STAGE REVIEW : ‘Last Metro’ on Wrong Track at Colony

No question. The Colony Studio Theatre went for broke with its current production of “The Last Metro,” a new musical based on the 1980 Francois Truffaut movie of the same name. It has a 25-member cast, 21 scenes, 17 songs, a complex set (Gil Morales), elaborate costuming (Ted C. Giammona) and taped music arranged, orchestrated and performed on synthesizer by that notable one-man band, Geoff Stradling.

But it climbed aboard the wrong train. Jeffrey Rockwell’s music and lyrics are mostly steeped in soft, romantic tempi for a piece that purports to convey at least some sense of the Nazi occupation of Paris. And Philip Gerson’s wildly overwritten book is riddled with cliches. “Last Metro” is not just a return to the book musical, which could be welcome, but an unfocused throwback to an innocuous kind of book musical that hasn’t a chance of pulling out of the station.

The situation is one of consensus. The authors and their director, Todd Nielsen, have chosen to turn Truffaut’s film about a French theater company’s survival under the Nazi regime into pure love story rather than commentary.

Too bad. The slender plot has the Jewish head of the company, Lucas Steiner (Don Stewart), forced to hide out in the basement of the theater for the duration, while his wife Marion (Jan Pessano), a leading lady, takes over the reins.

From his isolation, Steiner ruefully watches as Marion, against her will, falls in love with her new leading man, Bernard (Robert Stoeckle). There is one of those everyone-here-is-noble resolutions that makes for good things in life, but seldom in theater.

This shift of emphasis is not true to the film, which drew its mood from the inescapable dread and surreptitiousness of the time and place, as symbolized by the title. The Paris Metro ran 24 hours a day until the Nazis imposed a wartime curfew that had the last train running at 11 p.m. Theatergoers needed to scramble.

This sense of scramble, of fear, of the time being out of joint, never makes a dent in this musical version. Suggestions of it are purely cosmetic. When a show starts with costumed and bewigged 18th-Century maids and valets mincing through an operetta (the theater of the piece is now a musical house, not a dramatic one as in the film), it sends the wrong message. And when one of the earliest lyrics is “always there is Paris” (in a curiously misconceived ballad called “There Is Love”) it’s hard to see Nazis in the sunset.

The title song, “The Last Metro,” is the logical place to start, but we don’t hear it until Scene 5. Two or three numbers indicate Rockwell can write a good lyric and deliver a catchy tune (“At the Opera Comique,” “Not Being In Love,” “When I Look At You”), but Gerson’s book is a real problem. It remains doggedly superficial and the caliber of the writing seldom rises above such empty-calorie platitudes as “Are you sure you wanna do this?” or “You have an odd way of showing it.”

Except for Pessano, the company consists chiefly of actor-singers with a limited range that they’re too often called on to abuse.

Stoeckle is a strong actor who can finesse his way through this script (his “A Blank Piece of Paper” is a tender moment), but Stewart is defeated by the inconsistencies of his role. And other members of the company such as Pamela Winslow (the treacherous Nathalie), Don Woodruff (the noxious critic Daxiat), Sandra Kinder (the good old company factotum Germaine) and Vonn Hamilton (the director Jean-Pierre), are merely asked to do stereotypes.

By the Colony’s own account, this final production of its 15th season is its “most ambitious and complex undertaking” since its 1977 stage adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles.” No doubt, but what a difference.

“Chronicles” had an absolute sense of its identity. “Last Metro” gets hopelessly mired in irrelevant waltzes, minuets and love ballads at the expense of any Brechtian darkness. It bursts at the seams with overproduction while the real work that needs to be done languishes in the background. Assuming Gerson and Rockwell want to reflect the film, the error is conceptual. And that’ll take rethinking from the top.

“The Last Metro,” Colony Studio Theatre, 1944 Riverside Drive, Silver Lake. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays,3 or 7 p.m. (alternating schedule). Ends Sept. 29. $18-$20; (213) 665-3011. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.