Mindless fun isn't as easy to pull off as it looks, and that's just as it should be; seeming effortlessness, after all, is the defining quality of good escapist entertainment. The best news about Kathleen Marshall's eager, puppyish new revival of the 1954 musical The Pajama Game is that the old-fangled machinery of Broadway musicals still purrs along just fine. David Chase's pit band sounds terrific, the dancers are spry and spunky, the singing is lovely, Derek McLane's sets are sparkling and smart. Even the casting of crooner Harry Connick Jr., in his Broadway debut, fits this sense of continuity with the past. Watching Connick, dressed in Martin Pakledinaz's stylish retro threads and hitting his leading-man marks without a trace of irony, only seals our feeling that the American Airlines Theatre has for a moment become a time machine or a tourbus.

The show's generic professionalism ultimately makes this starched and pressed Pajama Game resemble a road-show museum of the mid-century American musical, with players who know all the old moves but not what they signify. The fault can't be laid entirely at the feet of Marshall or the Roundabout Theatre, except insofar as they failed to recognize the irredeemable flimsiness of George Abbott's libretto, or to realize that Richard Adler and Jerry Ross's score has a few choice bits of ear candy and a bunch of milky duds. The Pajama Game is exactly the sort of charming artifact, in other words, for which the Encores! series was created.