It’s hard not to want to love See What I Wanna See, the Michael John LaChiusa musical being intimately staged in Signature‘s Ark theater. You’ve got an ambitious composer trying to do more than produce commercialized Broadway drivel. You’ve got jazzy musical moments of sheer pleasure. And you’ve got Bobby Smith.

And yet, the evening never really comes together.

See What I Wanna See is kind of all over the place, a piece which interweaves three stories with an intersecting theme: objective truth is harder to find than you might think. The theme, though, lends an unnecessary heavy-handedness to the evening, making it feel like LaChiusa is really after something profound beyond entertainment, yet never really getting beyond a fairly simplistic thesis.