NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY
Book, music, and lyrics by Douglas J. Cohen. Based on the novel by William Goldman. Directed by Spiro Veloudos. Musical direction by Jonathan Goldberg. Choreographed by Mary Mazzulli. Set design by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Russell Swift. Sound by Marc Plevinsky. With Robin V. Allison, Derek Stearns, J.H. Williston, and Maryann Zschau. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Wednesday through Sunday, through March 10.

“Boy meets girl, boy meets killer, boy abandons mother” is how Jewish mom Flora Brummel sums up the plot of No Way To Treat a Lady, and she’s not far off. Douglas J. Cohen’s musical, a winner of the Richard Rodgers Award, is about a Jewish detective who’s investigating a serial strangler. In the course of said duty, he meets his dream girl, a rich, arty shiksa who lives in the same Manhattan apartment building as the first victim and is sick of her empty, upscale life. And, oh yes, the middle-aged dick finally summons the courage to stand up to his controlling mother, Flora (who rat-a-tats his name, Morris, into just about every lyric). The show is eerily reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim, not just in its anxious score and Company-like 1970 Manhattan setting but in its focus, à la Sweeney Todd, on a mass murderer. Of course, the Lyric Stage Company of Boston likes that stuff, having previously produced Sondheim’s Assassins, a little warble-a-thon that brings together folks who have taken a shot at the president.

No Way To Treat a Lady began life as a novel by William Goldman and went on to become a 1968 film that starred George Segal as detective Morris Brummel, Lee Remick as his budding girlfriend, and Rod Steiger as the killer who won’t quit until he gets front-page coverage in the New York Times. Cohen’s rather accomplished musical, more ironic than chilling, is a minimalist affair featuring a quartet of four actors. Detective, girlfriend, and killer form a sort of love triangle, and the fourth member of the cast plays a number of roles: Morris’s mother; the murderer’s abandoning mom, a famous actress; and the victims — all older ladies. You see, what detective and killer have in common, apart from a yen to see their names in the Times, are mothers they’d like to strangle. Unfortunately, failed actor “Kit” Gill has died before getting a chance (to great folderol in the paper of record), and Flora, well, she means well.

At the Lyric Stage, in Spiro Veloudos’s broad-brush production, what impresses are the sophisticated, if big-numberless, score and the quality of the singing. All four performers have lush voices, and musical director Jonathan Goldberg leads with a finessing invisible band. But this likable show is far from subtle: it’s rife with winking lyrics like “My life is in your hands” and “Something to get the blood flowing.” And in the hands of Veloudos and actor J.H. Williston, murderer and needy bad boy Kit is a failed actor in more ways than the script calls for — a snitting, seething ham bone brandishing a variety of accents and disguises, but not a variety of moods.

Admittedly, the character, at least as sketched in the musical, is your standard hurt-child-grown-up-to-be-attention-seeking-psycho. The actress mother not only ignored him but also demeaned his thespian aspirations. Now he’s taken up murder as an art, views every killing as a performance, and regards his ink on the crime pages as reviews. “We’re a hit!” he crows to the detective when an interview with Morris, about the strangler’s rampage, finally gets a banner headline in the Times. But at the Lyric, Kit is a one-loud-note maniac without a soupçon of slyness. He’s more annoying than frightening — though impressively, grotesquely committed on “Once More from the Top,” in which he dementedly frames his exploits as a vaudeville number complete with lunging dance moves and a heel-click.

By contrast, Derek Stearns is both self-effacing and increasingly a mensch as the singing Columbo. Rolling out of bed to face another day of wrinkled-trenchcoating, he croons that he needs “a shave, a shrink, a life,” and actually seems to be a character rather than a cartoon. Similarly, Robin V. Allison, in addition to dispatching some lovely high notes, is ingenuous yet smart as the been-around-the-Upper-East-Side-block Sarah, who finds herself disarmed by a disheveled cop seeking information and Bosco. And Maryann Zschau hits the cliché on the head, without being too overbearing, as the nagging Flora. She also gets to inhabit a ghostly portrait as Kit’s wicked-diva mom and to expire in several amusing ditties. These include a silky number (Williston’s subtlest) in which the killer, disguised as a priest, comfortingly assures an Irish widow that “beyond heaven’s door/There is room for one more” and another in which Kit, done up as a Spanish-accented dance instructor, cha-chas an over-the-hill vamp through the pearly gates.

At the Lyric, the musical is performed before Janie E. Howland’s collage of floating, mostly bolted doors that suggest you shouldn’t open yours; no telling who might be knocking. And Cohen’s score supplies, along with a jaded sweetness and some vicious irony, a jumpy Hitchcockian underlayer. Stearns and Allison home in on the cautious romance. And a musical about a murderer has to have a certain wryness. But at the Lyric, No Way To Treat a Lady just isn’t scary for a minute.