If you took On the Town, stripped it down, and gave it a lobotomy, it might end up very like No Singing in the Navy, now cavorting upstairs at Playwrights Horizons. The entertainment, "written by" Milo Cramer, which I guess means they authored the dialogue and the simplistic songs, takes the three-sailors-on-24-hour-leave motif of the 1944 Bernstein/Comden/Green classic and twists it into an absurdist vaudeville. You never know what silliness is coming next, or what new role any of the three sailors–Bailey Lee, Elliot Sagay, and Ellen Nikbakht–will have to play. It's daringly unstructured, undisciplined, and simultaneously reverent and mocking of the musical genre it's referencing, which also includes movies like Anchors Aweigh and Three Sailors and a Girl. And, I'm sorry to say, it's not as much fun as it sounds.

The Cast Photo by Valerie Terranova

On Krit Robinson's almost nonexistent set, a silver tinsel curtain behind a coat rack containing Enver Chakartash's quick-change costumes, suddenly the sailors aren't sailors anymore. They're three talking-singing crabs in an on-board crab bucket, the pluckiest one of whom wants to escape the bucket and explore the world. (This inspires one of Cramer's better rhymes, "bucket" with, well, a predictable obscenity; mostly their rhymes are near-, lazy, or absent.) This is the B story, and as it progresses, Heroine Crab, as she's billed, learns uncomfortable facts about her and her crab relatives, such as they're being raised to be a sailor's dinner. Unpleasant self-discovery seems to be a theme, whether of sailors, crabs, or the Lighthouse Lady (Sagay) forsaken by Sailor 1, and the tone shifts wildly and unexpectedly from exuberant to mordant and back.

There are other threads–such as Sailor 1 deciding he wants to run for mayor while on leave, dutiful pianist/musical director Kyle Adam Blair becoming the captain when someone slaps a captain's cap on his head, and Sailor 3 hiding a "secret secret of my soul"–but none of them goes anywhere. A revealing series of interviews in the program, and do read them before the show if you can, emphasizes that Cramer and their director, Aysan Celik, are pushing playfulness–after all, says Cramer, "these things are called plays!"

Too often, though, we don't feel like we're playing along. The randomness of the throughline is too bewildering, and it's as if Cramer and Celik, while celebrating the heritage of the classic mid-century American musical, also want to rip it to shreds. A sequence of the shipmates attending "a real live theayter show" has Sailor 3 suddenly transformed into an actor doing a Hamlet-like soliloquy while the other two slip into the audience and encourage us to boo, which we do; it just isn't much fun. Nor is the captain's discreet lust for the sailors, nor the surly box office attendant insisting that servicemen aren't allowed in the theater, nor the romantic duet of two ants in love. How did that get in there? Don't ask.

The three actors are OK, and each has at least one memorable moment. Lee gets to be a captain's orderly with a weird, funny baby voice. Nikbakht, the strongest-voiced of the three, is pretty funny donning a long white Santa beard to be Father Crab. Sagay gets the big closing number, which keeps repeating "I love you a lot/ It's all that I've got," which actually sticks in the head through sheer repetition, and may be the closest thing Cramer has to a theme: In a world where death is the only certainty, let's try to love one another. Which was also a touchstone of On the Town, but that had "Some Other Time" to convey the sentiment, and this has this.

Celik's direction has some cute touches, such as Sailor 1 miming an elaborate death on top of Blair's upright piano, and Sailors 1 and 3 staging a fight where each attacks the other from several feet away. That's the kind of silly that prevails. On the Town had plenty of silly, too, but undergirding it was the constant tension of knowing that Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie were headed back to combat, and possibly none of them was returning. That foreboding is rendered even more succinctly here, but ironically, rendering it more succinctly yields less impact.

I liked Cramer's School Pictures, the solo show they performed at this same theater a couple of years ago, and I'm pleased at their efforts to expand into a more complete theatrical universe. But this is so scattershot it's practically formless, and I didn't laugh out loud once; as the absurdities piled up, the returns diminished. I should add that the pre-show, with Blair plunking out Mozart and other giants on that upright, is quite satisfying, and that much of the audience seemed to find No Singing in the Navy hilarious. As for me, I'm off to find my bootleg DVD of On the Town.