THEATER REVIEW; A Little Town Goes A Little Footloose

That poor, tormented Reverend Moore. All that worry for so little reason, all that anguish over something so tame.

In ''Footloose,'' the flavorless marshmallow of a musical that opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theater, this righteous minister of a small-town church spends most of the show fretting over the dangerous consequences of rock-and-roll, something he describes as ''an endless chant of pornography.''

Yet if only, early on, he could have shared the audience's perspective on the way his town's teen-agers dance to such music. Why, it's less erotic, and considerably less involving, than an introductory aerobics class. Of course, if the Reverend had realized this in the production's first scene instead of its last, then there wouldn't be a show. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

There have certainly been worse musicals on Broadway than ''Footloose,'' the $6.5 million adaptation of the hit 1984 movie that starred Kevin Bacon. Yet it's hard to think of one so totally unaffecting. The music in the show is loud, for sure, with a propulsive beat designed to set toes tapping and fingers snapping. The score is peppered with flashy dance tunes from the movie that have boomed over disco floors for years. And there's a young, eager, hard-working cast of dancers, somersaulting, back-flipping, wriggling to beat the band. But as directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by A. C. Ciulla, this production has a blurry, removed feeling, like a Xerox of a Polaroid. The show's creators seem to be aiming at teen-agers whose parents won't let them see the raunchier ''Rent,'' with a generation-crossing family entertainment that absolutely no one could object to.

Any grit and spunk that belonged to ''Footloose,'' the movie, which was silly but kind of satisfying, has been bleached and sanitized out of existence. When a character sings about letting ''my mind take a small walk,'' when small-town life becomes too oppressive to bear, it's the only moment in the show when you fully identify with someone onstage.

You have to question the wisdom of adapting a film whose charm was largely realized in the editing room. Directed by Herbert Ross, the original ''Footloose'' arrived in the wake of the hugely successful ''Flashdance'' and made similar use of the kinetic crosscutting and camera work popularized by MTV. What most people still remember about the movie is its opening sequence, a series of close-ups of restless dancing feet that matched the percolating rhythms of Kenny Loggins's title song and was guaranteed to give anyone watching it a case of the St. Vitus twitches.

In theory, live dancers should be just as (if not more) able to convey an infectious exuberance. But that never, ever happens here, despite the gymnastic agility of the cast. Mr. Ciulla's choreography is, while buzzing with busyness, peculiarly uncentered; it doesn't tell you what to focus on.

It says everything about the show that in a number that is ostensibly about an awkward youth learning to dance (the rousing ''Let's Hear It for the Boy,'' a high point in the movie), we aren't allowed to see his evolution from klutziness to high-kicking assurance. The metamorphosis of this cartoon rube (played by Tom Plotkin) occurs mostly behind a curtain of other performers.

The movie was also lively looking enough to keep you from thinking about its treacly formula plot. It's the story of young Ren McCormack (Jeremy Kushnier in the role played on screen by Mr. Bacon), who arrives in a heartland high school from Chicago and teaches a strait-laced town that young folks have just gotta dance.

Ren's strongest opposition comes from the Rev. Shaw Moore (Stephen Lee Anderson), whose son was killed in a car accident after a party and who has since convinced the town council to make dancing illegal. Unfortunately, the Reverend also has a wild, dance-prone daughter, Ariel (Jennifer Laura Thompson), with eyes for Ren, and a wife, Vi (the ever-professional Dee Hoty), who has had about enough of her husband's sanctimoniousness.

Dean Pitchford, who wrote the screenplay for ''Footloose'' as well as most of its songs' lyrics, is also the book author, with Mr. Bobbie, and lyricist for the stage version. (Tom Snow wrote most of the music, though there are numbers from the film by Mr. Loggins, Eric Carmen, Sammy Hagar and Jim Steinman.) The new script scales up the movie's most feeble aspect: its tale of reconciliation and domestic healing among people who have known loss and whose spoken and sung confrontations here take on the aspect of a particularly teary segment of ''Oprah.''

The characters have been built up but in the wrong ways, with the emphasis on insights out of pop psychology books and very little of the detail that defines personality. As played by Mr. Bacon and Lori Singer in the movie, Ren and Ariel projected a sullen, smoldering quality; you could imagine their exploding in dangerous ways. The film in which they appeared might have been on the square side, but its young stars were undeniably cool.

This is not an adjective that fits their successors. The lean, rubber-jointed Mr. Kushnier is a likable presence and a limber dancer, but a brooding James Dean type he is not. His Ren registers as a genial, smart-aleck chorus boy who is a little too jittery (his character-defining solo is called ''I Can't Stand Still'') and could probably benefit from the occasional Valium. Ms. Thompson is a pretty, matronly young woman with nothing of the hellcat about her. It is worth noting that Ariel's most brazen bad-girl activities in the movie, like sleeping around and playing dangerous daredevil games with cars, have been eliminated.

The many new songs Mr. Snow has composed range from the vaguely pleasant (a Sondheimesque duet about ''learning to be silent'' sung by Ms. Hoty and Catherine Cox as Ren's mother) to the unbearable (a long soul-searching soliloquy performed by the mild-mannered Mr. Anderson).

Ms. Hoty and Ms. Cox come the closest to seeming like real people, and Stacy Francis, as Ariel's best friend, has a powerhouse voice, though it is hardly used to best advantage. For a musical that aspires to be a series of crowd-stirring show stoppers, ''Footloose'' has a perverse tendency to muffle the endings of its songs, as though it weren't really expecting much applause.

John Lee Beatty's sets feature assorted generic moving scenery against sunny backdrops with crayon-line streaks of yellows and blues, as though the world being summoned came out of a coloring book. This isn't inappropriate. The most impressive scenic effect involves a giant bridge over a river (prettily set off by the lighting designer Ken Billington's evocation of flowing water and starlight) that has little reason to be. Mostly, you keep wondering where that seven-figure budget was sunk.

At the beginning of the second act of ''Footloose,'' Ren takes Ariel and some pals to a honky-tonk in a neighboring town. ''Isn't this worth fighting for?'' he asks, pointing to the dance floor. Yet what he is indicating is a group of couples in cowboy outfits doing a simple ballroom step with bovine serenity. If this is all the wide world has to offer, Reverend Moore should have no difficulty keeping his congregation down on the farm.

FOOTLOOSE

Stage adaptation by Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie; based on the original screenplay by Mr. Pitchford; music by Tom Snow; lyrics by Mr. Pitchford; choreography by A. C. Ciulla; directed by Mr. Bobbie; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Toni-Leslie James; lighting by Ken Billington; sound by Tony Meola; orchestrations by Danny Troob; music supervision and vocal arrangements, Doug Katsaros; dance music arrangements, Joe Baker; music coordinator, John Miller; hair by Ross Ringo; production supervisor, Steven Beckler; technical supervisor, Peter Fulbright; executive producers, Dodger Management Group and Tim Hawkins; associate producer, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Presented by Dodger Endemol Theatricals. At the Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Stephen Lee Anderson (the Rev. Shaw Moore), Dee Hoty (Vi Moore), Jeremy Kushnier (Ren McCormack), Jennifer Laura Thompson (Ariel Moore), Catherine Cox (Ethel McCormack), Stacy Francis (Rusty), Billy Hartung (Chuck Cranston) and Tom Plotkin (Willard Hewitt).