THEATER REVIEWS : Good Intentions Go Wrong in Retro ‘Rules for Girls’

“Rules for Girls,” which just reopened at the Odyssey after four weeks at the Promenade Actor’s Studio, is the kind of musical that can give you chills. Not because it’s a plum--actually, it’s anything but--but because in both craft and message it’s a textbook case of naive good intentions gone dangerously wrong.

Heroine India Keller (capable Kathleen Walsh, the only decent voice in the cast) evolves from teen dweeb, through college self-loathing, to become the kept girlfriend of a yuppie schmuck. Act 1 (which stretches two minutes of ideas into an hour) covers junior high and high school, and Act 2 is college and beyond.

Along the way, she has to make devastatingly tough choices, like whether she should starve herself to get more attention from guys. Additionally, she does things like come home from college only to throw herself at the class womanizer who ignored her when she was fat. She also quits her job because her boyfriend tells her she’ll never get anywhere. (Yup, that’s the Spur Posse you hear cheering in the back row.)

The point (and its premises are never examined) appears to be that there’s no hope but to make the best of a woman’s severely limited options.

Ignore for the moment that the tone is whiny, the music singsong, the book and lyrics unrelentingly cliched, the singing reedy and the staging (by Amy Cabranes) uninventive. There are greater reasons to loathe this work.

“Rules for Girls” would be just another sophomoric no-brainer of a musical if the faux feminism driving the plot weren’t so offensively retro. But it gets sucked into the very system it attempts to indict, seeing voids where there are options and inadvertently repeating mistakes women’s lib was making 20 years ago, such as reducing both men and women to parasitic gender roles.

The backsliding is particularly ironic, given that “Rules for Girls” is brought to you by WOW (Westside Original Works), a group comprised mostly of women in their early and mid-20s.

* “Rules for Girls,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Thursdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends Aug . 29. $15. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘Wreckage’ Full of Boundless Energy

Bill Cusack and Greg “Spoonie” Sporleder are talented and boundlessly energetic performers. But “Spontaneous Wreckage,” their commedia dell’arte- ish outing at the Tamarind, is a grating exercise that wears thin pretty quickly.

With no set, just snippets of dialogue and a live band, Cusack and Sporleder (a.k.a. Edgar and Edgar) play two construction worker dudes having a day from hell. Horrible, maiming, wacked-out things just sort of keep happening to them--like when Edgar (Cusack) imagines having an Edgar Jr. who dies a violent death or when he gets his head rammed through the car windshield. Huh huh huh huh huh--as Beavis and Butt-head would say.

What keeps you watching this adrenaline romp, directed by Steve Pink, is the total physical commitment the performers bring to their roles. Now, imagine what they could do in real play.

* “Spontaneous Wreckage,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept . 11. $10. (818) 759-1786. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Swedish ‘Baby Jane’ Needs Translation

Sometimes watching theater in a language you don’t know makes sense--particularly if it’s a familiar classic or a production where the visuals matter much more than the words. But with a text-based adaptation like the Darling Desperados’ “Baby Jane” at LATC’s Theatre 4, it can lose a lot in the non-translation.

If you don’t speak Swedish, you’re not going to understand much of what’s said in this version of the Henry Farrell work about the weird Hudson sisters, holed up in their Beverly Hills mansion. This outing may mark the company’s U.S. debut, but it probably only hints at the talent that lurks behind the linguistic wall.

Twisted sister Blanche (Ulrika Malmgren) dwells upstairs, careening her wheelchair around a raised platform on which the only furniture is a hot-pink Christmas tree. Baby sister Jane (Katta Palsson), the child star gone raunchy, torments her sister, only growing worse when Edwin Flag (Per Sandberg) comes to call.

You miss the poetics of this dance of death, but what does come through loud and clear--too loud, actually--is a blaring rock soundtrack. There’s also a striking avant-garde design scheme and a hyped theatricality not unlike that of New York’s the Wooster Group.

* “Baby Jane,” Los Angeles Theatre Center Theatre 4, 514 S. Spring St., downtown, Friday, 8 and 10 p.m.; Saturday 3 and 8 p.m. Ends Aug . 21. $8-$10. (310) 394-9779, Ext. 1. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

A Few Strong Actors in ‘Charley’s Aunt’

“Charley’s Aunt,” a 100-year-old warhorse comedy about a couple of cheeky Oxford chaps wooing their sweethearts amid a round of mistaken identities, is the kind of piffling farce that theaters fall back on. It has lots of roles for both younger and older actors, and anyone can get a few yucks just by playing the countless entrances and exits at warp speed.

But that makes for a lot of uninspired, if passable, stagings of this play. And despite the efforts of a few strong cast members, such is once again the case with director Dan Kern’s outing at the West Coast Ensemble.

Cleve Asbury is a low-key Jack Chesney, while his sidekick Charley Wykeham is underplayed by the too meek and mousy Tim Barber. They lack the presence and energy necessary to transform this play into something more than a formulaic garden party roundabout.

Peter Lavin nearly rises to the challenge of his tougher role as Lord Fancourt Babberley, but it’s the senior members of the ensemble who really shine. Although Col. Sir Francis Chesney (the charming Edmund L. Shaff) and Steven Spettigue (Ben D’Aubery) have only one solid scene together, it’s the only fully engaging moment in the production.

* “Charley’s Aunt,” West Coast Ensemble, 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Oct. 3 . (213) 871-1052. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

‘Family Values’ Bill Is Hit-and-Miss

Playwright Mark Kemble is more adept than most at directing his own works. Yet he’s not so swift when it comes to making the call on which of his plays should be staged, as evidenced by the one acts in his “Family Values” at the Zephyr.

Kemble’s sardonic “Arthur Grant Revisited” has potential, but the pedestrian “In a Family Way” doesn’t. One out of two is not bad, but it’s not great either.

“Arthur Grant Revisited” is a darkly quirky ‘70s trip into one family’s neuroses--and the suspect role of their erstwhile postman in same--that’s both economical and clever. Just when you think it’s about to bog down in dysfunctional drivel, it rebounds into parody.

“In a Family Way,” however, is just a playlet with a tired “Indecent Proposal” gimmick. A Mafioso-type guy (the overly mannered Max Pearl) and his sexpot wife (the pat Denise Gentile) can’t get pregnant, so they invite a broke yuppie couple (Neal Matarazzo, Shannon Terhune) to dinner. The Mafioso guy offers to pay the yup $1 million to bop his wife, the female yup says OK, and both pairs trot off to do the deed.

* “Family Values,” Zephyr Theatre, 7458 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug . 25. (213) 660-8487. Running time: 2 hours.