THEATER REVIEW : Great Songs, So What’s Wrong? : The Pasadena Playhouse’s ‘Sweet, Smart, Rodgers & Hart’ is a bland, unimaginative revue of the works of the renowned team.

Any program based on the rich collaboration of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart couldn’t be all bad. Or so you tell yourself. But “Sweet, Smart, Rodgers & Hart,” the new musical revue for two pianos and four voices that opened Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, accomplishes the improbable.

The first word in the title is the operative one. Sweet “Rodgers & Hart” is. As in syrupy. Smart it’s not. Sedate is more like it.

Conceived, written and directed by Steven Suskin (there is no escape), the show flattens Rodgers and Hart into easy-listening music, dredging up every cliche of revue staging--the stools, the little snippets of tap, the biographical patter--to present the material as a kind of tranquilizing brew: A chamomile tea for the ear, designed to soothe and becalm.

Becalm it does. The show’s first half is a snorer with genteel, even-handed renditions of such standards as “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Thou Swell” (no sign here of “My Heart Stood Still,” another beaut from the same 1927 version of “A Connecticut Yankee”), mixed with the rueful “Glad to Be Unhappy” (from “On Your Toes”) and the early vintage “Sing” that starts things off.

This sort of bland homogenizing is a terrible thing to do to two men whose combined creative juices produced such Broadway benchmarks as “The Boys From Syracuse,” “Babes in Arms,” “Pal Joey” and two versions of “A Connecticut Yankee,” and whose songs, from the wider range of their ventures, have survived better than the shows they came from.

It is also a terrible thing to do to the four engaging performers here--Linda Griffin, Marcia Mitzman, Karen Morrow and Bob Walton--to line them up with no more imagination than ducks in a shooting gallery and ask them to accomplish the rest just by opening their throats and singing.

There are no miracles. Aside from the dearth of directorial inventiveness in this show, Suskin’s pace is numbingly even, apparently oblivious to the need for rhythmic variety to keep the joint jumping. Melodious and fortuitous were the terms of Hart’s alliance with the younger Rodgers, not soporific.

Things pick up some in the second half largely thanks to Morrow’s lively “To Keep My Love Alive” (a humorous primer on how to kill unwanted husbands from the 1943 version of “Connecticut Yankee”) and her superb “Spring Is Here” (from “I Married an Angel,” not from “Spring Is Here,” which provides two of this revue’s other songs, “Why Can’t I?” and “With a Song in My Heart”).

Morrow--an accomplished clown as well as singer--and Mitzman seem the most at ease both with the range of material and their own stage personas. Mitzman, whose voice often rings with rich intimations of Edith Piaf, is especially passionate in “A Ship Without a Sail” (from “Heads Up!,” 1929), “Lover” and “Manhattan Melodrama” (wherein Hart actually gives voice to unheard-of negative impressions of Broadway).

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The clean-cut, pleasant-voiced Walton, who looks as if he might be Donald O’Connor’s third cousin once-removed, performs a lilting tap routine while singing “Do It the Hard Way” (Onna White did what little musical staging there is). He’s very much the boy-next-door and it shows in his interpretations of “Jumbo’s” “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” and the bashful ballad “Tell Me How to Love.”

“Ten Cents a Dance” (“Simple Simon,” 1930) gives us Griffin at her poignant best, but she is a less vocally confident performer than the others, often struggling in the higher latitudes.

David Snyder and Kevin Cole seem to be having the most fun at their twin onstage pianos, recessed in the alcove provided by John Iacovelli’s simple set and unintrusive rear projections.

But polished though it is, craftsmanship cannot replace what’s missing at the top, namely a smart directorial approach to an old idea.

As a result, “Sweet, Smart, Rodgers & Hart” is tired old formula theater aimed at unsuspecting WASPs (as in White Affluent Senior Persons) whose own nostalgic reminiscence of the period makes them more likely to overlook the show’s shortcomings. Which, of course, changes nothing. To overlook is only to settle for being lulled instead of entertained.

* “Sweet, Smart, Rodgers & Hart,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 19. $31.50; (818) 356-PLAY. Running time: 2 hours.

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Linda Griffin, Marcia Mitzman, Karen Morrow, Bob Walton, Ensemble.

Conceived, written and directed by Steven Suskin. Producers Theatre Corp. of America and Nick Seuss. Music Richard Rodgers. Lyrics Lorenz Hart. Sets John Iacovelli. Lights Paulie Jenkins. Costumes Garland Riddle. Additional costumes Scott A. Lane. Sound Francois Bergeron. Musical director/arranger Kevin Cole. Pianists Kevin Cole, David Snyder. Choreographer Onna White. Production stage manager Theresa Bentz. Stage manager Christopher Burkhardt.