If you've absolutely got to do a stage recreation of the beloved MGM movie musical Singin' in the Rain, Theatre Under The Stars' sleek and spirited rendition is as good as it's likely to get.

One first must overlook a few built-in drawbacks. The material was perfectly realized on screen so there's no way to improve upon the original.

Any stage version will be forced by audience expectation into duplicating the film's staging and choreography, at least for the most famous scenes and numbers. Yet even exact duplication does not always achieve the same impact, minus the cinematic ingredients (moving camera, changing angles, close-ups) — not to mention the unique personalities of the film's stars.

Like many classic movie musicals, Singin' featured an original script built around an existing set of songs, in this case the songs' composer Nacio Herb Brown and lyricist Arthur Freed wrote for film musicals early in the sound era. The script Betty Comden and Adolph Green invented is often hilarious in depicting Hollywood's bumpy transition from silent films to talkies. Yet as usually happens when a musical uses songs not written for that particular story, the song-to-story fit is rather loose. With their slight emotional content, numbers like Fit as a Fiddle, Good Mornin' and others register as little more than jingles, however irresistibly infectious.

That said, TUTS' current mounting does everything possible to overcome said reservations. Jamie Rocco's direction is slick and crisply paced. As choreographer, he carefully re-creates the film's dances without bogging down into Hollywood waxworks. Where he adds his own moves, they're brisk and vivid. He handles the conventional romance gingerly, while getting good mileage from scenes involving vain star Lina Lamont, whose screechy voice complicates her transition to talkies — as always, the show's comic highlights.

While no one's going to surpass Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen, the leads here register remarkably well.

As Don Lockwood, the silent star facing both a professional and a romantic transition, Michael Gruber proves an exceptionally agile dancer and an impressively strong singer, with an every-guy congeniality not unlike Kelly's.

Randy Rogel once again makes a sprightly, endlessly chipper Cosmo, Don's ubiquitous and indefatigable sidekick.

Danette Holden is poised and attractive as aspiring actress Kathy, quite accomplished in her vocals.

Rachel deBenedet makes the most of her show-stealing role as comic villainess Lina, the spoiled screen diva with a voice like fingernails on a blackboard and an ego the size of Mount Rushmore. She's a scream (literally) and scores with her solo What's Wrong with Me? added for the stage version. (OK, that's the one way the stage show does improve on the film.)

The splashy physical production comes from New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse, with Michael Anania's handsome settings and Greg Barnes' costumes supplying the right glitzy period-show-biz look. Jeff Rizzo leads a lively orchestral performance and the ensemble dance work is polished.

Energetically performed and professionally mounted, this Singin' in the Rain offers lightly enjoyable, if not particularly involving, entertainment.