Women on the verge of a stronger story

This should have been a fabulous lark. Then early gossip, including postponements and last-minute shuffling of songs, predicted a total train wreck.

In fact, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" is often larky, somewhat wrecked and filled with enough fabulous moments by huge talents that its shortcomings - painful though they are - don't stomp all the joy from the rest.

Do I seem to be waffling? Welcome to this unsteady but audacious show. The Lincoln Center Theater's musical adaptation of Pedro Almodovar's 1988 Spanish movie is busy and laborious. It also is technically adventurous and stuffed with more stars (Patti LuPone and Laura Benanti, for starters) than material that deserves them.

First, let it be said that director Bartlett Sher, set designer Michael Yeargan and costume designer Catherine Zuber from Lincoln Center's magnificent "South Pacific" have figured out unending ways to capture the movie's candy-colored raunch, jungle-print wackiness and '50s pop-art extravagance. We are whisked around a surreal fantasy of Madrid's streets and apartments via ingenuous projections, fun-house mirrors, moving sidewalks and even taxi chases for our guide (Danny Burstein).

So, the show looks great, even if the mechanisms had not all jelled by Saturday's preview. Alas, the slight episodic story, adapted with perhaps too much faithfulness by Jeffrey Lane, is not muscular enough to support all this apparatus. And, though David Yazbek's music has engaging mambos and other dance forms, too many of his lyrics ("Madrid is my mama, give me the nipple") betray the sophistication needed for this screwball comic style.

Sherie Rene Scott has a sympathetic one-note exasperation as the main character, Pepa, an actress who spikes the gazpacho with Valium after being abandoned by her lover (Brian Stokes Mitchell, drab in a thankless minor role as a cad). But the women who luxuriate on the hysterical verge are Benanti, stopping the show as the irresistibly awkward and gorgeously ditsy model, and LuPone, skulking around like a leopard-print tea cozy as the long-deserted wife and mental patient.

Watch how desperate, yet how funny, LuPone is in her second-act courtroom scene, a dazzling plea for her lost youth called "Invisible." But just as things start to pick up, the show has no finale. It just stops. Like this.