STAGE REVIEW : Actors’ Charm Can’t Carry ‘Senior’ and ‘1.5 Man Show!’

The likable presence of two performer-writers doesn’t make up for the lack of substance in Eugene Pack’s “The Senior” and Chad Einbinder’s “1.5 Man Show!,” both at Theatre/Theater.

In “The Senior,” Pack, as Rupert Capistrano, takes the audience on a guided tour of his high school senior year, as he barrages his dream college with “extracurricular sassiness” to make up for shoddy SAT scores. If only every tortured adolescence were as easy to salvage as Rupert’s. By sheer force of will he shakes his dorky image, landing a girlfriend and the lead in the school musical.

Director Dale Rehfield does a good job of milking the humor and the pathos out of Rupert’s antics, particularly his attempts at phone suavity foiled by call waiting.

Pack is a concentrated and charming performer but a less successful writer. At 24, he’s too close to the experience he’s trying to dramatize to lend it any fresh insight; it comes off as shallow, premature nostalgia. Rupert’s persona and experience would be a welcome expansion of the glossed-over version of high school life served up on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” but in its present form “The Senior” is ill-suited for the stage.

It’s hard not to like Chad Einbinder as he takes the stage, as himself, to open “1.5 Man Show!,” flashing pictures of his new baby and joking about the difficulties of juggling fatherhood and performing. Any warmth that we might develop for this casual, affable fellow dissolves quickly during the slapdash mishmash that ensues.

Einbinder and a four-musician, three-actor ensemble attempt a “Saturday Night Live”-style comedy and variety show, mostly written by Einbinder, with an improvisational-theater feel that reflects many of his company’s ties to the Groundlings. Most of the show’s humor is of the one-joke “Far Side” variety--”Michael Caine on Ice,” “Finally a Musical Theater Traffic School”: funny concepts, but the individual monologues and scenes don’t add up to much. No unifying idea ties the show together and the whole thing is under-rehearsed, with sloppy execution and a dragging pace.

* “1.5 Man Show!,” Wednesdays, 8 p.m. $9.99. Ends Oct. 21. (310) 446-1880). “The Senior,” Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. $10. Ends Oct. 16. (213) 466-1767. Both shows at Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.