Holes Worn Into ‘Black Leather Soles’

“Before you know it, the fizz is gone,” sighs a jaded torch singer swirling a glass of flat soda water. Shattered dreams--big and small--figure prominently in “Black Leather Soles,” an ambitious, elaborately staged portrait of a 1936 Harlem nightclub at the Lee Strasberg Creative Center.

First-time playwright Gordon Greene set his piece in the dramatically ripe twilight of the Harlem Renaissance--that brief flourishing of possibilities for blacks to shed some of their historical baggage, which came to an abrupt halt with the Depression.

In hindsight, it was a missed opportunity with staggering social repercussions. To his credit, in telling the story of an idealistic young nightclub owner struggling with hard times and betrayals, Greene (playing his own protagonist) commendably steers clear of heavy-handed polemics, letting the personal tragedies of his characters speak implicitly to the broader implications.

Unfortunately, that subtlety does not extend to Greene’s plot, which lurches through a succession of melodramatic excesses. The piling-on jumbles too many subplots--the hero’s attempt to break free of his abusive father (Austin Stoker), his bitterness over the accident that crippled his own career dreams as a tap dancer, his tortured emotional connection with his star singer (Temple Parker), his resistance to a caricatured mobster (Emilio Borelli) and his weak-bladdered thug (Joe Marino), his misplaced faith in his emcee (Marlon Young) and bookkeeper (Karen ffolkes, substituting for Kaci M. Fannin), his sadly ironic doubts about his sweetly loyal bartender (Roy Lee), and his strained relations with his unpaid entertainers (Rolandas Hendricks, Toby Harris and Roscoe Freeman). Some poignant performances help sell the individual characters, even if they never congeal as an ensemble.

Genuine delights in Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter’s handsome staging are the lively tap sequences featuring Hendricks and Harris, and Parker’s tuneful renditions.

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“Black Leather Soles,” Lee Strasberg Creative Center, Stage Lee Theatre, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends June 9. $15. (323) 650-7777. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.