Nothing cures a case of arrested development like a little pregnancy. This seems the message of the summer of 2007, writ large on the big screen by Judd Apatow and now brought to the Atlantic Theater stage in Patty Griffin and Keith Bunin's new country-flavored musical, 10 Million Miles. But unlike Knocked Up, which blends salty and saccharine into a pleasing, even poignant puree, 10 Million Miles is a queasy mixture of compromised values and aesthetics — part romance, part road trip, all artificial.
The putative lovers are Duane (Matthew Morrison) and Molly (Irene Molloy), who travel together from Florida to the Northeast. They don't know each other well, but she's pregnant with his baby — or perhaps someone else's ("I had kind of a busy weekend," she explains). Neither has figured life out yet (he's fresh out of the Army, and she's an alcoholic prone to "busy weekends"), so they decide a baby just might give their rudderless lives some direction.
Across a series of overwrought but underwritten encounters with friends, relatives, and strangers (all played winningly by Skipp Sudduth and Mare Winningham), parenthood is confronted with a mixture of realism and insanity that rings as false as Duane's awe at Molly's originality in positing that the Virgin Mary might have invented a convenient cover story.
Sadly, the route of 10 Million Miles isn't even a scenic one. A red pickup truck anchors Derek McLane's largely empty and unattractive set, and though the car has a couple of tricks in store, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang it's not. The normally excellent lighting team of Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer tries to make up for it but instead oversaturates the stage with color in what seems a misguided attempt to evoke the energy and immediacy of a rock concert. Meanwhile, the spray of color-changing stars hovering above the visible pit is just unfortunate.
Working from a script that flirts with fairy-tale naïveté but never settles on any one tone, newly minted Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer can't breathe life into the proceedings. More problematic: If you don't enter the theatre a fan of songwriter Griffin (I was unfamiliar with her work), none of her wispy score or clunky poetry is likely to convert you.
But if you don't leave whistling Griffin, you may leave whistling Morrison. The squeaky-clean male ingénue of Hairspray and The Light in the Piazza demonstrates a facility for adjusting physical and vocal inflection that suggests no show has yet fully tapped the depths of his talent. 10 Million Miles, though — with its puerile philosophy and hokey theatrics — is not the musical to buck that trend.
Presented by and at Atlantic Theater Company, 336 W. 20th St., NYC. June 14-July 15. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com. Casting by Jim Carnahan/Carrie Gardner.