Theatre in Review: Little Miss Sunshine (Second Stage)If you're going to make a musical, it's probably better not to select source material in which five of the six lead characters are clinically depressed: It limits the kind of songs you can write. This thought came to mind during Little Miss Sunshine, in which a blue chip team of theatre professionals struggles to find music in a story that resists their efforts. Very closely based on the 2006 film, Little Miss Sunshine couldn't be more up-to-date in its portrait of a middle-class family falling apart in these recessionary times. Having lost his job, Richard, who long ago entertained dreams of baseball glory, is trying to reinvent himself as a self-help guru; meanwhile, his wife, Sheryl, has become the family breadwinner and all-around parent, a set of roles that she's not too thrilled about. Sheryl is also responsible for her brother Frank, a leading Proust scholar who tried to kill himself when his boy-toy lover left him for another middle-aged academic. Sheryl and Richard have also been forced to open their home to Richard's father, known as Grandpa, who was kicked out of his retirement village for possession of cocaine. Their 15-year-old son, Dwayne, has taken a vow of silence until he is allowed to enroll in the Air Force Academy; meanwhile, he buries himself in Nietzsche and communicates only via text message. This motley crew is brought together inside Grandpa's rickety VW van to drive Olive -- Richard and Sheryl's daughter -- from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach to take part in a pint-sized beauty pageant. The trip is fraught with disasters, which nevertheless have the effect of reminding them that they are, after all, a family. But where the film was a delightful picaresque tale, shrewdly fusing cranky comedy with sadder realities, Little Miss Sunshine repeatedly fails to strike the right tone. You'd think that William Finn, the king of musical kvetching, would be the man for the job, and indeed the show gets off on the right foot with "Way of the World," which lays out the clan's collective disappointments versus Olive's dreams of beauty-pageant stardom. He also comes up with an amusing chorus of mean girls who occasionally pop up to taunt Olive. But several other numbers feel like placeholders, and Finn's famously spiky wit is largely absent: This is especially true of Grandpa's tasteless and unfunny solo, "Have Sex," which consists of the title idea, repeated endlessly. Other songs, especially those in which Richard and Sheryl have at each other or Frank pours out his bitterness, only add to the generally glum atmosphere. And at the exact point when the level of suspense should be building -- will the family get to Redondo Beach in time? -- the action stops cold for yet another sad ballad, this one titled "Something Better Better Happen." Believe me, I was ready to second that motion. James Lapine's libretto has a handful of amusing wisecracks about such matters as Obamacare and transgender fourth-graders, but it often goes seriously awry in its attempt to recreate the film's oddball blend of laughter and melancholy. Some of the film's best scenes curdle on stage, turning unnecessarily sour. An accidental encounter, in a gas station men's room, between Frank and his ex, falls flat; we are asked to laugh at the notion that the sleek-looking Joshua has attached himself to a plump and unattractive older man. It's a nasty idea and it isn't improved by the song "How Have I Been," in which Frank vents his rage. A flashback showing how Richard and Sheryl got together mostly has the effect of suggesting that they were never really right for each other. And the big family decision to go on with the pageant trip after a certain calamitous turn of events -- not to be revealed here -- which seemed touching and funny in the film, seems crude and lacking in respect for the dead. Seeing the musical, it seems clear that the success of the film depended on the chemistry among a set of strong personalities, among them Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, and Alan Arkin. Here, Stephanie J. Block and Will Swenson, capable musical theatre leads, are surprisingly bland as Sheryl and Richard. (Swenson in particular doesn't sound comfortable singing Finn's music.) Rory O'Malley does his best as Frank, and David Rasche has a few good lines as Grandpa ("Don't go near drugs until you're on Social Security."), but much of their material is weak. On the plus side of the ledger, Logan Rowland invests Dwayne with a real sweetness, and little Hannah Nordberg is a total charmer, easily the equal of Abigail Breslin in the film. Wesley Taylor lightens things up a bit as the unfaithful Joshua and as a stoner sound engineer at the beauty pageant. The many scenes inside the van are cleverly staged by Lapine using a set of chairs on wheels; he also finds a way of representing the scenes where, having given the recalcitrant bus a big push to get started, everyone has to run after it and jump inside the moving vehicle. This may be a contribution of the choreographer, Michele Lynch, who also has fun with the tacky staging ideas at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The production also benefits from Beowulf Boritt's inventive set design, in which a deck representing a road map rises up to form the upstage wall before curving out into the house; also located upstage is a set of video screens on which Boritt projects plenty of moving scenery as the family makes its way across the Southwest. Ken Billington's lighting includes some lovely colorful side washes. Jennifer Caprio's costumes are especially good at disguising the actors, such as Taylor, Josh Lamon, and Jennifer Sanchez, who play multiple roles; she also comes up with a set of comically horrible costumes for the pageant contestants. Jon Weston's sound design is first-rate, allowing for total intelligibility and preserving a fine balance of voices and instruments. (Michael Starobin's orchestrations are helpful in this regard.) But all of this good work stumbles over the fact that, on the evidence here, Little Miss Sunshine simply wasn't crying out to be a musical. It's full of quirky characters, but do they really want to sing?--David Barbour 
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