Chip Zien and Joanna Glushak Photo by Jeremy Daniel Photography

The authors, Jeffrey Scharf (book and lyrics) and Jimmy Calire (music), are very neat; I don't think there's a false rhyme in the whole thing. Where they come up short is in supplying excitement and surprise. Maybe their sources, James M. Barrie's The Twelve-Pound Look and the Quintero Brothers' A Sunny Morning, are to blame: Both are about unexpected reencounters of long-ago lovers, and both proceed pretty much as you'd expect.

I won't spoil the Barrie by revealing what a "twelve-pound look" is. We're in the sumptuous drawing room, rendered not that sumptuously by scenic designer Edward Pierce, of Sir Harry Sims (Bryan Fenkart). He's about to be knighted, to the delight of his dutiful staff and equally dutiful second wife, Lady Emmy (Courtney Reed). Congratulatory notes are pouring in, and to respond to them, he has hired a typist. In what might be a twelve-million-to-one coincidence, that typist turns out to be Kate (Chilina Kennedy), his first wife, who ran off fourteen years ago, leaving Harry outraged and perplexed–why would she want to abandon a catch like him?

Harry is greedy, stolid, conventional, and an egomaniac, not a recipe for a fascinating leading man. A few character quirks might make him more compelling, but Fenkart doesn't supply them. Kate is more interesting, an independent-thinking woman in a time and place that had little use for such, and Kennedy makes a meal of her: She really listens to Harry's drivel, really reacts, and sings excellently. And Reed does what she can with Emmy, an obedient wifey who's not altogether comfortable in that role; watch her when Harry calls her, in what he intends as a compliment, an "ornament" to his existence. She slowly awakens to the possibilities beyond serving tea and impressing her friends with her gowns and jewels, and she ably lands the last line, which reverberates satisfyingly.

It's all rather predictable, though, and so are Scharf's perfect rhymes: "The day that we're in service to a knight, we'll survey the world in brighter," any guesses? Calire's music is nicely scored for strings, piano, and percussion (and, at a couple of odd points, accordion) by Sonny Paladino, but I'm afraid it comes off as so much Edwardian wallpaper–Elgar-esque, and it's not helped by the actual Elgar that precedes it over the sound system (sound design, and it's good, by Megumi Katayama).

The melodies are livelier, and so's the storytelling, in A Sunny Morning. I'd never heard of the Quinteros, but they were a big deal in Spain, authoring some 200 popular plays, skits, and operas, and both landing in prison at the start of the Civil War. A Sunny Morning, which opens with the chorus singing about what a sunny morning it is in this Madrid park, is a mellow picaresque wherein Dona Laura (Joanna Glushak) and Don Gonzalo (Chip Zien), both financially comfortable and probably in their 70s, make daily sojourns to that park. Forced to share a park bench–a pair of monks are occupying the cantankerous Don Gonzalo's usual spot–they spar and insult one another until they slowly discover, in another twelve-million-to-one coincidence, that they were thwarted lovers many decades back.

Reluctant, for contrived reasons, to reveal their identities to one another, each invents a story, both pretending to have been the best friend of their old selves. The pair keep up this ruse longer than they have to, because we're trying to stretch the evening out to an hour forty-five, and Scharf and Calire hope to keep us in a suspense that never arrives. They further stretch it out by having the chorus sing about what you're about to see at the start of both acts, and what you've just seen at the finale.

But Zien and Glushak are good company, and Don Gonzalo and Dona Laura have more personality than Harry, Emmy, and Kate. She, watching him attack a book with glasses and a magnifying glass: "Why don't you use a telescope?" Zien, with less to play here than he had a couple of seasons back in Harmony, in which he was absolutely superb, resorts to a bit of shtick, wringing laughs out of sneezes, that sort of thing. But he does it expertly, and his voice is as sturdy as it ever was. Glushak is poised and whimsical, perfectly embodying Dona Laura. They're well supported by Daniel Torres and Reed as their servants, and Fenkart and Kennedy as a randy pair of young lovers who stir up Gonzalo's and Laura's memories. Calire stays in a suitably Spanish mood, though I'm not entirely sure his cha-cha and tango rhythms are native to 1910 Madrid.

Director-choreographer Gabriel Barre, whose recent staging of This Is Not a Drill was so frenetic, is calmer here, and a stage that surprisingly revolves helps him vary the perspectives without calling undue attention to itself. Jan Caprio's costumes are quite lovely, and J. Jared Janas's wigs tell us a lot about the characters underneath them.

The audience, definitely skewing toward the upper decades, seemed to enjoy Reunions, though it did not grant the talented cast a standing O; it's not that kind of show. Structurally, it strongly resembles Romance Romance, a 1987 pair of one-act musical love stories that graduated from Off-Broadway to Broadway and ran out the season. It's just not as flavorful. Pleasant? Totally. Charming? Frequently. But static? Unfortunately, that too.