Squabbling songbirds Pete ’n’ Keely hits some strident notes BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Pete ’n’ Keely By James Hindman. Original music by Patrick Brady. Original lyrics by Mark Waldrop. Directed by Robert Jay Cronin. Music direction by Timothy Evans. Set by Daniel Bilodeau. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. With Kathy St. George and Christopher Chew. At Stoneham Theatre through September 28.

Imagine a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. It would be lightweight yet relentless, and every once in a while someone would put down the Scotch glass to sing "Hello, Young Lovers." Apart from the fact that the writing is to Edward Albee’s as sarsaparilla is to vitriol, Pete ’n’ Keely is a lot like that. In essence a two-person musical set on a sound stage with the spectators standing in for a studio audience, the show centers on a one-time popular singing duo of the 1950s and ’60s who, down on their solo luck, reunite for a 1968 television special even though they hate each other. The good news is that, at Stoneham Theatre, the eponymous pair are played by Kathy St. George at full diminutive-showboat throttle and Christopher Chew as a veritable boa constrictor of a lounge lizard with enough ruffles on his tux shirt to outfit the Folies-Bergère. The bad news is that, even in capable hands, this combination of canned banter, pop song, and lovers’ quarrel is about as tedious as its television-variety-show context.

The trouble is that Pete ’n’ Keely — which had a quasi-successful Off Broadway run, commencing in 2000 and garnering such unlikely fans as Rex Reed and John Simon — is sort of a one-trick pony. Well, a two-trick pony, if you count the spoof of TV variety specials (which in the New York production included a spate of elaborate period costumes by Cher’s favorite designer, Bob Mackie). For close to two hours, the ex-couple once known as "America’s Singing Sweethearts" amble down memory lane exuding fake amiability while secretly shooting daggers and the occasional, frozen-smiled barb. Mounting hostility battles showmanship until all hell breaks loose toward the end and, their old love whetted like Amanda and Elyot’s in Private Lives, Pete and Keely fall into each other’s arms again.

On the way toward this inevitable reconciliation, the two, in tandem and separately (and backed by a hidden combo and an on-stage pianist), regale us with standards of the period, among them the Ella Fitzgerald hit "Black Coffee" for Keely and a swivel-hipped, chest-hair-flashing rendition of the Davenport & Cooley "Fever" for Pete. There are also some amusing parodic, as well as countless filler, numbers by composer Patrick Brady and lyricist Mark Waldrop. The latter, who directed Pete ’n’ Keely Off Broadway, also penned lyrics for the more blatantly camp When Pigs Fly.

Indeed, Pete ’n’ Keely might be more appealing if its lampoon of the television variety show, with its strained chat and elaborate production numbers, were punched up. For my money, the best part of the Stoneham production is the title pair’s re-creation of their 1956 pop arrangement of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," with a flag-blazer-clad Pete silkily mouthing the melody while Keely, her helmet hair unfazed by a wind effect, barks little hallelujahs before peppily remarking, "Did that Julia Ward Howe know how to write a tune or what?" Also appearing on the duo’s reminiscent journey through their career is a medley of songs from their one Broadway foray, a modern-day version of Antony and Cleopatra called Tony ’n’ Cleo, and a hoky holiday number that features Pete manipulating the feet of a clog-dancing elf. More of that, please, and less dogged upbeatness and unctuousness, however intentional, from Pete and Keely, whose reproduction of the sexless sizzle-and-piston moves of Vegas-inspired performance gets tiresome long before the show is over.

At Stoneham, director Robert Jay Cronin does not so much wink at the Doris Day–Perry Como school of performance as try to sell it — or have St. George and Chew do so, flogging each song until the effect is numbing. Daniel Bilodeau’s studio set is appropriately cheesy, though not as lavish as it should be. And Gail Astrid Buckley’s costumes — is there a color of shimmer St. George does not sport? — are more slinky than satiric. St. George and Chew, for their part, ride a thin line between making fun of the has-been couple, or at least of the performance genre they represent, and putting the characters across. Chew is a good enough singer to parody the oleaginous smoothness of a Steve Lawrence while showing us why it worked. And St. George, mixing Judy Garland and Brenda Lee with a soupçon of Shirley Temple, demonstrates the drive that both propelled their act and bisected Pete ’n’ Keely.