THEATER REVIEW : Pieces Missing From ‘All That He Was’

“All That He Was” isn’t all that it should be.

The new musical about a man who dies from AIDS gets a few laughs and jerks a few tears. But in the professional premiere at the Tamarind Theatre, there is something missing at the core.

The show has been rewarded before its time. The original student production at Cal State Fullerton won the American College Theatre Festival’s Musical Theater and National Playwriting awards and was staged at the Kennedy Center. The text will be published.

Librettist-lyricist Larry Johnson and composer Cindy O’Connor should think again before they approve that final draft.

No one has a name in “All That He Was.” The characters are identified as Man, Lover, Mother, Father, Sister, Brother and so on. Apparently these people are supposed to be archetypes whose anonymity universalizes the story.

But they’re stereotypes more than archetypes. They make the show bland and generic rather than all-inclusive.

The emptiness of the characterizations is most keenly felt in the pivotal character, the deceased Man, who narrates and re-enacts his own story from beyond the grave. By the end, we still don’t know much about this guy--and what we do know is predictable. He’s seen partly as a victim--of his parents, a callous former sex partner, his doctors--and partly as a plain, vanilla, nice guy, with hardly anything distinctive or challenging about him. “All that he was” isn’t much, from what we can tell.

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Only one scene hints that Man has ever made the slightest mistake--we see the consequences when he thoughtlessly invited Girlfriend and Lover to the same supper. Oops.

Perhaps this vacuum at the play’s center is intentional. Maybe Johnson wasn’t as interested in Man as in how others react to him. Well, for the most part their reactions are predictable too.

Father is mean, Mother doesn’t understand, younger Brother is confused. The Friend who infected Man with AIDS is a swarthy cad dressed in black; his poor-me solo isn’t strong enough to make him more dimensional. Sister is a parody of a judgmental Bible-thumper, and a lesbian Activist is almost as much of a cartoon (though she wins her musical debate with the Bible-thumper). The

The obviousness of the book is compounded by the score. The few songs that make their point without underlining it--Brother’s “Somewhere Between,” for example--are overwhelmed by many more that throb and plod in a style that’s very derivative of early Lloyd Webber.

The show’s gooiest moment is a ditty about Man’s and Lover’s first shared Christmas. The goofiest is a solemn solo by one of the doctors, which we’re supposed to take seriously even though she has just been depicted as a nincompoop in the previous song. Director Jay Floyd should have sensed the inconsistency here.

Gary Imhoff brings boyish vim and vigor to Man--compare his squeaky-clean appearance to the spectral look Stephen Spinella brought to “Angels in America.” Most of the cast sings beautifully. But a prerecorded instrumental track suddenly halted Friday night, deserting Richel Kompst’s Girlfriend at the beginning of her big song. Kompst ad-libbed admirably until the music returned.

The set is one simple platform in the shape of a puzzle piece. It’s appropriate, given the circumstances; the absence of other pieces is all too symbolic of the show’s depth and sophistication.

* “All That He Was,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m. Indefinitely. $15. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.