Balladeers Forever Plaid, Marry Me a Little BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Forever Plaid Written and originally directed and choreographed by Stuart Ross. Musical continuity supervision and arrangements by James Raitt. Directed by Dale Sandish. Music direction by Jonathan Goldberg. Set by Paul Theriault. Lighting by Ken Elliott. Sound by Briand Parenteau. With Logan Benedict, Miguel Cervantes, Andrew Giordano, and Adam Souza. At the Stuart Street Playhouse 2nd Stage through July 25. Marry Me a Little Songs by Stephen Sondheim. Conceived and developed by Craig Lucas and Norman Rene. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Music direction by Jeffrey Goldberg. Set by Jenna McFarland. Lighting by Russell Swift. Costumes by Adriana Tulian. With Drew Poling and Leigh Barrett. At Gloucester Stage Company through June 27.

The sheen would seem to have gone off romance between the 1950s celebrated in Forever Plaid and the 1970s, when Stephen Sondheim was creating what you might call rue-mance: yearning but jaded, even a little angry that the "Three Coins in the Fountain" had all turned up tails. In Boston, the ’50s are being commemorated, albeit in their death throes, at the Stuart Street Playhouse/2nd Stage, where Plaid is laid out in all its tartan, if hardly tart, array. Further north, a chill wind threatens to bring out goosebumps on plump Cupid in Marry Me a Little, Craig Lucas & Norman Rene’s 1980 paean to loneliness, a work made up primarily of songs cut from Sondheim’s Company and Follies on their way to Broadway and landmark status. In 20 years, love had turned from a many-splendored into a many-splintered thing.

When creator Stuart Ross devised the plot of Forever Plaid, he must have been sampling substances used, in the era the show celebrates, primarily by beats and jazz musicians. There’s this geeky close-harmony quartet, see, who’re married to the pop music of the Square Decade and dreaming of playing clubs bigger than the "Fuselounge" at the local airport. But before that wish can come true, the four are killed in a car crash in 1964 — just as the Beatles are about to make their kind of music obsolete anyway. Years after the tragic event, the Plaids, as the Celtic-cummerbund-clad quartet are called, are inexplicably made flesh and allowed to return to earth for one last concert — even if they are a little rusty and given to robotic choreography redolent of the Four Freshmen crossed with the Tin Woodman. We are the audience for this tuneful vacation from Heaven (characterized by the Plaids’ most enthusiastic member as the "biggest comeback since Lazarus").

Ross’s revue had a very successful local incarnation in the early ’90s in the Terrace Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, where it ran for several years. Now the producing/performing duo of Miguel Cervantes and Andrew Giordano — calling themselves Standing O Productions and abetted by Robert Foley — have revived the Plaids’ revival. In the cabaret space recently inaugurated by Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, before a setting of twinkling stars and cardboard Deco, they and two other talented singers perform the ghostly concert with musical director Jonathan Goldberg on piano and Matthew Ambrose on bass. Direction — and reproduction of the finger-snapping, swimmingly swaying choreography — is by Dale Sandish, who learned the moves as a Plaid in the original Boston production.

As you might expect, the show, which has its tongue in its cheek but its larynx in the right place, is as inane as its preposterous premise. But it has its moments — including the one at the end when a tiny, silhouetted facsimile of the Plaids, who have been relegated back to the Beyond, is seen cruising across the moon in a vintage convertible. And the quartet of singers milk both nerdy comedy and harmonic elegance from the material, which includes swoony standards from "Moments To Remember" to "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" as well as a reverential tribute to Perry Como, a working-man’s medley of "Sixteen Tons" and "Chain Gang" more suitable for Johnny Cash than these high-school audio-visual-club refugees, and a high-speed re-enactment of that iconic Sunday-night family ritual, The Ed Sullivan Show.

Best known in these parts as the misunderstood protagonist of Bat Boy: The Musical, Cervantes is Sparky, the Plaids’ sparkplug, who’s given to cheerleading leaps and stricken expressions following wholehearted goofs. Broadway tenor Giordano is Jinx, whose nervous nosebleeds call for time-outs (and leave him having to negotiate dramatic lead vocals on "Cry" with cotton straggling out his nose). Lanky Logan Benedict, in heavy black Buddy Holly specs, is Smudge, an impressive bass baritone who chats up the audience about his childhood record collection before getting his lips stuck like a duck’s bill in the hole of an old 45. And Adam Souza is Frankie, which is as close as the dorky Plaids get to Sinatra smoothness. (Both Benedict and Souza, like Cervantes, are Boston Conservatory grads.)

