THEATER : ‘Quilters’ Is Touching, Funny, Brilliant : The exquisite, all-female frontier musical at Moulton Theatre is the show to see. Teri Ralston directs the production.

“It will come as a great surprise to many that ‘Quilters’ failed on Broadway,” Laguna Playhouse executive director Richard Stein writes in his program note for the exquisite, all-female frontier musical that opened over the weekend at the Moulton Theatre.

I’ll take Stein’s word for it, but I really am not surprised. If anything, it’s more surprising that “Quilters” got to Broadway in the first place. “Annie Get Your Gun,” an Ethel Merman star vehicle meant for out-of-towners, is the sort of frontier musical that Broadway historically has favored. “Quilters” is not a show for out-of-towners. It has the appeal of the authentic.

In the wrong hands, of course, “Quilters” could easily become quaint and languorous. Its episodic vignettes about pioneer times on the prairie, pieced together like the show’s handmade quilts, have a tendency toward the elegiac. But this touching, funny, musically winning production has been directed by Teri Ralston and performed by its cast of seven women with a verve and lack of nostalgia that give it the unsentimental pulse of life.

Whatever else theatergoers plan to see between now and Dec. 16, when “Quilters” is scheduled to close, this is one show they should try not to miss. In fact, this latest version of the Molly Newman-Barbara Damashek musical is such an unassuming marvel of theatrical brilliance, it is hard to know what or whom to praise first.

Shall we begin with the accomplished vocal talent of the wonderfully well-cast players--Laura Pryzgoda, Lisa Picotte, Tricia Griffin, Karen McBride, Carolyn Miller, Colleen Dunn and Karen Angela--or the considerable dramatic gifts that enable them to create individual portraits of pioneer women so gratifyingly different from each other?

Or shall we begin with the feeling that the piece has captured an immense cycle of experience common to most, if not all, women--pioneering or otherwise? “Quilters” deals with everything from menstruation and courtship to childbirth and mothering, aborting an unwanted fetus to surviving a beloved husband’s death, being young and playful to growing old.

The varied pacing of Ralston’s direction-cum-choreography is not to be overlooked, nor Jacquie Moffett’s and Doug Williamson’s functional but evocative design: a towering windmill, a raised platform and a few strategically placed wooden beams--all set against a quilt-like backdrop and bathed in Steven Wolff Craig’s flesh-toned lighting. Note, too, the understatement of Marthella Randall’s plain country costumes and the effective use of simple props.

If the ensemble work looks as cohesive as the beautiful quilts that have gotten the characters through the good and bad times in their hard lives on the prairie, it is not for lack of practice: This cast has performed “Quilters” four times before under Ralston’s direction. And plans are under way to do so again later this season in Los Angeles.

Ralston, who appeared with the original cast of “Quilters” at the Denver Center Theatre in 1983 and in a production at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum in 1985, first directed the show with this cast at the Moulton in January, 1987. That was followed by an hourlong version in June, 1987, mounted at a national competition of the American Assn. of Community Theatres in Norman, Okla., where Ralston and company took top honors.

They remounted the full-length show at the Moulton in May, 1988, to raise money to travel to Dundalk, Ireland, where “Quilters” competed in the 23rd annual International Community Theatre Festival. (The adjudicators awarded “Quilters” second prize, while the audience disagreed and voted it the top show.)

Pryzgoda, who clearly has the outstanding voice of the ensemble, offers two of the production’s musical highlights: a haunting rendition of “The Butterfly,” which embellishes a particularly affecting tale about an orphan and the death of her young mother, and “Quiltin’ and Dreamin’ ” which is part of a droll sketch about a plain Jane who catches the eye of the handsomest cowboy in the county (played with amusing panache by Dunn).

The brightest of nearly two dozen numbers include the entire ensemble doing “Pieces of Lives,” “The Windmill Song” (featuring Picotte and Angela), “Every Log in My House” and “Cornelia.”

Griffin also has a notable solo in “Green, Green, Green,” as well as an affecting dramatic scene about a husband’s death on the railroad.

Miller gives a fine, melancholy reading of an old-maid schoolteacher who can’t have children, while Picotte provides an essential buoyancy throughout in a polished and energetic performance both as a singer and actor. Angela, though at times a bit shrill, brings off some of the sharpest moments of comedy as a clever scamp. And McBride has an anchoring presence as a pioneer matriarch.

Meanwhile, the band lends vivid support not only as musical accompanists but also as sound-effects technicians creating the mood of the prairie.

Mark Turnbull plays a variety of instruments from wind to percussion, along with Rocio Marron on fiddle, Cynthia Merrill on bass and Bob Hawkins on guitar and mandolin.

‘QUILTERS’

A Laguna Playhouse production of the musical by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek. Directed and choreographed by Teri Ralston. Music and lyrics by Damashek. Based on “The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art” by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen. Musical director Mark Turnbull. Set by Jacquie Moffett and Doug Williamson. Lighting by Steven Wolff Craig. Costumes by Marthella Randall. With Karen Angela, Colleen Dunn, Tricia Griffin, Karen McBride, Carolyn Miller, Lisa Picotte and Laura Pryzgoda. Performances Tuesdays to Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sunday, Dec. 9, at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Through Dec. 16 at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tickets: $14 to $22. Information: (714) 494-8021.