John Spencer Shines as ‘Glimmer’ Flickers

As Martin Glimmer, a merry, hacking wanderer of the night otherwise known as a former jazz sideman, John Spencer makes the most of the new Warren Leight play “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine,” now at the Mark Taper Forum.

The performance is big. Best known as Leo McGarry on Aaron Sorkin’s popular, speechifyin’, Bush-administration antidote “The West Wing,” Spencer takes the Taper stage and makes it his own, detonating Leight’s one-liners like a wily terrorist. Shuffling around the Taper stage in a watermelon-colored robe, smoking a joint, resisting a reunion with the twin brother who cut him out of his life, the actor has everything in his arsenal to create a memorable stage character.

Except a memorable stage character. Leight offers a genial array of wisecracks; he’s eager to please and audience-friendly. But by revisiting the jazz milieu so soon after his internationally produced Tony Award winner “Side Man,” Leight may have been asking for it.

They are, it turns out, very different works. The far superior “Side Man,” which makes its local premiere in May at the Pasadena Playhouse, is at once a familiar my-screwy-family confessional and a pungent comedy of jazz manners. With “Glimmer,” Leight cracked to one interviewer, “I’m experimenting with plot--having one.”

Among other things, “Side Man” proved you don’t need much of a plot if you have the right texture and slices of life. With “Glimmer,” you never fully buy the particulars of Leight’s estranged-brothers story. Surprisingly little in it rings true, even when anchored by a no-bull performer such as Spencer. His character references everything from “Miss Saigon” to Thomas Wolfe, which generalizes rather than particularizes the character and his predicament. He’s an all-purpose, comic-relief ex-junkie.

The setup: Back in the ‘50s, long before Ken Burns turned a placid eye toward swing, bop and the drugs that provided so many greats with a tantalizing downbeat, there were trumpeters known as Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine. Martin (Spencer) got hooked on heroin by his brother Danny (Nicolas Surovy). Danny married a harridan, who for various cloaked reasons demanded Danny erase the troublesome Martin from his orbit.

That’s the distant past. “Glimmer” begins with a meet-cute in 1990. Trombonist Jordan Shine (Jonathan Silverman), son of the trumpeter, is playing a wedding gig in Greenwich, Conn. There he encounters callow marketing whiz Delia Glimmer (Alexa Fischer). She never realized her father--who renounced his jazz life for the sterile, moneyed World of Business--even had a twin brother, wasting away in a ratty New York apartment under the care of Jordan.

“Glimmer” inches the twin brothers together, slowly, amid much scrapping and denial. In counterpoint Jordan romances the pretty but humor-impaired princess Delia, who is engaged to someone else, someone she neglects to tell Jordan about.

Many such delayed secrets, spanning the generations, pop up in “Glimmer.” The narrative has a hoked-up feel. The class conflicts are handled awfully crudely: The haves, represented by Delia and Daddy, can only imagine the lives led by the poor, honest, witty have-nots.

Martin falls into a coma early on in “Glimmer,” popping up almost instantly from his hospital gurney, cracking wise. (At times the play is a burnt-out variation on “Wit.”) Problematically, “Glimmer” has an uncontrollable gag reflex. The jokes came more easily in Leight’s earlier jazzbo tribute.

Formerly titled “Glimmer Brothers,” Leight’s new play has been revised over two years; the Taper edition, staged by Evan Yionoulis, is by far the biggest of its productions to date. With scenic designer Neil Patel’s setting dominated by a depiction of an old bandstand snapshot, we’re never out of the shadow of J-A-double Z. Evan Lurie contributes some pleasant original music, with a particularly evocative piano theme heard, too briefly, as a transition into Act 2, Scene 7.

Throughout, Spencer is never less than compelling. Surovy’s Daniel has some force and unforced class; Silverman’s Jordan certainly gets his laughs, though with an actor so attuned to go for the gag in every exchange (must be all the Neil Simon on the resume), “Glimmer” acquires a synthetic slickness. A key ‘50s flashback, performed by Silverman and Fischer, carries an unfortunate sketch-comedy air. Elsewhere, Fischer can’t figure out what to do with her excruciatingly phony scenes.

What’s missing from “Glimmer,” finally, is a palpable sense of what the characters have lost--namely, the music. They talk about it, but too often we know where each scene is heading. It speaks well of Leight’s future that “Glimmer” goes its own way, wrong or right, rather than following in the impressionistic footsteps of “Side Man.” But if this tale of two twins is to truly move us, it needs to spell out less, ease up a little, and find ways to let the characters reveal themselves the way people tend to in real life--on the off-beat, the unexpected riff, not the melody line.

* “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Also: 2:30 p.m. Feb. 28. No evening performance March 4. Ends March 4. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Alexa Fischer: Delia

Jonathan Silverman: Jordan

John Spencer: Martin

Nicolas Surovy: Daniel

Written by Warren Leight. Directed by Evan Yionoulis. Scenic design by Neil Patel. Costumes by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Original music by Evan Lurie. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.