No story, no dialogue in this performance but it's a bold step in contemporary theatre

Joni Mitchell: River

Created and directed by: Allen MacInnis

Playhouse Theatre, through Oct. 30

Don't go expecting dialogue, plot and other key components of theatre from the Playhouse company's season-opening show, because Joni Mitchell: River flows only with the Canadian icon's songs.

Squint hard enough and the blue-white stage resembles a river of the show's title, borrowed from the Mitchell song that closes the first act. Search long enough and her lyrics form "the arc of a love affair" promised by River creator and director Allen MacInnis, who put in motion the Prairie songwriter's own notion that her words and melodies play like films inside her head.

Mitchell's songs are grouped thematically based on lyrical content, ranging from love and war, through trouble in paradise and big-business worries and psychosis, and ultimately back to love. John Mann, Rebecca Shoichet and Lorretta Bailey capably sing the production's 29 songs as a trio and in solo turns, but the lack of story and dialogue tends to make for one meandering River.

The trio is backed by a four-member band, which is surrounded by stairs of varying shape and slope. The player with the most difficult assignment is guitarist and bandleader Greg Lowe, who must pick his way through a forest of strings and fretboards stored on a circular rack -- a guitar "Lazy Susan," as Playhouse artistic director Glynis Leyshon dubbed it in her opening-night welcome on Thursday. Each of the guitars is tuned just so, in order to efficiently and effectively perform Mitchell's often complex folk-jazz works.

A good number of the songwriter's melodic hooks aren't easy to grasp, and Mann and Shoichet are more successful than Bailey at singing some of the gear-changing arrangements staged here. The Spirit of the West frontman's pipes are well suited for the sarcastic Be Cool and storied Woodstock (played in a sexy, four-in-the-morning funk), while Shoichet is able to nail Mitchell's sky-high vocals (not to mention the gutter-low "put up a parking lot" end line of Big Yellow Taxi). Bailey, a native Albertan, sings the majority of the night's softer tunes (Not to Blame, A Case of You) with the heart of an actor who works musicals, as opposed to the working-musician ways of Mann and Shoichet. (The latter gigs with local groovers Soulstream, which employs her husband/drummer Randall Stoll, and the ultra-stylin' French lounge act Mimosa.)

Many of Mitchell's best known songs (Help Me, Woodstock, Big Yellow Taxi) are played during River's 19-song first act, which feels rushed compared to the post-intermission performance. Act II opens with the show's most theatrical moments, when the singers enter the thematic psych ward.

Looking dazed through a reading of Trouble Child, they end up self-belted into three padded chairs. Mann, sporting a wife-beater T-shirt, looks especially devilish through the group-sing session and into his solo vocals on Down To You. The second act's songs are stretched out, giving extra weight to works such as Shadows and Light, performed a cappella (gospel style) with mesmerizing effect at the end of the four-song Paradoxes of Right and Wrong grouping.

The show ends on a quiet note with verses of Both Sides Now delivered solo by the singers, capping the trio of After Love, Wisdom theme songs.

The production team would have done better to use more of the projected images that popped up too infrequently during songs such as The Fiddle and the Drum (a blurry American flag) and Big Yellow Taxi (rush-hour traffic).

For the Playhouse, Joni Mitchell: River represents a bold first step toward producing only contemporary theatre, a mandate change announced by the company last spring after 41 seasons of staging sometimes dusty old scripts. But hey, at least those plays had one.

Tom Zillich is a local writer and editor.