Michael Halling and Christine Digiallonardo Photo by Carol Rosegg

Hughes (1905-76) would seem a worthy subject for a traditional biographical musical in the Fiorello!/Gypsy mold. A billionaire entrepreneur who carved out a significant presence in aviation, moviemaking, finance and philanthropy, he was tall, handsome, and definitely a colorful personality. A Texan born to a prosperous inventor of a drilling bit that facilitated oil extraction, Hughes captivated Hollywood with movies like Hell's Angels and Scarface, was a daredevil pilot who also made numerous innovations in aircraft design, helped turn Las Vegas into Las Vegas, and eventually went rather balmy, a condition well portrayed in Jonathan Demme's fine latter-day biopic Melvin and Howard. So there's plenty there to fill a stage, right?

Alas, the authors–the late Frank Evans (book and lyrics, with book revisions by Jennifer Paulson-Lee and Jim Scully, and additional lyrics by Chad Gorn) and Jim Scully (music)–have taken a fascinating subject and standardized him into a near-nonentity. The young Howard (an appealing and off-book Matthew Eby) is a sweet, smart kid, pampered by his mother (Jill Paice; cue affectionate mother-son song); she dies young, leaving him to pursue multiple identities as he conquers one profession after another. Soon he's grown into a strapping Michael Halling, who ably conveys Hughes's restlessness and boasts a sturdy tenor. He marries the socialite Ella Rice (Christine DiGiallonardo; cue love song), a union that quickly falls apart as his work commitments distract him (cue my-man's-not-around song). He hires Noah Dietrich (David Elder) to manage most of his business affairs, a task Noah finds exhausting (cue "Do It Noah," with Elder tap-dancing to indicate Dietrich's delicate professional balancing act). In Hollywood, Hughes ardently but unsuccessfully woos Katharine Hepburn (Gina Milo, singing better than Kate ever did), all the while building and crashing new planes. That's just Act One.

Who is this guy? Are we supposed to like him? The authors don't give us much of a viewpoint. Rita Randolph (Haley Swindal), a fictional Hollywood gossip columnist in the Hedda-Louella tradition, delivers breathless radio broadcasts on Hughes's triumphs and setbacks–a useful expository device, though if we're to believe the chronology, she stays at that one radio station for over a half-century.

That chronology, in fact, is a disaster. A pre-1930 musical sequence has the Beverly Hilton switchboard operators bubbling over receiving a phone call from Judy Garland, who would have been about six, still Frances Gumm, and not on their radar. "Wannabe," uttered in the 1920s, didn't become a noun for many decades. The authors put Hepburn at MGM when she should be at the Hughes-owned RKO Radio Pictures, and they have him gallantly offering to purchase the film rights to The Philadelphia Story for her while it's in Broadway previews, though The Philadelphia Story premiered in 1939, and we're well into wartime. Noah eulogizes Hughes as "motivated not to have things, but to do things," and celebrates the 32 years they shared in business, though by my count, it's more like 50.

And is that a proper eulogy, at that? We never get very far into our protagonist's brain. And the finale suggests a Charles Foster Kane sort of mindset, with the elderly Howard reminiscing about his mother and younger self longing for a "White Picket Fence," a simple, homey existence that contradicts everything we've seen in the previous two hours. It's a cute tune, and there's also a sprightly "Howard's Hollywood," with a Tinseltown chorus offering Hughes a backhanded welcome, and "Only One for You," that Howard-Ella duet, about as standard as a showtune ballad can get. Scully, the program notes, "has been in the field of real estate for most of his life," and largely, this score sounds like the work of a showtune lover who has been in the field of real estate for most of his life. He serves up fox trots, waltzes, and a whole lot of two-four, and while it's pleasant enough on the ear, you'll feel you've heard it before. The lyrics are somewhat better, with some catchy rhymes: "merger"/"perjure," "khaki"/"back, he," and my fave, "jockeyed"/"Lockheed."

You don't, however, exit knowing Howard Hughes any better than you did coming in. We get yards of dialogue about countersunk rivets and fuselage modifications, but the man is kept at a distance. Hughes's interesting later years, where his obsessive-compulsive disorder went sky-high and he watched Ice Station Zebra 150 times, get short shrift. Nor is there any mention of David Charnay, a business partner of at least Dietrich's stature, or The Conqueror, a Hughes epic shot near nuclear tests in Nevada, where so much of the cast and crew eventually succumbed to cancer that wags referred to it as "an RKO Radioactive Picture." Other notable episodes–a 1936 car crash where Hughes killed a pedestrian, some controversial financial hookups with Richard Nixon–also go missing.

There's no set or costume design, though Indigo Garcia's lighting gets the job done, and Evan Frank helpfully provides scene-setting projections of Floyd Bennett Field, the RKO logo, and Grauman's Chinese premiering Hell's Angels. Paulson-Lee, who directs and choreographs, has the actors (also Michael Dikegoros, Eric Michael Gillett, Candice Hatakeyama, Michelle Beth Herman, Mya Ison, James Judy, and Josh Tower) uncomfortably rolling out music stands with scripts perched on them, the wheels sometimes drowning out the dialogue. There's also an odd 30-second ballet of the ensemble crossing the stage while waving chairs in the air, signifying I'm not certain what.

According to Howard–unwieldy title, as not much of this accounting of his life seems to be according to Howard–wants to be a solid conventional musical biography, and we could always use one of those. But it keeps tripping over itself.