STAGE REVIEW : Casting Animates ‘Summer’

Paul Horner’s “Suddenly This Summer,” at the Melrose Theatre in Hollywood, looks like no other musical revue I’ve seen. The cast of 10 is a remarkably varied cross section of faces and figures: whites, blacks, Latinos, four little people. The singing voices are an interesting mix of dark and light, big and small.

Horner’s tunes aren’t as distinctive. His music is in the pop mainstream--simple, solid, sometimes affecting, sometimes predictable. The lyrics, by Horner and eight other writers, are clever one minute, pedestrian the next. But most of it is quite likable.

The show is most irresistible in several funny solos.

In “Washing Windows,” angelic-looking Stacy Sullivan turns household drudgery into a hilariously suggestive fantasy. Marc Allen Trujillo maintains a perfect deadpan in “Yuppie Lady,” a takeoff on “Sophisticated Lady” (lyrics by Phyllis Katz, from her “Co-dependently Yours”); note how he never lights the cigarette he carries, befitting the yuppie era. Janet Adderley, in “Just for Tonight” (lyrics by Steve Meigs and Horner), emphasizes her full-throated vowels and fumbles with her short skirt to signal her character’s sexual hunger.

On the more serious side, Craig Curtis whips through the evening’s most sophisticated lyrics (by Ray Underwood with Horner) with aplomb in the Brel-like “Second Nature.” The show concludes with two exceptional lullabies, the jazz-inflected “Go to Sleep” (lyrics by Underwood), feverishly sung by Dolores Kelly and Trujillo, and “Angels on Your Pillow”(lyrics by Peggy Lee), performed with crystalline purity by Sullivan.

During the ensemble numbers, Adderley’s staging and choreography and Horner’s musical direction pass the melodies around the group equitably, creating an elegant look for the most sentimental strains.

The only problem with the staging is a sequence when the four little people sit on stage, singing choruses of a peppy go-for-it song in between more thoughtful, moody solos by some of the others. It seemed slightly patronizing; so does the vacuous little ditty that introduces the little people.

Yet in the rest of the show, the little people make their points. Zelda Rubinstein sings a touching solo about her dream man. The quartet sings the ferociously satiric “Cutie Pies,” and they are joined by the others in an anthem which makes the point that everyone is, at least to themselves, “Larger Than Life.”

“Suddenly This Summer,” Melrose Theatre, 733 N. Seward St., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Indefinitely. $12-$15. (213) 891-6199. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.