Coming after a big, splashy musical like La Cage aux Folles, it would be hard to downshift to an unassuming revue like Tintypes, but that is the challenge the Maltz Jupiter Theatre presents to its audience.

The lightweight, nostalgic show looks in on the turn of the 20th-century, a time of innovation and optimism, even if we can look back from today’s perspective and see that period as the run-up to the First World War. While it is true that our history is mirrored in the popular songs of the time, theatergoers are advised to lower their expectations over the insights these three-and-a-half-dozen musical numbers provide.

This material works best when presented simply and effortlessly, but that is not the approach that director J. Barry Lewis and his talented cast of five have taken. Instead, they press terribly hard to please, grabbing these songs by the throat with an insistent delivery that drains them of their natural joy. Nor is the show helped by Josh Rhodes’ mechanical choreography.

Although Tintypes’ script is extremely sketchy, it is credited to three people — Mary Kyte, Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle — who place the songs in the mouths of such historical figures as Teddy Roosevelt, anarchist Emma Goldman and Ziegfeld girl Anna Held, as well as such archetypal characters as an ethnic immigrant and a wealthy industrialist.

The musical numbers form a loose story line, but it is the songs themselves that are the show’s reason for being. Some remain popular (You’re a Grand Old Flag, Bill Bailey), while others have fallen into deserved obscurity (Getting’ More Like The White Folks Ev’ry Day). The sounds of the era include the bombast of George M. Cohan and the ragtime syncopation of Scott Joplin, as well as jaunty rhythms by less remembered composers.

Lewis has pared away several minor songs from the score, and if he wants to keep cutting, he should look to a second act vaudeville sequence that grinds the show to a halt with a succession of wheezy jokes that even the cast readily concedes are not funny.

Music director John Mercurio leads a six-member onstage band that plays the score with vintage verve, but sound designer Keith Kohrs needs to work further on the balance between musicians and cast, whose lyrics often were inaudible.

Standouts in the cast include Lisa Estridge, who handles such mournful ballads as Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child and Nobody, as well as Christopher Veitel (I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen), even if he is visually more reminiscent of Donald Sutherland than Teddy Roosevelt.

Michael B. Raiford’s scenic design fills the Maltz stage, though it remains unclear what it is supposed to represent. The show’s title, Tintypes, suggests a series of early photographs, but too much of this Maltz production is uninvolving and out of focus.

TINTYPES
C
Where: Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter
When: Through Feb. 28.
Tickets: $40-$59.
Call: (561) 575-2223.
The verdict: A lightweight revue of songs from the early 20th century that tries too hard to please.