E-Mail This Article to a Friend Regards to Broadway Pal Joey, Camelot, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, On the Twentieth Century BY CAROLYN CLAY

Remarkably, no one has sent in the clowns. Among the slew of musicals recently revived on local stages, not one is by the ubiquitous Stephen Sondheim. But wending their way from 1940’s Pal Joey (at Stoneham Theatre through October 2) to 1985’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (at Trinity Repertory Company through October 9), these shows do bespeak a change in direction — from beautiful music oiling stiff librettos to shows held aloft more by gimmicks than by soaring scores.

The most famous remnant of the collaboration of Rodgers and Hart, Pal Joey, with its 1930s tale of a nightclub cad, was shocking in its time. Today, it’s primarily notable for Richard Rodgers’s lush tunes, including "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," and Lorenz Hart’s sly rhymes and clever lyrics. Weylin Symes and Caitlin Lowans’s zippy Stoneham production can’t solve the central problem of John O’Hara’s book, based on stories he had written for the New Yorker: that the central character, hustling song-and-dance man Joey Evans, is sort of a vacuum in which rattle unconvincing lies, opportunism, and a con man’s charm for the ladies. But it’s worth the price of admission to delight in Leigh Barrett, who, as daring married doyenne of Chicago society Vera Simpson, succumbs to Joey for a time and gets to wrap her golden tonsils around "What Is a Man?" and the Threepenny Opera–ish "In Our Little Den," as well as to exhibit a luscious if rueful bewitchment, bother, and bewilderment.

The Stoneham production is scaled down, with a cast of 13 filling the dancin’ shoes of an original ensemble of more than 40. And the period costumes, especially for the nightclub dancer/singers, are makeshift, ranging from majorette wear to variously hued, leg-revealing hoop skirts for the novelty number "The Flower Garden of My Heart." An onstage combo, led by musical director/keyboardist Jose Delgado, handles the accompaniment with aplomb. And the dancing (including some tap) — by Brad Bass as a more babyish than churlish Joey, Ceit McCaleb as brassy/surly hoofer Gladys Bumps, and a winsome back-up quartet — is nimble. Robyn Elizabeth Lee is sensible yet starry-eyed as the nice girl with a penchant for puppies who is scorned by our antihero — though not before the love-at-first-song duet "I Could Write a Book." Scott Marshall marshals the quirky criminality of fast-talking "agent" Ludlow Lowell. And Kerry Dowling brings her sweet voice and bounce to the Elaine Stritch signature song "Zip" — which fields period references from Gypsy Rose Lee to Walter Lippman and which here comes with a program glossary.

The 45-year-old Camelot (presented by North Shore Music Theatre at the Shubert Theatre through October 8) also runs on its score. As drama, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s tale of Arthurian adultery is, despite its claim to "one brief shining moment," as endless as it is pompous. It does, however, contain Guinevere’s sprightly paean to flirtatious youth, "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood," Arthur’s My Fair Lady–like "How to Handle a Woman," and Lancelot’s besotted declaration of multiseasonal fidelity, "If Ever I Would Leave You," among other beloved ditties. And the fine NSMT singers deliver — Nili Bassman’s Guinevere while looking long-red-tressed and lovely; Joseph Dellger’s grizzled Arthur modestly yet authoritatively; and Maxime Alvarez de Toledo’s Lancelot with appropriate priggishness and French accent.

The NSMT production was moved to the Shubert due to a fire at the Beverly facility, and Gabriel Barre’s staging betrays its arena origins by unfolding on a wooden round afloat on the Shubert stage. But it’s atmospherically lit and doesn’t make too much of its anthropomorphic borrowings from The Lion King or its ill-advised depiction of Morgan Le Fey as a Bread-and-Puppet Miss Piggy. Moreover, there’s a framing device that allows the musical’s theme of legend and its transmission to trump its soulful tale of the noble hanky-panky that brought down the Round Table.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is of the contrivance-over-composition ilk. There is practically no memorable music in Rupert Holmes’s Tony-winning combination of Sherlock Holmes and Shear Madness, a gloss on the mystery novel left unfinished by Charles Dickens. Played out in a Victorian music hall, with 21st-century actors playing 19th-century actors playing Dickens’s characters, the show is a layer cake without any musical icing, a confection surrounding a conceit by which the audience determines the ending, with all the players clamoring to be elected "murderer" so they can sing another song.

Dickens’s novel, which is set in the moldering cathedral city of Cloisterham, is melodramatic but also a little psychosexually sinister, with its lecherous choir director, John Jasper, who, when he isn’t salivating over music pupil Rosa Bud, fantasizes about her in the opium den of Princess Puffer; its tepid union of Rosa and the title character; its seductive pair of Ceylonese orphans; and its fishy doings in and around the crypt of the mayor’s recently deceased wife. But the musical is more like a Dickens parody, with one eye on the author’s coitus interruptus of a plot, the other on the hammy shenanigans of its Victorian Noises Off troupe.

The inventive Amanda Dehnert directs the production, an attempted triumph of enthusiasm over material in which the talented and high-energy Trinity players, led by Brian McEleney’s giddy music-hall "Chairman," relish their dewiness (Rosa), villainy (Jasper), or general suspiciousness (everyone else) while spiritedly vamping their co-conspirator, the audience. (Eugene Lee’s new design for the upstairs playing space makes it all the easier for the proceedings to spill into the crowd.)

Deliberately winking and melodramatic, the two-hour-and-50-minute show is a bit belabored, with the music mostly rhythmic canoodling, occasionally upgraded to G&S patter, all made blaring by the anachronism of headset mikes. There are two worthy numbers: the art song "Moonfall," nicely rendered by Jessie Austrian’s Rosa, and Princess Puffer’s account of her fall into drugs and disrepute, to which Anne Scurria brings showmanship and a growling musicality.

Both Pal Joey and Drood get by with four-person combos, but what a difference a 21-person onstage orchestra makes! The treat of the week was Overture Productions’ concert revival of the sly 1978 Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century (at the Cutler Majestic Theatre last weekend), with operetta-ish score by Cy Coleman and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. This third Overtures production was its best, a delicious melding of accomplished singing and over-the-top stylization featuring Tony nominee Alice Ripley as film diva Lily Garland and Broadway vet George Dvorsky as Oscar Jaffe, the flamboyant if failed Broadway producer and Garland’s onetime Svengali, who’s trying to salvage his career by wooing her into a Broadway play while the luxury locomotive of the title wends its way from Chicago to the Big Apple.

Tony McLean directed the semi-staging, snaking the large chorus on and off like a train chugging in and out of the station, and bringing on a quartet of youthful Boston tap dancers to provide metallic train noise as well as a showstopping display of prowess. Local performer Cheryl McMahon almost stole the show from the no-slouch stars, playing the Imogene Coca role of religious nut Letitia Peabody Primrose. She couldn’t keep her hands off the derrière of conductor Michael Joseph even as she urged the audience to "Repent." Thank you, producer Deb Poppel, for bankrolling this exhilarating exhibition of the power of live theater, however light. Ironically, when On the Twentieth Century first whistle-stopped through Boston on its way to Broadway, the elaborate train slowed it down. Here, you didn’t miss the title character one bit.