STAGE REVIEW : THIS ‘BLUEBEARD’ MISSES THE POINT

“Don’t quibble, Sybil!” is one of the late and much-lamented Charles Ludlam’s funniest stolen lines. It is delivered in the course of his outlandish “Bluebeard”--early Ludlam that’s something of a cross between “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Young Frankenstein.”

That, at least is what it was meant to be. With Ludlam’s wickedly jerry-rigged pieces, most of them written for himself to star in at his Ridiculous Theatre in New York, a flair for the ridiculous was a given. The same is required of anyone who tries to stage these witty, bastardized versions of penny-dreadfuls (with a few added fillips and outright grotesqueries to spice things up). So who forgot to tell director Gary Glassman?

His staging of “Bluebeard” at the Wallenboyd is lukewarm Ludlam. It has neither a visceral understanding of Ludlam’s outrageousness, nor actors with the daring and versatility to carry it out. The production tiptoes where it should waltz, missing the flavor, the energy, the brashness and the point.

“Bluebeard” is the gothic tale of a crazy scientist (Pablo Vela) who lives on an island performing sex-change operations in his “House of Pain” on anyone luckless enough to cross his path.

He’s not just switching people from one sex to another, but grandly trying to create a third sex (as if two weren’t trouble enough).

All he’s managed by the time the play begins is to botch the job on a few unfortunates who became his prey and are now his prisoners.

Into this sinister context float Bluebeard’s attractive niece Sybil (Daria Martel), her old-maidish tutor Miss Cubbidge (May Quigley) and her handsome fiance Rodney Parker (Mark Chubb). More fuel for mad experiments and apocalyptic sex. Need we go on?

It’s not just Glassman’s sane and rational treatment of such nefarious and absurd derring-do that’s dismaying. He compounds it by using actors who have no clear sense of what’s called for. Ludlam’s theater is a fearless collision of styles (begged, borrowed, stolen, invented). It clamors for an equally iconoclastic approach. How could one play his “Camille” or his “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (“It sphinx!”) less than ruthlessly?

Yet the placid Vela portrays Bluebeard as if he were nearly normal, which contrasts bizarrely with his actions. And when he speaks Ludlam’s famous “When I’m bad, I’m very, very bad and when I’m good . . . I’m not bad,” it’s resoundingly juiceless. Ludlam is not someone you meet halfway.

Bluebeard and Miss Cubbidge have a sexual encounter that was redolent with excess when it was performed by Ludlam and Black-Eyed Susan at the Ridiculous.

Vela and Quigley never get beyond a few tittering passes in very staid underwear. As for Martel and especially Chubb, in a pair of “nice” roles, they haven’t a clue how to grasp the essence of their less colorful characters.

The star attractions at the Wallenboyd are the victim/servants: Barbara Barron as the quasi-lobotomized Mrs. Maggot and Ken Danziger as the sheepish Sheemish.

Another victim, statuesque Linda J. Albertano as the Leopard Lady, hisses and fumes in and out of rooms (and sometimes character), interrupting herself twice to sing a pair of songs. It is one of this production’s deeper mysteries.

Another is the design of the third-sex genitals by Jonathan Borofsky. It gets a separate credit but seems . . . inauspicious.

The set by Stephen Glassman and Ajax Daniels is quite elegant, which may not be entirely right for the raunchiness of the play. What this “Bluebeard” mostly reaffirms is the enormity of the loss we experienced when we lost Ludlam.

Performances at 301 Boyd St. run Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., until Sept. 5. Tickets: $9.50; (213) 629-2205).