Musical-theater fans have their own version of fantasy football, whereby they day-dreamily pair up dead lyricists, composers, and stars. Well, how�s this for a collaboration: In 1953, No�l Coward turned Oscar Wilde�s first major play, the delightful Lady Windermere�s Fan of 1892, into a musical called After the Ball. And now, bless their hearts, the folks over at the well-meaning Irish Repertory Theatre have pulled an Encores! and given it a next-to-no-frills production. Unfortunately, they have also completely missed the point.

With only a few alterations (like the ending, overcomplicated here), the plot of the musical is the same as in Wilde�s play: Devoted wife discovers devoted husband is having secret rendezvous with a mysterious lady of ill repute; considers leaving devoted husband for dashing playboy; learns things are not always as they appear. Moral: Sometimes living a lie is a good idea.

Though Lady Windermere�s Fan has been on Broadway four times, the last was in 1947. Meanwhile, Coward�s musical all but vanished after receiving a tepid reception at London�s Globe Theatre in 1954. It�s so little-known that, for musical lovers, the title is more likely to conjure the devastatingly sad Showboat song of the same name (�Many the hopes that have vanished / After the ball!�).

This After the Ball doesn�t have much of a production history, making it hard to precisely dole out blame for the sorry show that recently opened at the Irish Rep. While No�l Coward�s musicals, particularly his later ones, were never especially beloved, it�s hard to imagine that the man who wrote the dazzling Private Lives could be guilty of anything this leaden. Script editor Barry Day, a former adman and longtime Coward enthusiast, has added �extra material��turning, for example, the Duchess of Berwick into a couplet-spewing narrator who winks obscenely at the audience like something out of this season�s Belle Epoque. After the Ball was probably never a truly great show, but Day and director Tony Walton have beaten it to a bland pulp.

Better known as a great, Tony-winning designer of Broadway shows like Guys & Dolls (or by theater-trivia buffs as Julie Andrews�s ex-husband), Walton created the spare set and the flouncy period costumes in addition to directing. From the program, we also learn that nearly every member of the cast spent the summer warming up for this with Walton�s Goodspeed Opera House production of Where�s Charley?, Frank Loesser�s musical version of that old chestnut Charley�s Aunt, which is about as far from urbane as one can get.

So perhaps it shouldn�t be so surprising that the company here speaks irony-saturated aphorisms with the concerned sincerity of a social-work team on a house call. At times, it�s as if they have been airlifted into Manhattan from an anonymous regional theater and told they were in Carousel. Such dour solemnity is particularly blasphemous in light of the fact that Coward�s clever songs celebrate, in the words of Kenneth Tynan, a �gallant, rise-above-it quality.� Luckily, while the cast is charisma- free, they do have fine singing voices. And some of these long-forgotten songs are just delightful. �London at Night� is a romp about how class divisions crumble after dark. �Why Is It the Woman Who Pays?� is a wryly sex- positive anthem. �Faraway Land� is probably the nicest song ever written about Australia by someone other than Peter Allen.

In �Stay on the Side of the Angels,� Lord Darlington attempts to seduce Lady Windermere by telling her not to be seduced. David Staller, who also gamely plays cello in the onstage orchestra, does a decent job in the role, providing one of the precious few moments of ambiguity the production allows.

One thing Wilde and Coward had in common was the ability to create characters who are, to quote a character in After the Ball, �appealingly appalling.� But in this production, all such nuanced motives are rendered benign. If one weren�t following closely, one would never know that the pleasant Mrs. Erlynne was blackmailing the pleasant Lord Windermere. No one ever seems exasperated or scared or angry or�and this is where all is lost�up to no good. Which means it�s just like any other tedious Victorian melodrama, only one that inexplicably contains musical confections and irresistible epigrams like �I can resist everything except temptation� and �We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.�

In his director�s note, Walton says that when he saw the original production of After the Ball on the West End in 1954, he wished he could �see past their posturings and relate to Wilde�s characters.� Such a wish betrays a fundamental misapprehension. If you can relate to Wilde�s characters, something is deeply wrong with you. Because the charming quality about these folk is that they are all reliably, irredeemably shallow, through and through. That thing about how it�s important to be earnest? It was a joke.