THEATER REVIEW : Despite the Eyewash, ‘Marlene’ Has Its Moments : Salome Jens has all the moves, the legs and the voice of Dietrich, but the gaze just isn’t there. What’s also needed is a script that does more than just stare at its subject.

GARDEN GROVE —  Salome Jens as Marlene Dietrich?

She has the husky voice, the long legs. She knows how to stand--regally, and how to straddle a chair--provocatively.

When she sings, she steers her arms and fingers through the air with crisp precision, just like Dietrich. She carefully caps many of the songs with a sharply turned left profile.

What Jens lacks--in “An Evening With Marlene: Falling in Love Again,” at Grove Shakespeare’s Gem Theatre--is the Dietrich gaze. And a script that does more than just gaze at its subject.

Writer Sebastian Milito has Dietrich recall a derisive comment about how she “veils her eyes.” In fact, that analysis--if not the attitude behind it--was close to the truth. That veiled look in Dietrich’s eyes was an essential part of her mystery--and her allure.

Jens, on the other hand, has gloriously expressive eyes that hold very little back. Mystery is not her forte.

Does it matter? Jens twice utters a maxim about the importance of the truth, as opposed to the mere facts. She’s not attempting a physical impersonation. She’s going for psychological verity.

In this she often succeeds. Although she may not be Dietrich, we sense that she understands her deeply. A show like this is supposed to shed some of the mystery about its subject, so maybe the absence of mystery in her eyes isn’t all that important.

The script, however, doesn’t help much in that process of illumination. It’s drawn almost exclusively from Dietrich’s autobiography, and it’s necessarily condensed to fit into the time frame of an evening at the theater. That means that these are just the highlights of Dietrich’s carefully tailored and self-censored thoughts.

This problem is hardly new. It plagues many a biographical monodrama. At least Milito has eliminated one of the other common problems of the genre: the occasion for Dietrich’s chat with the audience doesn’t seem completely fake.

She’s depicted on a New York stage, rehearsing for the opening of her one-woman concert. Because her stage appearances did include a lot of pro forma autobiographical comments, it’s not unlikely that she would practice those parts of the show, as well as the songs themselves. Furthermore, she has an onstage listener in pianist Armin Hoffman.

He not only accompanies her on the songs. He also serves as a silent, sympathetic ear--and as her stand-in when she’s assessing her own lighting. As we see her calculating the lighting (which was in fact designed by Michael Gilliam) so obsessively, we understand how well she had mastered her own presentation. But this show doesn’t take us far beyond that carefully crafted image.

We learn about the little German girl who got into trouble for presenting flowers to a French prisoner of war while World War I raged--and how this girl grew up to become a tireless trouper in the anti-Nazi war. She was also a doting mother, secretly devoted to cooking and cleaning despite her glamorous image. No, she never cared about being a big star; Milito never corners her into considering whether that’s the whole truth.

Her talk of her love life goes a bit deeper. She admits that she was unable to connect permanently with a man, despite her long marriage and her extracurricular love for actor Jean Gabin. Referring to herself and men as “ships passing in the night,” she acknowledges that she’s sorry she “didn’t drop anchors in more ports.” Specifically, she says she “could not love” her mentor Josef von Sternberg.

That’s about as far as it goes. If we choose, we could attribute her inability to drop anchor to the self-sufficient “world of women” that Dietrich grew up in. But that thought doesn’t appear to cross Dietrich’s mind.

In other words, these fleeting glimpses of a fascinating life don’t develop along any particular course. We proceed from one mood to the next, more or less at random. We don’t get the feeling that Dietrich is learning something as she goes; she’s simply repeating familiar emotions and thoughts for the benefit of her act.

There are some musical highlights. Jens makes “The Laziest Girl in Town” as droll as the day it was born. Jules Aaron’s adroit staging of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” evolves from a first-time run-through--with Jens standing behind pianist Hoffman, looking at the sheet music--into a gripping center-stage tableau.

Jens wears three Emelle Holmes outfits equally well: a taupe pantsuit that emphasizes those long legs, an elegant rose robe and a formal white gown.

‘An Evening With Marlene: Falling in Love Again’

Salome Jens as Marlene Dietrich. With pianist Armin Hoffman.

A Grove Shakespeare Festival production. Written by Sebastian Milito, based on Dietrich’s autobiography “Marlene.” Directed by Jules Aaron. Music arranged by Hoffman. Set by John Iacovelli. Lighting by Michael Gilliam. Costumes by Emelle Holmes. Hair by Carol Meikle. Stage manager Nevin Hedley.