Pulsing With Life

As the title suggests, "Queens Boulevard" feels a lot like a day spent strolling through, say, Jackson Heights: You eat a samosa, browse at a street fair while foreign pop blares over loudspeakers, then buy a mochi ice cream from a cart and head home. A pleasant and richly textured experience, but a mild one — that's the essence of the new musical by collage theater specialist Charles Mee, which opened on Monday at the Signature as the second production in a season-long celebration of Mr. Mee's work.

Credit Mimi Lien's brilliant set for bombarding you with the sensory overload of a dazzlingly diverse (46% foreign-born) borough from the moment you enter the theater. The set is a feast of color and detail: discount vegetables, nail salons, barbershops, mirrored paneling, saris on mannequins, candy-colored lamps, phone cards, travel agents, karaoke screens. On a second-story catwalk, a DJ is already mixing and whipping up the crowd for the wedding that's about to take place: between the handsome Vijay (Amir Arison) and his hip, cute bride, Shizuko (Michi Barall).

Ostensibly, "Queens Boulevard" centers on the couple's wedding day and is inspired by the Kathakali play "The Flower of Good Fortune." But don't be fooled — that lively, gaudy set and the pitch-perfect ethnic-inflected costumes (by Christal Weatherly) are as crucial to the experience of "Queens Boulevard" as its story.

In fact, getting bogged down in its meandering plot could actually hamper you from enjoying the ride. The story consists of the frustrating journey of Vijay, who leaves his bride in the bedroom to go buy her a rare flower; he instead gets suckered into a series of well-intentioned delays and doesn't get home for many, many hours. How Vijay could be so gullible, and how Shizuko could be so patient, are topics better left unexplored. The point of Vijay's journey seems to be to furnish "Queens Boulevard" with enough tableaux for a postmodern "It's a Small World" ride.

Fortunately, director Davis McCallum, choreographer Peter Pucci, and music supervisor Michael Friedman are all working from the same understanding. Together they craft a piquant blend of scenes and song-and-dance numbers. In the musical numbers (which range from Indian pop to karaoke to Irish folk), the cast's singing, which often overlaps with a recorded vocal track, is seldom the point, and the dancing, too, has an untrained, everyman sheen.

This effort to create a kind of working-class plainspoken world extends into the scenes, which are populated by cabbies and small-business owners and regular folk. The dialogue, collated by Mr. Mee from sources ranging from Internet Web logs to Homer, has a deliberate lack of fireworks. There's almost a Hallmark-card quality to the sentiments characters express at important moments. Sometimes the slenderly written speeches work, and sometimes they don't, but Mr. Mee remains committed to his aesthetic, and Mr. McCallum sets a galloping pace that smooths over the rough patches. "Queens Boulevard" isn't a perfect ride, but it pulses with its own insouciant energy.

"Queens Boulevard" until January 6 (555 W. 42nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-244-7529).