“When the Lights Go On Again” may call itself “a new 1940s musical,” but this flimsy potpourri of World War II songs enjoying an extended run of Friday and Saturday performances at the Triad Theater trots out every cliché of so-called wartime nostalgia. Its four cheery singers — Bill Daugherty, Eli Schneider, Christina Morrell and Connie Pachl — play the Moonlighters, a vaguely Modernaires-like vocal group, whose live broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York is interrupted by an announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Attached to the show’s 28 songs is a wisp of a story in which one member marches off to war, putting on hold his secret romance with another member. Eventually the group reunites when the three who’ve stayed home go on a U.S.O. tour.
The show’s only points of interest are its vintage pop obscurities. Classic ballads of separation like “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “I’ll Walk Alone” are omitted in favor of perky period pieces like Redd Evans’s “He’s 1-A in the Army and He’s A-1 in My Heart” (a 1941 hit for Harry James) and Irving Berlin’s patriotic fund-raiser, “Any Bonds Today?”
If the wittiest numbers — like Frank Loesser and Arthur Schwartz’s “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” a woman’s lament about the dearth of eligible men on the home front — transcend the era, you still long for a perspective more intelligent than the perky, jingoistic attitude of a Betty Grable movie. A methodical, scholarly approach to the material might have helped. So would more distinctive voices. But these four-part harmonies, while never gratingly out of tune, fail to find a smooth blend. And the direction by Mr. Daugherty, who conceived the revue, is crude enough to suggest a Mickey-and-Judy show on its rickety first legs.
At this uncertain moment in our history, the concept of wartime nostalgia, which the show mindlessly exploits, seems a ridiculous and possibly dangerous oxymoron.
