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The richly paneled interior of the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel is the perfect setting for the musical Glimpses of the Moon. The hotel's lobby and the cabaret venue seem to whisk audience members back to the period of the piece, which is based on an Edith Wharton novel, to the days when the Gilded Age was giving way to the Jazz Age. The show, with music by John Mercurio and book and lyrics by Tajlei Levis, also has two extremely appealing leads in Chris Peluso and Autumn Hurlbert, a couple of twentysomethings with tastes for the finer things in life, but without the personal means to attain them. Unfortunately these assets, along with some others, do not mean that theatergoers will strike gold in this amiable, but ultimately never truly satisfying tuner.

Wharton's story follows the travails of struggling classics scholar and would-be novelist Nick (Peluso) and penniless, but effervescent Susy (Hurlbert) as they hang on to the tails of New York's elite while also trying to find love, which they don't realize that they have found in one another. When these two hatch a plan to marry and use the wedding presents they receive from their rich friends as the means to live free of sponging off their betters, their world seems ideal. Fourth-in-line for a title Winthrop Strefford (played in a strangely cartoonish manner by Glenn Peters) provides them a cottage in Maine for their honeymoon. Then, Nick and Susy are off to the Vanderlyns' estate in Newport for the summer. Along the way, vases, dinnerware and silver are all pawned to pay for the things not provided by their hosts.

Unfortunately, Susy has to do a little favor for Ellie Vanderlyn (a mugging and overly broad Jane Blass) in return for the older woman's hospitality. Susy needs to mail Ellie's husband Nelson (a stalwart Daren Kelly) pre-written letters weekly. These missives will cover Ellie's tracks as she's gone off with a mystery lover. Susy agrees, but doesn't tell Nick. When he realizes what she's done, it's just as Coral (played with awkward aplomb by Laura Jordan), a bookish heiress who's been a patron of his and is romantically interested in the virile classicist, returns to the scene. Coral's arrival and Winthop's sudden and unexpected inheritance convince Nick and Susy it's time to dissolve their marriage that's supposed to have been a business relationship, but of course, they really have fallen in love during their time together. Can true love triumph over commerce in the heady 1920s?

The plot is the stuff of musicals of the era, and Levis' book tells Wharton's tale with marvelous efficiency and a good deal of wit. (A Lehman Brothers reference early on works beautifully). Unfortunately Mercurio's score proves to be problematic. Though he provides some wonderful jazz riffs, the composer often complicates things unduly, using awkward minor shifts and deliberate dissonances in his melodies. The devices, while signals of talent, often prove problematic for both the performers and theatergoers' ears, and do not necessarily serve the piece which, though dark, has a certain champagne-like quality to it. Even "Right Here, Right Now," the show's 11 o'clock number (performed by a different guest star each week) fails to capture audiences' ears or hearts; given that Tony nominee Liz Larsen belted it out of the park at a recent press performance, this is particularly surprising.

Within the close confines of the Oak Room, director Marc Bruni has given "Glimpses" a surprisingly smooth staging that somehow captures the buoyancy of the era, a quality that one wishes were more consistently prevalent in "Glimpses," which though winning never quite reaches the gold-standard in musical comedy.

---- Andy Propst

Glimpses of the Moon plays Mondays at 8pm at the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street). Tickets are $65.00, plus a $30.00 food/drink minimum, and can be purchased by calling 866-468-7619. Further information is available online at: www.GlimpsesOfTheMoon.com.