STAGE: MUSICAL REVUE OF JEROME KERN SONGS

Just when you fear that you might gag on all the false cheer being propagted by 'Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood,' the bland English cabaret show at Broadway's Ritz Theater, along comes a performer (one of four) whose authenticity cuts right through the show-biz cheesiness. Her name is Elisabeth Welch, and she's a small woman with apple round cheeks, silverish hair, large mischievous eyebrows and a posture that curls her body into a perptual, lightly amused shrug. Once you hear her light soprano make the most of familiar Kern songs, 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,' into something dramatic and new, you're likely to start riffling through the Playbill trying to find out where she's been all these years.

As the program and other sources reveal, Miss Welch was born in New York and appeared in two Depression-era Cole Porter musicals, 'The New Yorkers' and 'Nymph Errant,' the latter of which landed her in London in 1933. Not long after that she recorded a forgotten Kern song with Paul Robeson at the Abbey Road recording studios. Since then she has enjoyed an expatriate's film and stage career abroad - with at least one brief return (in the 1980 revue 'Black Broadway') to New York. If anything positive is to come out of 'Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood,' we must write letters to our Congressmen demanding that Miss Welch be detained in the United States forthwith, as a national resource too rare and precious for export.

There are roughly 40 numbers in this show, and how on wishes that Miss Welch, whose elegant phrasing suggests a second coming of Mabel Mercer, sang at least 20 of them. Her actual list of assignments is much shorter, but it does include such delights as 'She Didn't Say Yes' and 'Why Was I Born?'(dedicated to Helen Morgan), as well as snatches of 'I Won't Dance' and 'I've Told Every Little Star.' The rest of the time this singer sits on a stool in the shadows, her face exuding a sweet, meditative glow, as if she were imagining she were somewhere else. We come to know how she feels.

Conceived and directed by David Kernan, who also collaborated on the impossibly arch 'Side by Side by Sondheim,' this revue was originally seen at the West End's tiny Warehouse Theater. It's a classic reminder that the English have about as much of a natural instinct for American musical theater as the Actors Studio does for Restoration comedy. While Kern was, in Alec Wilder's definitive estimation, our theater's most characteristic creator of 'the pure, uncontrived melodic line,' his songs don't just sing themselves. The attractive performers surrounding Miss Welch - Liz Robertson and Elaine Delmar, who are English, and the American Scott Holmes - have good voices but no compelling point of view on their material.

While there are a few happy exceptions to the generally dull drift - especially when the jazzy Miss Delmar is having fun with the Dorothy Fields lyrics to 'Pick Yourself Up' and 'A Fine Romance' - the Kern standards (largely but not exclusively from his Hollywood years, 1934-45) usually pass by without leaving much emotional or musical decisions are simply perverse. Miss Robertson and Miss Delmar belt out 'Bill' and 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man' in counterpoint, obliterating both song. 'Ol' Man River' has been arranged as an upbeat trio weirdly reminiscent of Peter, Paul and Mary's old 'Puff, the Magic Dragon.' Mr. Holmes, excessively mindful of the World War II circumstances prompting Oscar Hammerstein's Lyric for 'The Last Time I Saw Paris,' imbues the number with a tragic demeanor that even the crooner in Woody Allen's 'Broadway Danny Rose' might find a bit sweaty.

The arrangements, played by a small on-stage band, don't help; they're suitable for a cocktail-hour combo at a convention hotel. The sketchy narration, by Dick Vosburgh ('A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine'), is unsophisticated, disorganized and arbitrary. Among other insights, we learn that Kern's 'output for both Broadway and Hollywood was phenomenal' and the 'Show Boat' literally changed the face of the American musical theater.' For reasons that aren't clear, we're told more about Kern's post-stroke hospitalization than about his views on the musical theater, whose face he changed, literally or not, more than once.

The set (flats depicting a vague urban skyline), monochromatic costumes and lighting are impoverished (Easily the production's most spectacular effect is the addition of cloud projections for 'Till the Clouds Roll By.') Mr. Kernan, whose inability to resist a cliche is announced by the revue's choice of opening song ('The Song Is You'), has directed his performers to conclude most of their numbers with bared teeth and raised arms. Far from recalling Kern's Hollywood or Broadway, such staging takes us back only to 'Your Hit Parade,' It's the ineffable style of Miss Welch alone that gives 'Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood' its franchise on a romantic musical past.