STAGE REVIEW : ‘Club of Hearts’ (Formerly ‘The Cemetery Club’): RIP

Given the rotten reviews “The Cemetery Club” received in New York in 1990, it’s a wonder anyone would consider staging it as part of a series, even if that series happens to call itself a Broadway Series. Softening the title to “Club of Hearts” for its run at the La Mirada Theatre, where it opened Thursday, turns out to be strictly a cosmetic move. Ivan Menchell’s lumbering comedy about three Jewish widows who meet monthly to visit their husbands’ graves may give you heartburn but it has precious little heart.

Any episode of TV’S “Golden Girls” tops it for laughs. Its heavy-handed one-liners are anatomical, sexual, tasteless or merely predictable. What story there is finds itself mired in stereotypical chopped liver.

Lucille (Nanette Fabray) is the debonair bargain hunter, in the market for cheap mink and men. Doris (Fritzi Burr) is the scold who’ll mourn her dead husband to the day she joins him if it kills her. (It does.) And Ida (Jane Kean) is the sweet middle of the roader. Like Doris, she respects the dead, but like Lucille she wants to rejoin the living. Enter a mild-mannered butcher named Sam (Jack Axelrod) who’s mourning his dead wife and we’re off and limping.

In what may well be the most unoriginal effort to illustrate time’s hoary march, Menchell manages to offend everybody: Jews, who have rarely been so unfunny; women, who have rarely been so unreal, and probably butchers, who have rarely been so bloodless.

There is some vague attempt to show how life prevails over death, and one rowdy drunk scene (still the cheapest way to get laughs without earning them), but Menchell’s play sputters long before it takes off.

Director Scott Rogers has stuck to the letter of the script which, given its shortcomings, is not good news. He moves people around, but can’t spark their enthusiasm--a sign perhaps of their intelligence.

Production values are just as prosaic, except for Lucille’s brown wig which hits new lows. No matter how cheap or tasteless she’s supposed to be, Lucille cares about how she looks. There’s got to be something better out there. The blonde wig she dons in Act Two is proof that there is.

Opening night, the actors did some colliding into one another’s lines and tended to go it alone (including a vulgarly funny turn by Ivy Bethune as an unwanted fifth wheel). Burr, Kean and Axelrod negotiate the overburdened territory as best they can, but while Fabray enlivens the second act drunk scene trussed up as a latter-day Halloween version of Mme. Du Barry, she’s miscast in a part hardly worthy of her comic skills and seems to know it.

Broadway may be to blame for this play’s existence, but La Mirada is to blame for aiding and abetting in its survival. Somebody, please, give it a decent burial.

“Club of Hearts,” La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 26. $23-$27; (310) 944-9801, (714) 994-6310). Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

‘Club of Hearts’

Nanette Fabray: Lucille

Jane Kean: Ida

Fritzi Burr: Doris

Jack Axelrod: Sam

Ivy Bethune: Mildred

Executive producer Herb Rogers. Producing director Thomas Mitze. Director Scott Rogers. Playwright Ivan Menchell. Sets Joanne Trunick McMaster. Lights Raun Yankovich. Costumes Donna Barrier. Sound Chuck McCarroll. Props Kat Graeber. Technical director Garth Hemphill. Production stage manager Steven Donner.