Charm, yes, but a little TMI

Niffer Clarke, a natural ingenue at the age limit of that theatrical category, and Richard Carsey joke and have a lovely time during most of Beyond the Ingenue, in the Skylight Opera Theatre’s intimate studio space.

Clarke has a sweet, light soprano in the way of her idols, Shirley Jones, Barbara Cook and Julie Andrews.

Like her idols, she can throw herself into the sentiment of a song in a gripping way.She’s lovely, a petite strawberry blonde with bright blue eyes.

Carsey is a very good pianist, a much better singer than I’d realized, a genial stage presence and a sly prankster. Carsey’s ad libs cracked up his partner more than once, and that was fun. His imitation of Shirley Temple playing Laurie in Oklahoma! must be seen to be believed.

By the way, we learn that grown-up Shirley Temple was very much in the running to play Laurie on the silver screen, but Jones got the role and became the grown-up movie star.

Carsey and Clarke wove all sorts of fascinating musical theater trivia into the show. They  lost no momentum when they passed on the fun facts, mostly about Jones, Cook and Andrews. Education can be fun and good show business. Carsey also wove a great many musical jokes into his arrangements.

Maybe you have to be a musical theater geek to get the jokes, but I for one found the mashing up of Cain’t Say No (from Oklahoma!) with the giddy laughing vocalise from Glitter and Be Gay (from Bernstein’s Candide) hilarious.

The show bogs down when its digs into Clarke’s personal life. It seems she carried over the ingenue pattern into her personal life (bad idea), she’s getting divorced, she’s in therapy and yoga, she’s learning about personal freedom from her high-school-age daughter, she’s boldly entering a new chapter of her life and so on. We all have our struggles, and sometimes we can find ways to transform them into art that means something to someone who isn’t us. But more often, such revelations transform art into something that feels uncomfortably like public therapy, and that was the case with Beyond the Ingenue (seen, by the way, Wednesday evening).

I can imagine a musical play about the life/career path of an actress who buys into the ingenue role in life, grows older, finds it untenable and makes a transition. We make the journey with her, understand the character and root for her. After the journey, the redemption feels earned. But Beyond the Ingenue isn’t that show. It’s a peppy, funny little revue that takes weird turns into a real woman’s personal life.

The closing “look out world, here comes the new me” anthem, composed for this show, sounds contrived in this context. The sketchiness of it all makes it hard to sympathize. After all, as mid-life crises go, a pretty woman transitioning out of ingenue-hood sounds less daunting than, say, getting laid off from a factory job after 30 years. It’s not that Niffer Clarke doesn’t have a valid story to tell. But she needs the right key and context to make it stick. In this show, it just gets in the way of a good time.

Skylight Opera Theatre’s Beyond the Ingenue runs through Jan. 8 in the Studio Theatre of the Broadway Theatre Center. Tickets are $37.50; call the BTC box office, (414) 291-7800 or visit the Skylight’s website.