THEATER REVIEW : Nothing Fishy Here : The musical revival of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ is the Odessa Theatre’s best production so far.

For a while there it appeared that anti-war plays might be growing as passe as Cold War spy novels. That was before (fill in any of several developing or ongoing wars), which makes a musical revival of Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 pacifist drama, “A Man’s a Man,” achingly relevant.

Director and actor James Kennedy has dusted off this difficult but stinging satire of a military war machine (written when Brecht was only 28) and turned the Odessa Theatre in North Hollywood (formerly the Gnu) into a carnival-like army recruitment poster.

That would have been fine with Brecht. His anti-war dialectic and theoretical Theater of Alienation (in which ideas are designed to supplant emotions) can be seen in their formative stage in this odyssey of a wimpy husband and dockworker named Gayly Gay (the impressive Gary Iverson) who goes off to buy a fish and winds up in His Majesty’s Imperial Army.

It’s not clear how stern director Kennedy was with his alter-ego acting self. Kennedy co-stars in his own show as a fierce military commander nicknamed Bloody Five who winds up reversing roles with, of all people, the passive Gayly Gay, the softy who’s transformed by regimentation into a killer-warrior. (One of Brecht’s big themes here is power and dominance and the subsequent loss of identity.)

In any event, the characteristic Kennedy bombast informs both the direction and his acting. What’s intriguing about his stage presence is his fireplug likeness to James Cagney at his rat-a-tat-tat best. The bellowing Kennedy takes the stage like a smoking Tommy gun, whether barking at his scummy regiment or its sexual purveyor, Widow Begbick (Barbara Murray’s right-on-the-Brechtian-mark camp follower).

The production, from Eric Bentley’s translation, is certainly the 6-month-old Odessa Theatre’s best work to date. The trouble is that theatergoers who are Brechtian neophytes will get lost in the tangle of farce, satire, song, vaudeville and dance. Even Brechtian enthusiasts have their work cut out for them, because the production too often is too busy and frenetic.

Particularly incomprehensible are a pair of Indian characters from the Pagoda of the Yellow God. (The musical drama takes place in India, a classic Brecht fantasy land that could be anyplace.) These two quasi-Oriental characters (unwisely cast with Anglo actors) murkily advance a major plot point about a drunken soldier, Jeraiah Jip (co-artistic director Reese Howard’s well-cast battlefield Everyman) who goes AWOL and is replaced by the unwitting faceless man out shopping for a fish, the aforementioned Gayly Gay.

The show’s obvious strength is Tanya Everett Bagot’s brash choreography, notably Adrienne Hurd’s black-clad bar girl, whose towering body and dynamic footwork threaten to blow everyone else off the stage.

But this is an ensemble production with a huge 19-member cast. Almost as choreographically propulsive as Hurd is Roumel Reaux as a saber-flashing grunt who opens the production with a mesmerizing, strobe-lit military dance drill number under fight choreographer Walter Bagot (Tanya Bagot’s husband).

Central to the musical action is musical director and onstage pianist Gordon Glor. The cast’s singing is dangerously uneven in the case of co-stars Kennedy and Iverson, who would do well to merely recite their lyrics. Vocally, the show’s sterling, soaring thrush is Donna Christy, as one of three sibling vixens who flaunt their body wares at the base brothel/saloon.

The lighting (Gregory Santana) and the sound design (Renji Philip are sharp components. But the austere stage and blank walls cry out for some imaginary decor, some vestige of a set design, instead of the emptiness here.

Where and When

What: “A Man’s a Man.”

Location: Odessa Theatre, 10426 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Indefinitely.

Price: $10-$12.50.

Call: (818) 752-0059.