Dredge up every conceivable cinematic cliche about "gay Paree," throw in a gay love story, and you have Paris by Night, an unrelentingly trite new musical concocted by Trinity Repertory Company artistic director Curt Columbus, along with Andre Pluess and Amy Warren, who came up with the undistinguished, jazz-derivative score.

The show is ostensibly set in the pre-revolutionary 1960s, and while it's commendable to revisit that time period to flesh out a variation on a story that wouldn't have found a mainstream voice in that era, Columbus would have done better to draw more deeply on primary sources like James Baldwin.

The main problem, however, is that his two-dimensional characterizatio[...]