Playhouse in the Park throws its entire arsenal at Dark Paradise: The Legend of the Five Pointed Star — and this year's Rosenthal New Play Prize winner is a sight to behold as it travels back to 1878 and a strange border town where cowboy heroes (including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday) are pitted against a mess of vampires.

        It's the production that works, not Keith Glover's latest American myth-laden pop adventure.

        I wasn't a fan of Mr. Glover's first Rosenthal winner, In Walks Ed, which melded the hip urban fashions of blaxploitation films of the '70s with the conceits of the Western, particularly the legend of the lone gunfighter.

        Slick as it was, for me it did not enlarge or expand the film genres he was imitating, despite his poetic flights of fancy. He didn't take me anywhere new.

        I have the same problem with Dark Paradise. The drama celebrates the cliches of the Western genre in scene after scene without ever moving beyond them.

        And for all that Mr. Glover has a way with wry, throwaway lines, he's overwritten this script. Too often where one line would suffice, Mr. Glover writes 10, occasionally flowering but mostly in the banal spirit of scripts from TV westerns from the '50s.

        What are we supposed to make of this? It's not a send-up — for all its sly winks (and overlong comic bits with a Gabby Hayes stand-in), it's clear Playhouse is deadly serious about Dark Paradise. But because its points about courage and heroism are as old as the Lone Ranger, what are we to surmise? That live theater is better than black-and-white television?

        The production is a knockout from first to last. The actors are perfection, somehow making Mr. Glover's laundry list of characteristics into appealing characters:

        James Horan is required to merely be laconic as Wyatt Earp; Gary Sloan's Doc Holliday is the dissolute Southern gentleman; Kim Brockington is fabulously Angelina Jolie for our heroine (who dresses more like a Tomb Raider than a western dance-hall girl); Sean Haberle is deliciously Captain Hook as our villainous vampire; Sheriff Tony Todd is Clint Eastwood-esque. And so on.

        Mr. Glover nails the stereotypes, but never having been a fan of early TV westerns, I'm missing the point, or the joke.

        Dark Paradise is for the most part a triumph of design, with Ann Hould-Ward's costumes looking like they've come to life from an arty comic book, and David Gallo's menacing set breathtakingly lit by Thomas Hase.

        Jim Steinmeyer's special effects include magic to rival Abracadabra. The only thing that doesn't work is the usually impeccable David Smith's sound design. There are entire scenes where the dialogue is lost.

        Mr. Glover also directs, with his well-known eye for spectacle, but, like a boy with too many toys, he also indulges himself.

        Late in the first act, after an inexplicable (and one-time only) blast of rock 'n' roll for a skirmish with the undead, Doc Holliday says, “That is the strangest thing I have ever seen.”

        I know exactly how he feels.

        Dark Paradise, through March 2, Playhouse in the Park, 421-3888.

No fade in Frampton's future
50 years of Peter Frampton
Cammy tickets go on sale Monday
A spirit of cooking
Not your mother's opera
DAUGHERTY: Aw shucks, they can't away our Chucks!
DEMALINE: Turning theater from hobby to career
Book explores Cleveland Orchestra's triumphs, turbulence
'Dark Paradise' silly but done well
Energetic 'Hamlet' fitting finale for Apking
Get to It