‘Sophisticated Ladies’ Is More About Mary

Sophistication has always been a quality associated with Duke Ellington.

It begins right there in his nickname. Born Edward Kennedy Ellington, he was called Duke by a boyhood friend who admired his regal air. He fully grew into the name by writing music that combined ragtime piano, call-and-response technique, classical symphonic devices and other forms into a lush, propulsive sound.

In 1981, much of the best-known of this music was played on Broadway in a music and tap-dance extravaganza called “Sophisticated Ladies.” Though the show proved to be curiously uninvolving there and in Los Angeles in 1982, it was, at least, a classy, flashy affair.

The same cannot be said of a production that has begun a national tour with a stop through tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. What was once an ensemble show has been so resolutely focused on original Supremes member Mary Wilson that Ellington fades into the background.

Originally announced as a lavish production, staged by Ellington’s talented granddaughter, Mercedes, the show arrives instead with a cast of just 14 singers and dancers, directed and choreographed by Roger Spivy. The under-rehearsed show was plagued Monday night by bad miking, botched lighting and overall bad timing.

On a more fundamental level, Wilson wasn’t always suited to the music. Her dusky, sometimes gritty voice is quite capable of generating electricity, but her musical temperament is another matter.

She connects most instinctively with the up-tempo numbers, as when she breaks into scat in “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” or when she infuses a playful sexiness into the Billy Strayhorn classic “Take the ‘A’ Train,” complete with breathy “ooh-ooh” train sounds. She struggles through most of the torch songs, however, showing effort where there should be none in the cascading sighs of such tunes as “Solitude” and “Something to Live For.”

The other female vocalists outshine Wilson, which even the Wilson-loving Monday night audience betrayed in its more spontaneous response to them. In tempos ranging from the sassy “Hit Me With a Hot Note and Watch Me Bounce” to the sultry “Mood Indigo,” Luci Lucil displays one of those rich, honeyed voices that comes from somewhere so deep inside that it seems to be rising from all the way down in her toes. And Jen Mize lends a big, ‘40s band-singer style to “Caravan.”

The production contains far less tap than the original, which was presided over by Gregory Hines and Hinton Battle. Still, the group dance numbers are its most polished aspect, especially a jungle-themed Cotton Club-style number that puts the women dancers (Mize, Lisa Beasley, Crystal Eden and Rachael Sellars-Montoya) in bikinis sprouting palm fronds and sends them undulating through “The Mooche.”

The instrumentals are handled by a horn-heavy 14-member ensemble that, as of Monday, wasn’t playing cohesively under trumpeter-bandleader Barrie Lee Hall Jr. What’s more, the sound levels had them drowning out the vocalists, who too often found themselves singing in the dark or into either overactive or dead mikes.

With so many problems, sophistication is the least of this show’s attributes.

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“Sophisticated Ladies,” Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. Tonight at 8. $50-$40. (800) 300-4345. Also March 10 at Poway Center for the Performing Arts; (858) 748-0505. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.