There is much quaint musical idiocy on view, with the Plaids offering, among other things, a Caribbean medley that involves plastic bananas and maracas, as well as a full-out accordion rendition (by Giordano) of "Lady of Spain" to accompany the giddy Sullivan tour, which comes complete with Señor Wences in quadruplicate. But you can’t deny that the close-harmony thing — with every note more like a chord — produces a lovely sound and that these guys, when not trying to outdo one another at tenderhearted doofiness, have mastered it. Cervantes springs with manic energy through some of the funnier numbers, including the proudly Spanish-tinged "Perfidia" and the bebop "Crazy ’Bout Ya Baby." Both Souza and Giordano might have been sultry prom kings in an earlier era. And Benedict, for all his intentional awkwardness, occasionally leaks incipient rocker.

Whereas the Plaids got snuffed while still starry-eyed about close harmony both vocal and romantic, the older, wiser singles of Marry Me a Little have lived long enough to dine out on diminished expectations and the ravishing dissonance of Sondheim. If nothing else, the show proves that what falls off the composer’s plate is superior to what most songwriters proffer as the main course. What Lucas and Rene did was to piece together Sondheim’s leavings, primarily from the much-reworked 1970 Company and 1971 Follies, augmented by numbers from the then-unproduced Saturday Night (written in the 1950s but abandoned when its producer died), and weave them into a tale of two New Yorkers spending a weekend evening alone in identical apartments in the same building, yearning for love but getting TV dinner.

In the fantasy arc of the show (which also includes rejects from A Little Night Music, Anyone Can Whistle, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), the unnamed Man and Woman, going about their business before getting into bed with early editions of the Sunday Times, momentarily and ebulliently intersect before returning to the equivocal insularity of the title tune (cut from Company), which invites someone to "Marry me a little/Love me just enough . . . /Keep a tender distance/So we’ll both be free/That’s the way it ought to be." What GSC has done is to dust off the piece as a showcase for big-voiced Jacques Brel vets Leigh Barrett and Drew Poling, whose dreamy, no-longer-youthful lonelyhearts can at least take comfort in the plush luxury of their own sound (which is buoyed from the hall by musical director Jeffrey Goldberg on piano).

Marry Me a Little, which is through-sung, can seem like too much Sondheim; the dissonance and jangling jadedness are so intense that, when a pretty melody intrudes, as in "All Things Bright and Beautiful" (cut from Follies) or "So Many People" (from Saturday Night), your ear grabs on for dear life. And under Paul Daigneault’s direction, the singers — ostensibly alone on a Saturday night, though they share the single apartment setting — have to augment the songs with some pretty desperate domestic business, including unloading phallic groceries and singing into a sink spray hose. The worst is when Barrett’s character has to launch into a gutsy rendition of "There Won’t Be Trumpets" (cut from Anyone Can Whistle) while Brillo-ing the cooktop. But these are excellent, satisfying singers, up to the difficulty of Sondheim (though Barrett is the better actor). In their hands, the revue seems composed of one showstopper after another, with Barrett’s trenchant "The Girls of Summer" (written for a 1956 play of the same name) and Poling’s mournful "Silly People" (cut from A Little Night Music) among the highlights.

To his credit, Daigneault does not lose the shape imposed on the material by Lucas and Rene, and the section in which the Man and the Woman come briefly together — beginning with a sparking touch on "So Many People" and continuing through a rudimentary Fred & Ginger twirl through "What More Do I Need" and "A Moment with You" (both from Saturday Night, in which new love defies even the noise and grime of New York City) — is exhilarating. Which makes the landing harder. From Poling’s defiant "Happily Ever After" (a claustrophobic indictment of coupledom cut from Company) to the wistful "It Wasn’t Meant To Happen" (cut from Follies), the performers capture the self-destructive self-protection that has kept Sondheim characters sending in the clowns, and shutting out Cupid, for decades. The star-struck, love-loving Plaids, had they lived, would have been so depressed.