As a producer the hardest thing to do (besides everything) is to parse the difference between good and compelling. It’s not hard, in fact it’s fairly easy, to make something good, something with no obvious faults, and even a few things in the plus column. It’s much harder to make something that will get people into their cars to drive across town, to part with some money, and, ideally, to live in their heads long after they leave.

Kodachrome, I think, falls on the wrong side of that line. A crueler version of me might say employ the word “twee”, this devilish individual might even break out “pretentious” and would almost certainly say something like “it thinks it’s the new Our Town, when it’s anything but,” however I think that misses the mark. There’s nothing wrong about Kodachrome, but there just isn’t enough right with it to make me care.

Kodachrome can easily be reduced to “Our Town with an ADD problem” or “Almost, Maine with a narrator.” Like Our Town it deals with life in a small town while finding beauty and merit in an average life; like Almost, Maine it’s a show of many disparate characters dealing with the fractured states of love. Unlike other of those two it doesn’t have much new to say and doesn’t have an interesting way to say it.

That’s maybe a little harsh, so in its defense I will say that the show is very cute, it’s heartfelt, and those that stick around for the ending will find a little bit of interest there. I think the show would be excellent for a student group, or a community theater (in all sincerity I wish local theater Company Onstage would do it, it would suit them well,) but it is not the stuff that gets me out to downtown Houston.

Our play proper follows a Photographer (oh yes, all characters are identified by their jobs, even when they have given names.) She shows us around her small Connecticut town, the people who live there, and the heartbreak many of them are facing. She moves us from scene to scene quite quickly (this play firmly finds itself in the modern cinematic style of writing,) and although characters usually have their designated pairs, they mix in with everyone else too.

By the end almost everyone is left a little unsatisfied, but ultimately ok (the characters, not the audience,) as they either gain or lose love. There isn’t much else to say, sadly.