Genius creativity comes in countless, often confounding forms, not always instantly obvious. Somewhere in a disreputable dive tonight, ideas shaping the 21st Century and beyond may spark against each other, not quite ready to ignite but getting closer.

That’s the fantasy that drove Steve Martin (yes, the guy with the arrow through his skull) to imagine the Lapin Agile – now a Paris tourist trap but, a century ago a picturesque cabaret crawling with future Big Names like Modigliani, Apollinaire and Utrillo – on the night when Picasso met Albert Einstein.

It’s October, 1904. Pablo Picasso is beginning to shake the blues and enter his Rose Period while Einstein is about to declare that everything is relative rather than of absolute value. Much of 20th Century arts and sciences is waiting.

First, though, there must be revels. Picasso already is a dog with women while Einstein is seeking the Whore of Mensa, in Woody Allen’s memorable phrase. Such things are part of the scene at the “Agile Rabbit,” we are informed by the regulars there in endless roundelays of bombastic gaggery.

This “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” is now being staged in Carlsbad by the New Village Arts Theatre in a production so anxious to be worthy of its subjects’ creativity (Martin’s included) that it turns cold with exhaustion.

Director Dana Case seizes on the silly moments of the script and builds outward, crowding the sense of muscular spiritual wonder that Martin obviously craved. There is inadequate separation of the genius from the general, a kind of cheap equality at odds with the serene planes of a Picasso or an Einstein. This celebration of the common man is all through the script, like a school assembly where all must win a prize, but Case pushes it to the front.

Arguably, Martin is a genius in his own field (if not one as transcendent as his subjects) but that field isn’t the theatre. Thus characters of promise – an inventor of a revolutionary building material made of “asbestos, kitten paws and radium,” various predatory females – are introduced but too soon dropped except as gag lines.

And whatever is Elvis Presley doing, as a messenger from the future? Why he’s there to make some point that genius comes in many forms, including stealing from Africa. So what might have been a mildly wry comment on relativity of values (Hey there, Einstein) becomes instead a culturally sensitive gossip column.

Tom Zohar plays Einstein like a Charlie Chaplin (the show’s funniest moment comes when he messes up his hair to look more Einsteiny) and Tim Parker channels Tom Cruise and Rudolf Nureyev as Picasso. Both are plausible choices, better than Greg Wittman’s Elvis, sort of a Tupelo undertaker.

Sandra Ellis-Troy is the voice of commercial reason as a dyke-like art dealer, Amanda Morrow plays a succession of smitten females with stylish separation and Brian Abraham, Kristianne Kurner, Kyle Lucy and Eddie Yaroch are unconvincing denizens of a fin de siecle Parisian cabaret.

The Tim Wallace scenery appears unfinished, or at least not entirely painted. Plus, there either are too many or not enough bottles behind the bar. Many of Mary Larson’s costumes are bang-on, others not. There’s a living piano which gets played only once, while the show opens with a blast of recorded jollity.

Ashley Jenks’ lighting design is over-vaulting imagination meets under-equipped facility. Pools of emphasis surge and recede like disco night at the dog show.

Somewhere in all this are the elements of an slight but amusing trifle. Mostly they’ve been trampled in the effort to be Steve-Martin funny.

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