‘Chavez’ Has Long Row to Hoe but Falls Short

Nyna Shannon Andersen’s “Chavez: Going Towards the Light” is one curious hybrid of a show: less a musical than an operetta, a sprawling epic staged in workshop style by former Mark Taper Forum dramaturge Leon Katz and Debra De Liso, an entertainment set forth as a history lesson.

Just as the work of United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez was never completed, this show at the Tracy Roberts Theatre is far from finished.

Andersen, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, is a veteran at turning the lives of civil rights icons into musicals, with works such as “King, the Man,” staged at Studio City’s Two Roads Theatre in 1996.

Chavez’s story, stuffed with dramatic ebbs and flows and the dynamics of big characters, big ideas and bigger emotions, screams for an epic. Attempts at a film biography have been floating around for some time. Were this France, Great Britain or Russia, with their long traditions of historical drama, the Chavez stage epic would be done by now.

As it stands, Andersen’s “Chavez” is a quintessential work-in-progress that is much too much in love with its hero, much too long by at least 30 minutes and much more boring than it should be.

Its aim extends its reach, yet that ambition is its most stirring quality. That the staging by Katz and De Liso is in Studio City rather than the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (the rightful home for such a show) says less about the work than about the foundation’s long-term inability to develop home-grown work about Chicano heroes.

The book follows a straight chronology from Chavez’s upbringing by loving parents in a filthy California shack to his gradual awakening to the plight of his fellow farm workers and his own abilities to lead a nonviolent movement inspired by Gandhi.

Andersen takes great pains to trace Chavez’s Catholicism as fertile soil for his integration of Gandhi’s Buddhist-inspired spiritual politics and to dramatize Chavez’s deep divide with other men in the UFW who preached aggressive machismo when faced with farm owner intransigence and police power.

Were “Chavez” not so long (three hours), its literal by-the-numbers storytelling approach would be an ideal history lesson for young people who may have only vague notions of the man’s impact on Chicano identity and grass-roots, working-class movements.

But it is long, and it is literal. The operetta form of sung dialogue and the wisely simple staging employing small wooden crates as the set pieces would seem to propel this work toward a stylized perspective.

But it remains stubbornly stuck between a sermon and an expressionist vision. Andersen’s lyrics are awkwardly stuffed inside her songs. At other times, such as a during a beautiful exchange of love between Cesar (Edgar Garcia) and loyal wife Helen (Brenda Canela), this becomes true operetta in its simplest, most direct form.

While the book reflects Andersen’s extensive research, her music is generally uninspired to a numbing degree. The show is so overburdened with midtempo songs that they begin to blend into each other and eventually dampen the play’s most dramatic moments.

Garcia constantly struggles with his limited singing range, but he remains astonishing. There is no other actor all year who will have more lines than Garcia, and his energy is unwavering.

Canela sings exquisitely (sometimes echoing Natalie Merchant) and has too little stage time. Jose Maranon, thankfully, brings mucho gusto to his primary roles as both Chavez’s long-suffering father and the macho Esteban. No one in the ensemble displays more versatility than Ron Kochevar, who switches from tough-guy strikebreaker to social worker to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at a moment’s notice.

“Chavez: Going Towards the Light,” Tracy Roberts Theatre, 12265 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 26. $15. Running time: 3 hours.