‘A Big Band Christmas’ Sounds Good, Looks Off

The setting is the rooftop cafe of Manhattan’s Astor Hotel during World War II. It’s a yuletide broadcast featuring old seasonal favorites and readings of those endearing letters sent home by soldiers.

It’s a charming idea, especially to introduce young people to a world that no longer exists, when people believed that despite the war, they were having fun. That’s the idea behind “A Big Band Christmas.” It works for the most part but sags sometimes in the staging at the Curtis Theatre in Brea.

When the musical revue works, it is at its most maudlin, with the typical saccharine denial that anything is really going wrong out there in the world--as long as we have Christmas. Where it doesn’t work is in its authenticity. The “Stand By” and “Applause” and “On Air” signs are slowly dimmed and lighted; the real ones of the day had on-and-off switches. Nor did band singers sit at tables, but in chairs in front of the musicians. And women, particularly entertainers, never appeared in public in pantsuits.

The re-creation of radio commercials is meant to be funny, but though their words are right, their presentation is heavy-handed and period-dumb, particularly a cigarette commercial that has the entire band coughing violently. That’s 1998 thinking in a production meant to recall a more tobacco-affectionate era.

The “big band” is Tom McClure’s Windmill, an 11-piece group that isn’t only capable of producing the big band sound when it decides to, but is also capable of a sort of Mozartean jazz, as in such numbers as their throbbing version of “Greensleeves.” They are also adept at accompanying the four singers in the spotlights.

In one way, it’s fortunate that all four of them have a generic 1940s band-singer sound, whether they intended to or not. But they also have band-singer individuality. Ann Peek is most successful at this dual-personality vocal trick. She’s capable of sounding like several different big-name band singers of the period, and she puts enough personality in her renderings to make them very individual.

Cliff Senior and Lisa Dyson have the true sound of those anonymous voices heard over the air in those days, but they, too, infuse enough special detail to make them seem more than real. Producer-musical director Joshua Carr is the fourth voice, and a frequent announcer on the “remote broadcast,” but his approach is too studied and explicit for the period and the genre.

Director-choreographer Ray Limon keeps things moving quickly but should have found something more indicative of the period and the style to help focus the image he wanted to create. It almost works; it’s just a little out of focus.

* “A Big Band Christmas,” Curtis Theatre, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 20. $15. (714) 990-7722. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

A Limon/Carr Productions presentation of Christmas music with Joshua Carr, Ann Peek, Lisa Dyson and Cliff Senior, and with Tom McClure and Windmill. Directed and choreographed by Ray Limon. Musical direction: Joshua Carr. Additional writing: Nicholas Wheat. Pianist: Barbara Wheat.