THEATER REVIEW : Taking the Congeniality Out of ‘Camelot’ : Some bright moments of sweet musicality are set apart by haphazard staging at the Pantages.

For a few brief shining moments in the American musical theater, they wrote ‘em like “Camelot.” And for more than a few brief shining moments in the staging that just arrived at the Pantages, even those born long after the last gasp of the Eisenhower era can glimpse why shows like this last.

Full of schmaltz but a finely crafted example of its operetta-like genre nonetheless, the 1960 Lerner and Loewe classic breezed into Los Angeles for a two-week engagement on Thursday.

Well, it didn’t exactly breeze in. But it didn’t wheeze in either, as touring productions are sometimes wont to do.

Oddly, it both soared and sank. For this revival has what any production should envy: Loewe’s lilting score and unabashedly romantic ballads, brought to you by not one, but the three staunch leading performers: Robert Goulet (King Arthur), Patricia Kies (Guenevere) and Richard White (Sir Lancelot).

Yet it’s staged, especially in Act I, as if the mythical English idyll Camelot’s main crop were concrete and everybody’s got their feet stuck in it.

Plodding along through Lerner’s often tedious book, the direction flattens the story of the king whose wife and most trusted knight fall in love. All told, director Norbert Joerder betrays “Camelot” more vilely than Arthur’s evil bastard son Mordred, who rats on the affair between Guenevere and Lancelot.

Joerder, in fact, seems to be doing all he can to make you wait as long as possible between the moments of clean, sweet musicality. But the less staging in a scene in this production, the better it tends to be: The crowd scenes are as botched as the solos and duets are eloquent.

The Big Dramatic Moments are thrown away. Even when Guenevere is tied to the stake and ready to burn and Arthur has to make an agonizing choice, it’s hard to get beyond the physical clutter and diffused focus. Similarly, Arthur and Guenevere’s painful last farewell, which flits by as spear carriers mill about, is so quick it’s nearly painless.

And if you can’t get the climax to work, what have you got? Not the comic relief--in the person of the old knight Pellinore, whose dotterings provide an inadvertent lesson in why vaudeville died. Not even the spectacle scenes, such as “The Jousts,” which echoes the “Ascot Gavotte” number in the 1956 (and generally superior) Lerner & Loewe hit “My Fair Lady.” There’s no heartache in the heroics, no pizazz in the pomp.

What you do have, however, are some concert-quality renditions of classic musical theater set pieces.

When the crystalline-voiced Kies sits down and sings her tender anthem “Before I Gaze at You Again” near the end of Act I, for example, or her later “I Loved You Once in Silence,” all the preceding distraction melts away. Likewise, when White ably belts out the famously overwrought love song “If Ever I Would Leave You,” the music works as it’s meant to, on your soft spot rather than your sense.

Goulet, who originated the Lancelot role in 1960 and is now in the part created by Richard Burton, also brings the right combination of magnanimous charm and elegant magnetism to his role. And while the Arthur role doesn’t provide Goulet with quite the opportunity to show off his mellifluous baritone, Goulet makes the most of the half-spoken, half-sung score.

He’s especially compelling in the latter half of the story, once Arthur has figured out the attraction between Guenevere and Lancelot and decided to grin and bear it.

The Arthurian parable is played out against the backdrop of an ornate but generic set that exacerbates the staging’s liabilities. Crowding and pushing the action forward to the front third of the Pantages proscenium, it neither allows the group scenes to breathe, nor affords the intimacy that’s needed for Arthur and Guenevere’s chamber tete-a-tetes.

* “Camelot,” Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Jan. 9. $25-48. (213) 480-3232. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

“Camelot” Robert Goulet: King Arthur Patricia Kies: Guenevere Richard White: Sir Lancelot Tucker McCrady: Mordred James Valentine: Merlin/Pellinore

Produced by Shelly Gross for Music Fair Productions Inc. Music by Frederick Loewe. Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Directed and choreographed by Norbert Joerder. Musical direction John Visser. Scenic supervision and lighting Neil Peter Jampolis. Costumes Franne Lee. Sound Tom Morse.