The stuff of Boschian nightmares

Some things just aren’t meant to be shared. Take, for instance, other people’s dreams. Is there anything more tedious than listening to friends regale you with their unconscious adventures from the night before?

If you can imagine 2 hours, 45 minutes of such yawn-inducing elaboration (“and then you wouldn’t believe it, but suddenly I’m back in ...”) from a perfect stranger, then you have a fair sense of the experience of John Stothers’ “Pilgrim,” the bloated musical fiasco directed by Nick DeGruccio that opened Saturday at the beautifully restored Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Hollywood.

The venue, a charming, mini-Broadway jewel that’s in tiptop shape again, deserves better than to house the nightmares circulating in Stothers’ incoherent tale, which takes place in a grotesque, Hieronymus Bosch world of Gothic depravity. (The character names drop an art-world hint for anyone dozing off.)

The story, populated with oppressed and impoverished craftspeople to make the down-and-outs of “Les Miserables” seem posh, revolves around an unlikely couple: Anna (Jessica Rush), a genteel daughter, who implores Tinker (Tom Korbee), an insouciant pot mender, to rescue her from an arranged marriage to one of the town’s fearsome Guildmasters. Their meet-cute contrivance involves a discarded piece of putty chucked her way, which, it doesn’t take a drama critic to tell you, isn’t particularly adorable.

They fight, they flirt, they separate and reunite -- and the audience suffers repeated whiplash in the process. Before a scene has been credibly established, it’s jerked in a crazy new fabulist direction, which makes the romance seem only that much less significant.

Ten Bosch (Eric Anderson) is usually the culprit behind the dramatic fits and starts. A printer with aspirations of becoming a power broker, he keeps shifting the action through the roiling machinations of his ambition.

First, he persuades the tyrannical Master, whom Anna was to have wed, to stay his wrath. Then he works out a complicated plan that will slowly get Tinker out of the picture without turning him into a martyr.

This involves imprisoning the young man in the dungeon where his father was killed. And it’s here, in a cell shared with the cacophonous lunatic Hieronymus (Robert Patteri), that Tinker comes across a coded letter from his father, which advises him that the way to personal and political freedom is to pass through the three stages known as “securus,” “terroris” and “despero.”

No questions, please. The material had best be approached in a noninquisitive frame of mind. To inquire about facts is to risk decimating the entire ramshackle artifice. And, in truth, the answer to anything you might wonder about is simply: “It is impossible to know.”

As Tinker discovers through the cryptic message that he must dream his way out of this hell, the line between imagination and reality keeps growing murkier. In fact, it’s never exactly clear what’s going on. And so when the acrobats suddenly arrive (yes, that’s right, acrobats), and Tinker finds himself surrounded by a man on a stilts and woman hanging from a red stretchy cloth, it’s hard not to follow Tinker’s lead and flee on wings of your own secret fantasies of escape.

Stothers is as scattered musically as he is dramatically, never settling on a style or even a unified pallet. If there were the slightest hint of theoretical consciousness in “Pilgrim,” one might generously consider it a postmodern pastiche.

Occasionally, it seems like a “Forbidden Broadway”-style parody, a kind of “Rent” meets Andrew Lloyd Webber meets “Spamalot” send-up, except the work is in deadly earnest. The numerous love ballads, for example, are delivered as though the cast were auditioning songs for “American Idol” -- a style that precludes the loophole of camp.

The leads are attractive in a soap-opera way. Korbee, toned and tanned, performs bare-chested, while Rush, a fetching damsel in distress, has a lovely voice. But their modern demeanor doesn’t help DeGruccio’s production establish an otherworldly feel. We’re always watching contemporary actors half-heartedly pretend they’re in another time and place -- a sketchy storybook milieu that isn’t so much fantastic as half-baked and fake.

Steven Young’s scintillating lighting and Josie Walsh’s rambunctious choreography can’t offer more than temporary distraction from the mind-numbing drama on sluggish display. Although acoustics were a problem throughout, great resources obviously went into this staging -- an investment that’s as hard to credit as the unreality we’re expected to be captivated by.

“Pilgrim” is a long journey to nowhere, a trip that will leave you more appreciative than ever of the simple joys of returning home.

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‘Pilgrim’

Where: Ricardo Montalban Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays

Ends: April 23

Price: $39-$59

Contact: (800) 595-4849

Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes