CAMBRIDGE — There’s more to baseball than hits, and there’s more to theater than hits, too. But that doesn’t stop batters — or producers — from praying for the next home run.
And where better to set a baseball musical than in the heart of Red Sox Nation? That, apparently, was the thinking behind “Johnny Baseball,’’ the American Repertory Theater’s new musical about the Sox and their fabled curse that opened to the press Wednesday night at the Loeb Drama Center.
So is it a hit? Well, that will be up to the fans, of course. But from the press box, it looks like a solid double: a lively story that will please diehard fans and rookies alike, some clever lyrics . . . and a score that is, alas, more of a square than a diamond.
That’s not to say the songs are awful; they’re just a bit flat-footed, on the whole, and too many of them sound alike. Many start out promisingly, with a few ingenious turns of phrase or amusing rhymes, but then the plod-plod-plod of the rhythms and the aimless, vaguely old-fashioned feel of the melodies sends them crashing into the dust.
Fortunately, there are some glorious exceptions: a lovely ballad, “Don’t I Know You?’’; a hilarious comic interlude, “Worcester Boosters Fight Song’’ (make sure you pronounce that “Woostah Boostah’’); and the soaring paean that ends the show, “The Game of Baseball.’’ It’s in that song, which links the nation and its national pastime with the simple lyric ’’everybody’s country, everybody’s game,’’ that the thematic grandeur the show has been striving for really does come to life.
But it takes a while to get there. We begin with a beleaguered group of bleacher creatures, on the edge of despair as the Sox look ready to lose to the Yankees in the fourth game of the 2004 American League Championship Series. The youngest among them cries out, “Dear God, what do you want from us?’’
Cue the backstory. An older fan takes the boy aside and offers to tell him the real reason the Red Sox are cursed. It’s not because Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, this enigmatic figure says; it’s because . . .
Well, but that’s the whole story. Suffice it to say that the Babe does figure in it, but tangentially, and that the larger issue looming over the team (and therefore the show) is one for which the Red Sox and we fans should genuinely feel ashamed: that the team was the last in the major leagues to sign a black player. (Pumpsie Green in 1959, for those keeping score at home.)