STAGE REVIEW : Kelly Shows Talent but Lacks Focus : Performance: Specter of AIDS looms over multimedia artist’s one-man show at Sushi Performance Gallery.

John Kelly has a remarkable voice--high, liquid, passionate and penetrating--equally at home with arias and with Rodgers and Hammerstein classics.

If only he would sing more in his new work, “Divine Promiscue (Music While Waging Victory).”

Kelly, who made his Southern California debut at Sushi Performance Gallery on Thursday and continues there through tonight, is a graceful and imaginative multimedia artist who has trained as a classical dancer and singer. In this one-man hourlong show he sings half a dozen selections, dances, changes character, performs on film and speaks, but his considerable talents are neither harnessed nor sufficiently focused here. If you don’t know the story before you walk in, you may be very confused.

“Divine Promiscue” could be subtitled “Portrait of the Artist in the Age of AIDS.” An artist named Randy sits at his desk trying to find inspiration. He dreams of it, and his muse comes to him in the form of Dagmar Onassis, an opera singer dressed in red and played by Kelly. (What you can learn from the artist’s off-stage explanations, but not the piece itself, is that Dagmar is his vision of the fictional child that Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis never had.)

He tires of art; he seeks love. An affair fails, and he dreams of creating a masterpiece. Mona Lisa (again played by Kelly) appears in a film on a screen over his head while he’s sleeping. When he awakens, he also has to deal with the specter of AIDS (never explicitly mentioned)--symbolized by a heap of dirt behind a scrim.

He returns to his art--and that’s his victory.

One element that hurts “Divine Promiscue” is the tedious back-and-forth nature of the construction--from art to love, from love to art. Another is his propensity for silliness, notable in the Mona Lisa film. But the most significant problem is that the show seems very slow until the powerful AIDS section near the end.

Kelly’s dancing, singing and acting are so much more dignified and moving when he finally comes into contact with that heap of dust that the cliche-ridden art-love melodrama and the jokes seem all the more vapid by comparison.

For the moments near the end when Kelly’s work jells, he’s sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat extraordinary. But in “Divine Promiscue,” too much of the time seems to be lost in an insular world of his own choreography, direction, text, singing, dancing and acting. The work cries out for a director-writer to pan the gold from the dross.

“DIVINE PROMISCUE (MUSIC WHILE WAGING VICTORY)”

Choreography, direction and text by John Kelly. Set by Huck Snyder. Film by Anthony Chase. Lighting by Stan Pressner. Pianist is Fernando Torm-Toha. Stage manager is Tad Yenawine. At 8 p.m. tonight. Tickets are $9 (members) and $12 (general). At Sushi Performance Gallery, 852 8th Ave., San Diego. 235-8466 .