We all know you can't go home again, but -- bummer for the citizens of Winesburg, Ohio -- apparently you can't leave, either.

So they stay put and suffer, these denizens of Sherwood Anderson's celebrated stories (here unnecessarily and only half-successfully turned into a stage musical). They live small in a small town.

Take the Willard family. Elizabeth Willard, middle-aged but already old, years ago abandoned all hope of erotic satisfaction. Her husband, Tom, would make a ghost look like Hercules. Both Elizabeth and Tom are growing apart from their son George, a fledgling writer who may have the best hope of life outside Winesburg (though he's certainly taking his time about it).

And these are the town's success stories! What about their friends and neighbors (whom even Anderson calls "grotesques")? Alice Hindman cries in the rain, "trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg." Still, she's luckier than Wing Biddlebaum (!), a former teacher, whose hands now flutter uncontrollably because of a relationship of sorts that he almost had.

I could go on, but it's all too sad. (And too small.)

I'm guessing that in 1919, Anderson's prose seemed to capture something essential, sad and beautiful. Today, it seems condescending. Winesburg doesn't so much ennoble these folks as pathologize them. They're not people -- they're Icons of Middle America.

Ah, but icons aren't very engaging on the stage, which is a problem for Winesburg-the-musical. I should say that the show hits one real home run -- a big number about the town baseball team and its quirky coach buzzes with life. Not coincidentally, this is one of the few stand-alone songs in the score, which otherwise shuttles between folksiness and New-Age-iness, and is always serviceable, but never memorable. It is, however, superlatively well performed by an ensemble under the musical direction of Thomas Murray.

I wish I admired equally Terrence Nolen's stage direction, but the production exacerbates the problems of the text -- it's full of studiedly arty stage pictures, and lacks any sense of day-to-day existence. Even the acting seems to strive wrongheadedly for something conceptual, as though the cast is playing a Walker Evans photograph, rather than living humans.

There's no denying that Winesburg is, in its way, skillfully performed and produced. But I lost patience with everything about it long before the final curtain, 2 hours and 20 long minutes after I first sat down. Why can't anybody do anything in Winesburg, Ohio? By the end, I was praying for an inserted Cole Porter number -- "Get Out of Town."