You'd be right to be skeptical about a show that packs two exclamation points into its title — and "Gutenberg! The Musical!" suffers from more than excessive punctuation.

The concept of mounting a bad Broadway show propelled "The Producers" to mega-hit status, but the current offering at Manoa Valley Theatre plays like a short skit that has been overinflated into two acts.

Written and originally performed in New York and London by Scott Brown and Anthony King, the show features two incredibly enthusiastic and naive young men who stage a backers' audition for a show they have written about the 15th century inventor of the printing press. Because of tight funds, they play all the parts wearing labeled baseball hats to identify characters. A single piano provides accompaniment.

Driven more by adrenaline than talent or good taste, the show offers some funny bits. Grabbing a couple of fists full of hats to simulate a chorus and rotating a clothes rack to simulate a kick line make for great visual humor. But such gimmicks don't sustain the play. Worse, it is dragged down by tuneless songs and a dogged lack of variety that enthusiasm can't disguise.

The play-within-a-play is bad, but that is the intended setup. Unfortunately, the MVT production directed by Rob Duval and featuring Elitei Tatafu Jr. and Tony Young is mostly not funny.

But it's not for lack of enthusiasm.

Tatafu and Young make the introductions to each act lively and fresh with their eagerness and total lack of aplomb. It's only after the musical numbers start that the show begins it's gra- dual, mind-numbing descent. Act 1 introduces the players: the title character intent on saving humanity by mass producing the Bible, the evil Monk who intends to thwart him, and a grape-stomping girlfriend named Helvetica (whose baseball cap sports a pair of blond braids).

In Act 2, they purposely avoid wrapping up all the loose ends.

The songs display a lack of variety that results from a full-throttle approach and the confusion that happens when a cat-puppet assumes a dominant role and singing Rats and Feces fill out a musical number. The songs are intended to be awful — like the prologue sung over the body of a dead baby — and they succeed.

Accompanied on piano by Kenji Higashihama, both Tatafu and Young sing well enough and, despite some noticeable hoarseness and coughing, manage some effective harmony.

The silent gem in the production, however, is the modified thrust stage designed by Willie Sabel. It features a rear proscenium and a projected acting area surrounded on three sides by cabaret seating, with risers for the rest of us in cheap seats. With only a little tweaking it would be the perfect Elizabethan stage.

Unfortunately, it hosts "Gutenberg!" and not Shakespeare.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater since 1973.