Putting together a revue of songs from another era is never as easy as it might sound. On the other hand, when it doesn't work, it isn't hard to imagine how the conversation between the collaborators might have unfolded:

"Let's put on a revue!"

"How ‘bout World War II songs?"

"Yeah, but let's not do those famous ballads again; let's do a lot of songs nobody remembers with all that slang everybody's forgotten."

"Cool, except we don't know any actors with any feel for the time, we don't know what the clothes looked like then, and we're not even sure which songs come from before, during, or after the War.

"No problem. We turn up the mics, load the book with clichés, and have a couple of cast members grin and keep grinning."

That conversation obviously never took place, but if you sat through "Swing for Victory," the relentlessly cheery but ham-handed revue now playing at Downstairs Cabaret Theatre Center, you shouldn't find it hard to believe.

The show's excuse for singing nearly four dozen songs in two acts is an on-the-air radio reunion of The Four F's (get it?), a singing quartet of two women and two men, who argue and complain a lot when they aren't grinning. Plot complications rise and fall apparently at whim, including a pregnancy that first appears as a tummy ache but arbitrarily disappears before the noisy final curtain. Maybe that's all the characters can manage since each of them has exactly one personality trait: blond Faith (Lauren Mayer) is sweet-but-dumb, dark-haired Fran (Emily Taradash) is sarcastic, Phil (John Debkowski) is sincere, and Frank (Dick Baker) is pushy. The book possesses not a trace of invention or imagination, and the four cast members are, to be gentle, unpolished. Director Daniel T. Lavender was incapable of moving them beyond melodramatic posturing and frenetic excess, as well as some occasional mumbled diction in the songs.

James Bedell, Joshua Clayton, Michael Ruby, and Lavender, the show's creators, have included mostly jive tunes, mostly long forgotten and for good reason. A few of them have aged well, including the infectious "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and the clever "Rhode Island Is Famous for You" by first-rate songwriters Arthur Schwartz and Harold Dietz. No more than three or four of the powerfully moving and still-remembered wartime ballads are in the show, not "You'll Never Know," not "I'll Walk Alone," not "White Cliffs of Dover," just for starters.

When the cast recreates a key scene from the movie "Casablanca," Mayer and Debkowski as Ilsa and Rick break into song, but for some unfathomable reason, they do a chorus of "I'll Be Seeing You" before segueing into "As Time Goes By." Twenty of the show's 47 songs are from the 1910's, 20's, and 30's; fair enough, I guess. But there are also 10 songs written after the War, and that's not fair enough, especially since they include three original numbers from "A Saint She Ain't," songwriters Dick Vosburgh and Dennis King's 1999 tribute to wartime musicals. How else to explain it: the foursome that put this thing together either didn't know or didn't care. A revue of songs doesn't need to be "Hamlet," but it doesn't need to insult the audience's intelligence either.

That carelessness extended to Emily Taradash's costume design. One of the women wore a blouse with a peplum, characteristic, not of wartime styles, but of Christian Dior's New Look from 1947, and one of the men wore a three-piece suit at a time when vests disappeared to save on fabric.

Music Director Danny Glass and his group provided a sure and lively touch to the swing-time arrangements by John Putnam. If only they could have done the acting and singing, too.

"Swing for Victory"

Ongoing

Downstairs Cabaret Theatre Center, 540 E Main St.

$27-$32 | 325-4370, downstairscabaret.com