STAGE REVIEW : Hits Sing but Book Doesn’t in La Mirada’s ‘Tin Pan Man’

Before it moved just north of Manhattan’s Times Square in the ‘40s, Tin Pan Alley held a decades-long residence on 28th Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. It was the center of the entertainment business, feeding the voracious maw of vaudeville and Broadway and, in the ‘20s, the burgeoning record business. Talkies added Hollywood to that clientele.

What a fine place, and time, to set a musical, especially when the score is made up of real hit songs of the era.

Musical nostalgia sells theater tickets these days, and writers Fred Searles and Jerry Cutler follow that well-established formula in their “The Tin Pan Man” at La Mirada Theatre. They follow a couple of well-established formulas, as a matter of fact, and that’s the rub.

The standard problem with musicals beleaguers this show--a slight, inconsequential and too familiar book. The writers bow to those carefree chronicle movie musicals of the 1930s, in which the romantic leads ran blissfully through the popular tunes of Gershwin or Berlin, Youmans or Kern, tied together by the conceit that said romantic leads wrote all those familiar ditties themselves.

Searles and Cutler’s Tin Pan Man, Billy Cooper, appears to have written every hit song of the first half of the century, to be plugged, of course, by his best friend, piano-player Danny. Billy is also beset by an off-and-on romance with Margie--now there’s a song cue if we’ve ever heard one--who doesn’t help by being the guiding light of every social movement that pops up during the era.

In the forefront of suffragettes, smashing speak-easies with a baseball bat and operating as a bigwig in the Roosevelt Administration, Margie can’t be blamed for not getting around to trapping her man.

Billy (David Naughton) and Margie (Marcia Mitzman) do get together eventually, after 40 years of not aging one whit. Billy’s mother (Connie Danese) doesn’t age either, from her mature semi-Yiddish beginning as purveyor of New York’s best turn-of-the-century egg creams to her brassy World War II trumpeting of “Sing Sing Sing.”

The world of “Tin Pan Man” is one of wishful thinking that seems out of joint with a more realistic present. Billy’s story could have said something about passing mores, disappearing values and the dangers of holding on to the past. Instead, it’s a pale carbon copy of its era’s own naivete, saved only slightly by the familiar melodies and memorable lyrics of its tunes.

And the tunes sound very good crooned and belted by a lively company under Glenn Casale’s wisely tight direction. He hasn’t been able to do much with the simplistic book, but he keeps the action moving at an energy level to match the fine musical direction of Milton Greene, who knows how to make Matt Harris’ exceptional orchestrations sound as though they’re really being played by a Broadway pit band. It’s the right sound for what the show might have been.

Chuck McCarroll designed the wrong sound to amplify both orchestra and singers. It’s way too loud for the material, over-modulates too often and muddles Greene’s good vocal arrangements, especially in the bigger ensemble numbers. Some of the color combinations in Katina Kerr’s costumes are also uncomfortable and often detract from Joanne Trunick McMaster’s clever and appropriate vaudeville-style sets.

Naughton looks just right for the slightly dense, totally career-focused Billy, but although he has a pleasant light baritone that works well on ballads, his laid-back approach doesn’t inject much life into the production, particularly the exposition-loaded monologues the writers have given him to span the decades as they flash by. As his activist girlfriend, Mitzman is a lot more exciting and gives power and color to ballad and up-tempo numbers alike.

Danese shines in the more straightforward big numbers, such as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” but her scat in “Sing Sing Sing” is lost in the decibels of the sound system. Jeffrey Polk is the only singer in the company able to rise above the electronics. His “Minnie the Moocher” easily steals the show; he doesn’t have to ask the audience to join in, they can’t help themselves.

Paul Ainsley does the stock things with his stock character of the blunt-brained publisher who bumbles through it all, but he does it so well he gets every laugh he sets up. Randy Hills is very strong as Billy’s pal Danny and sings with style and period flair. Cathy Susan Pyles tries valiantly to overcome her own stock squeaky-voiced blond bimbo and often succeeds.

More use could have been made of ensemble members Mark McGee, whose rich voice is a pleasant surprise when he’s on his own, and Jim Raposa, whose joyous, athletic dancing often makes more of Robb Barron’s rather tentative choreography than is really there.