“The Blue Flower” takes place in the first third of the 20th century, mostly in Germany, against a backdrop of WWI, Weimar and the rise of Nazism. Three of the main characters are visual artists involved in the avant-garde.
And the score is . . . gentle country music.
Not Brecht-and-Weill- inspired cabaret or harsh modernism, not punk rock or electronica, but acoustic country, with nods to folk, honky-tonk, Broadway torch songs and tango.
Then again, the show, which opened last night at Second Stage, features a character named Max (Marc Kudisch) who speaks in Maxperanto, an imaginary language simultaneously translated on a big screen.
Clearly, creators Jim and Ruth Bauer — he focused on the music, she on the visuals — weren’t interested in an obvious, traditional show-tune formula. But whether it’s the score or Maxperanto, the novelty quickly wears thin.
And considering how ambitious “The Blue Flower” is, how much historical, artistic and personal ground it covers, the show is strangely flat and uninvolving.
Partly this has to do with the narrative structure: a flashback told in the third person, which holds the characters at arm’s length.
The man looking back is the German-born Max, seized by a heart attack in New York. He revisits his relationship with fellow artists Franz (Sebastian Arcelus) and Hannah (Meghan McGeary), and with Polish scientist Maria (Teal Wicks) — the quartet is inspired by the real-life Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Hannah Höch and Marie Curie.
Will Pomerantz’s production makes prominent use of photomontages, videos and excerpts from vintage movies. But the projections are often redundant, repeating rather than complementing the live action. Max “became famous,” we’re told, and the word “famous” flashes on the screen — a device that’s repeated way too many times.
Art fiends will have fun with the show’s many references; one number alludes to the 1918 Dada performance involving a typewriter and a sewing machine. But the mellow, overly polite hoedown it’s set to doesn’t fit a movement as anarchic, as deliberately provocative, as Dada.
Some of the most moving moments are the ones that fall back into traditional Broadway-style emoting, such as Maria’s two big ballads, forcefully delivered by Wicks, a recent Elphaba in “Wicked.”
Even so, they aren’t enough to perk up this earnest, sweetly misguided show.