‘Donna Summer Musical’ can’t hold a candle to the titular superstar

At least four times during “Summer: The Donna Summer,” the titular powerhouse commands that she wants to be known as more than the planet’s Disco Queen. Yes, she was synonymous with the glory days of New York’s Studio 54, where the gender spectrum was in full rainbow flourish generations before “spectrum” was used to describe gender. When she broke out with 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby,” Summer broke Top 40 playlists in a way today’s celebutantes and popsters dream of breaking the internet. She feigned 22 orgasms in that number, taking sex out of the closet and celebrating it on the radio. She was revolutionary.

But she also ran far deeper the hypersexualized commercial persona that helped sell 100 million records, including a top 40 Billboard tune every year from 1975 to 1984. She battled racism, sexism, abuse and depression. Her life was inherently dramatic, making her a prime subject for a musical bio.

That musical is not “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” running through Feb. 23 at the Nederlander Theatre. The script is a bobblehead: A heartless, garish cartoon of the person it purportedly honors.

The production directed by Des McAnuff (book by McAnuff, Robert Cary and Colman Domingo) has the cast to deliver the music that helped define the 1970s and ‘80s with a catalogue that included “Bad Girls,” “I Feel Love” and “No More Tears (Enough is Enough”). But that cast is stuck in a script that deserves to be (wait for it) — left out in the rain.

A la the three Chers of “The Cher Show,” “Summer” features three Donnas. Dan’Yelle Williamson is Diva Donna, or Donna from her post-disco days to her 2012 death. Alex Hairston is Disco Donna, the voice that had everyone from suburban seventh graders to Grace Jones doing the bump. Olivia Elease Hardy is Duckling Donna, the teen who sings in church and skips school in favor of auditions.

When the three team up for (“MacArthur Park,” “No More Tears,” “Last Dance”), the sound will fill your heart and make you wanna dance. As soloists, they’re equally fine. When the music stops, “Summer” sinks. The milestones in Summer’s life aren’t explored, they’re exploited. Time and again, the book gins up conflict and then discards it, unexplored.

The missed opportunities are glaring: Summer (born LaDonna Adrian Gaines) was an African American woman who became a star in 1970s Germany, a place so white that strangers would come up to Summer on the street to touch her skin, the musical tells us. That’s all we hear about that. She references a Judy Garland-level problem with pills, which is also dropped shortly after it’s brought up. Her $10 million lawsuit against Casablanca Records flies by, framed not by Summer’s bravery in taking on an industry titan, but by the death of Neil Bogart (John Gardiner), the man in charge of the label.

© Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade

One of the most inexcusable short shrifts explores Summer’s relationship with the LGBTQ community. She owed much of her early success to the legions of gay men who created and defined the club scene of her heyday. In 1983 — the height of the AIDs pandemic — Summer came under fire for making a crack about God creating “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” As “Summer” explains it, she was trying to tell the men in the audience not to sing so loud. Or something. It’s a mess.

There’s more. Or rather, less. Summer becomes a born-again Christian because her sisters visit her in California to remind her that the Virgin Mary exists. She escapes a German stalker who tries to kill her. She is sexually abused for five years by the pastor of her childhood church. Problems are trotted out for display, and then summarily forgotten.

The spark of a creative idea exists. “Summer” shows her love-is-love-is-love inclusiveness by putting the chorines in boy drag for many of the numbers. That could work as a middle-finger to the binary if Sergio Trujillo’s choreography and Paul Tazewell’s costumes didn’t often evoke a mild retread of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video.

Robert Brill’s set — primarily a void for Sean Nieuwenhuis’s uninspired projections — doesn’t help. Raindrops fall on giant screens during “MacArthur Park,” a tube of lipstick appears when Donna puts on lipstick.

There’s a genuine thrill to hearing Williamson, Hairston and Hardy unleash their pile-driving vocals. Summer paved the way for everything from raves and electronica to Britney Spears dancing with a python. Donna Summer deserves better.

Catey Sullivan is a local freelance writer.

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