A ‘Guitar’ played for laughs

The lady’s name is Vienna, and she’ll thank you not to mess with her. “Down there I sell whiskey and cards,” she tells a pack of surly interlopers who blow into her bar like an angry sirocco. “All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head. Now which do you want?” This dame shoots from the hip -- a nice pair of them -- in the musical comedy-western “Johnny Guitar,” now playing at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

Adapted from Nicholas Ray’s 1954 baroque cult film starring Joan Crawford and her eyebrows, “Johnny” works because it reverses the genre’s traditional gender roles. The tough guys here are gals: Vienna (Michelle Duffy), a saloon owner with a past, and her nemesis, Emma Smalls (Valerie Perri), a repressed rancher who’d rather hang Vienna than let her make a killing when the railroad comes through.

These cactus-spiked Amazons are circled by a pair of feminized men, Johnny Guitar (Kevin Earley) and an outlaw named the Dancin’ Kid (Alan Campbell), defined not by manly deeds but by a shared passion for Vienna. This is a musical in which the gents spar over cookware and the women wield the six-shooters -- and some pretty nasty tempers.

Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s book follows Ray’s overwrought film almost line by line, but he and musical collaborators Martin Silvestri and Joel Higgins (who also directs) play it strictly for laughs. In fact, “Guitar” winks at its audience so often you start to wonder if the show has an involuntary twitch. Like Richard Odle’s set, purposely cheesy wooden flats painted to resemble rough-hewn wood or rocks, this musical puts invisible quotes around every other line. Its authors may be trying to let us in on the joke, but they end up keeping the material at arm’s length.

Ray’s movie may topple over into camp, yet it commits to its convulsive style, achieving a bizarre integrity as a parable about the violence of sexuality. Unfortunately, Van Hoogstraten and company manage to make their stage adaptation about less than its cinematic source; making fun of something only works when your satire is at least as smart as its object.

What’s winning about this “Guitar” is its posse of talented lungs, which make the most of the show’s accessible mix of Western ballads, country and doo-wop styles.

The appealing Duffy, reminiscent of Amy Grant, lassos the show together with her effortless command of stage and song. Earley offers a rather benign acting presence but boasts a voice to which John Raitt might tip his hat. Their big signature solos -- her “Branded a Tramp,” his “Tell Me a Lie” -- gratify a hungry audience in the way the rest of the show might have, but never does.

As the tightly wound Emma, Perri has about as thankless a role as they come, and she doesn’t help matters by giving a barn-broad performance. Too bad -- she has quite a set of pipes, and her Act 1 finale, “Who Do They Think They Are,” should come with a pacemaker warning. Campbell, who appeared opposite Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard,” charms with his Dancin’ Kid.

Higgins’ direction has humor but lacks a dynamic sense of staging: the shootouts and climactic catfight fall as flat as a bad high school production, noticeably at odds with the level of singing talent.

A date with “Johnny Guitar’s” saucy heroine is tasty enough, but its creators have gone for mild instead of piquant. Seems her creators have bitten off a lot less than a frontier dame like Vienna can chew.

*

‘Johnny Guitar’

Where: La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, 2:30 Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: June 18

Price: $32 and $40

Contact: (562) 944-9801 or www.lamiradatheatre.com

Running time: 2 hours