry to the show. Most of the numbers are given equal weight and presented unimaginatively in a sequential manner, separated by Douglas D. Smith’s dark lighting scheme or that unenlightening patter mentioned earlier.

Smith also did the evocative hotel set that provides rich context with Marianna Elliott’s sexy or satiny costumes in an array of moody colors: mauve to brown to fuschia and soft pink and yellow. But the effect can misfire. In “Take Me for a Buggy Ride,” Jackson is decked out like a bumble bee in a yellow and black stripe, with bustle and pink bows, that steals all the thunder. Her song seems hollow under the lavish decor.

When the songs make a clean breast of the situational garnish, they’re much tastier, as with the haunting “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” sung by all three women. But it doesn’t happen enough. Has its age caught up with it? Perhaps Epps needs to do revamp his format to catch up to some of the classiness of more recent revues--including “The Joni Mitchell Project.”

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2. Special holiday schedule. Ends Dec. 23. $22-$27; (213) 627-5599.