STAGE REVIEW : Gritty Sets Add Punch to ‘Golden Boy’

Theater, unlike movies, is not the natural turf of sports heroes. The stage is a different kind of playing field. In theater, athletic glory and agony are typically dramatized in gyms and locker rooms, one zone removed from speeding, crunching bodies or the swat (as in “Damn Yankees�) of the bat.

Take “Golden Boy,� Clifford Odets’ morality play about pugilism and the American Dream in which a 21-year-old “kid� eschews the violin for the boxing ring.

As produced by the Sierra Madre Playhouse, the drama’s best scenes happen in sweaty dressing rooms and gymnasiums, where Depression-era fighter posters dot the gray walls and you can hear the roar of the crowd in the adjacent arena. (The visceral imagery from the throbbing, city noises is from sound designer Barry Schwam).

It is in his training and rubdown quarters, flicking his fists and dancing about in his red silk robe, that the sinewy, flavorful star of the play, the brash Louie Liberti as the entitled Joe Bonaparte, demonstrates flashes of the boxer we never see in the ring. It is this dungeon-like inner sanctum, where molls and gangsters quarrel with other lowlifes of the profession, that gives director Jerry Morrison’s production its muscle.

This grimy sense of place overshadows the production’s other, more conventional scenes--a park bench with a much too obvious, and distracting, archangel looming over it; a dingy fight manager’s office, and the living room of the young boxer’s squabbling Italian-American family (featuring Rocky Beach as the youth’s sensitive, old-country father).

David Calhoun’s set design has an artful murkiness, but its effect is undermined by a lighting scheme that insufficiently darkens portions of the set not in use. That hulking angel, for instance, visually and constantly gets in the way of everything else.

Even in its day, “Golden Boy,� with its pseudo-tragic ending, was essentially an elevated melodrama. But it is especially dated now, although its thematic fiber and its history remain vivid.

When the legendary Group Theatre premiered “Golden Boy� in New York in 1937, it joined “Of Mice and Men� and “Our Town� as long-running hits and heralded Odets’ return to Broadway from literary Purgatory in Hollywood in a star-filled production that included John Garfield, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, Morris Carnovsky and Lee J. Cobb.

Two years later, the movie version marked the potent debut of William Holden in the title role. Ultimately, in the ‘60s, the material was transformed into a musical starring Sammy Davis Jr.

Watching it loyally revived today is a time-warping experience, mixing contemporary relevance with quaint period texture.

Its subject--the conflict between inner and outer desires--is immense and very much in the American grain. Bonaparte gives up what, and who, he naturally is (in this case, a promising classical musician) to pursue false dreams and a fantasy (again in this scenario, the short, fast life of materialism and fame).

In short, fighter Joe Bonaparte is a spiritual son to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and many another phantom-chasing wretch.

At the top of the show’s supporting players is Lee Wessof as the affable/vulnerable, loud fight manager.

Other solid turns are rendered by the silken Anthony Duke as a fancy-dressed mobster and the even fancier-dressed Fran McCreary), whose hard glitter perfectly catches the obligatory tough dame Lorna Moon.

On the down side, McCreary’s love scenes with the younger Liberti are unconvincing. More hard to take, and primarily the fault of the director, is Abba Elfman’s offensively strident hanger-on and the early, equally off-putting vocal tone of Jeffrey McKeown as a temperamental brother-in-law.

The production’s wardrobe, from heavily cuffed trousers to fedoras to the gorgeous gowns, were splendidly designed by Shon LeBlanc.

“Golden Boy,� Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre, today through Saturday, 8 p.m ., Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 28. $7-$8. (818) 355-1478. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.