‘Dolittle’ does little to push it

WHEN analyzing “Dr. Dolittle,” staged by and starring Tommy Tune, the animal analogies just keep piling up, with the phrase “dog and pony show” uppermost.

The show is hopefully subtitled “Everybody’s Musical,” but its cartoonish broadness may put off older audiences, while a rusty romance could well bore the tykes.

Tune gets points for persistence. After a failed national tour last fall, Tune trotted the heavily doctored “Dolittle” into the Pantages on Tuesday for its West Coast premiere. Several other engagements, including limited runs at the San Diego Civic and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, are scheduled.

The new musical, which features the music and lyrics of Leslie Bricusse and a book by Lee Tannen, is loosely based on the Newberry-winning children’s series by Hugh Lofting about a British doctor who is able to talk to animals. However, the chief source material is the execrable 1967 film starring Rex Harrison, which Bricusse later recycled into a stage version in the late 1990s.

Why Tune should so tenaciously tweak this innately problematic enterprise remains unclear, but to give him his due, there are moments of genuine charm to be found in this latest offering. A few of choreographer Patti Colombo’s dance sequences reach blissful heights, the costumes by Dona Granata and Ann Hould-Ward are eye candy of a high order, and Kenneth Foy’s whimsical scenery seems to have unfolded from a children’s pop-up book. And, of course, the animals -- primarily puppets artfully manipulated by black-clad ensemble members -- set the tykes aroar.

More important, Tannen’s book addresses some of the glaring problems of Bricusse’s original screenplay. Several of the film’s more obnoxious characters, including the one so unmemorably portrayed by Anthony Newley, have been elided here, and the famously protracted film has been winnowed to an intermission-less 90 minutes.

Even at that brief running time, the unhappily episodic plot wears thin. Tune is charming and relaxed in the title role, but his errant British dialect is distracting, and the annoyingly flat opening scenes seem to presuppose a familiarity with the material. Worse, the romance between Dr. Dolittle and his initially “impossible” neighbor, Lady Emma Fairfax (consummately polished Dee Hoty, doing her best) seems spliced in, devoid of any true emotional heft.

If one expects to hold an audience, particularly a young audience, that thread of empathy is essential. At its best, children’s theater weaves a complicated fabric that covers the full range of human emotion. “Peter Pan” is, after all, a meditation on the evanescence of youth, while “The Lion King” reverberates with the Oedipal guilt of a son who believes he has killed his own father.

Sadly, underneath all the fancy footwork and bright colors, Tune’s “Dolittle” is little more than a series of uninvolving and unconnected yarns that soon fray into ephemera.

*

‘Dr. Dolittle’

Where: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays, 1 and 5 p.m. March 5

Ends: March 5

Price: $25 to $68

Info: (213) 365-3500, www.BroadwayLA.org

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Also

Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 3rd Ave., San Diego

When: March 7-12

Price: $19-$65

Contact: (619) 570-1100

Also

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: March 21 to April 2

Price: $20 to $65

Contact: (714) 556-2787, www.ocpac.org