The Bell Curve:

I should have read the ad more carefully.

It described rather accurately what we were going to see, but it never occurred to me that any program based on the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein could be anything but enjoyable. When the ad told me that Orange County’s Pacific Symphony was going to meld “some of the most cherished film musicals of all time” with its orchestra in concert last Saturday night at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, the caution flag should have gone up. Instead, my friend Betsy Flynn and I went.

The first uneasiness grew out of a program note that songs I know well and love from six Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals — all of which I had seen with their original Broadway casts, once even sitting with the composers themselves — would offer us a “symphonic night at the movies.”

And when the orchestra might as well have stayed at home while the entire first scene of “Oklahoma!,” including dialogue, was played out on the screen as the opening number, I knew there was real trouble ahead.

By the end of the first set, it was pretty clear that listening to a fine symphony orchestra play counterpoint to a movie version of such show tunes, written to be sang, as “There’s Nothing Like a Dame” or “Do Re Mi” leaves a lot to be desired. Like artistic judgment, for example, a necessity even in the summer when such departures seem possible.

We left at intermission, something neither of us had done in recent memory and maybe ever. We talked on the long walk down to the parking lot about why both of us reacted so strongly, and we agreed that the immediate reason was a sense of being cheated, even though we had been forewarned.

We had driven out to the box office at noon to buy half-price rush tickets. That helped, but 27 bucks to see old movies we could borrow for free at the public library felt like a bad bargain. So did a two-dimensional concert in which the orchestra seemed almost a bit player.

Even Rodgers and Hammerstein couldn’t fill a void like that. Selling a song written to play in a theater requires powerful feelings to pass between singer and audience. I didn’t detect much of that third dimension happening Saturday night, especially with a screen in the way. So we’ll just have to write it off for good intentions and a long and splendid history.

Building a concert around a composer isn’t new. But to work, it has to focus somewhere and build a bridge from there to the audience. An example of how that should work will lead off the 2009/10 South Coast Repertory season.

The play is called “Putting It Together,” the composer is Stephen Sondheim and the cast is simply a half-dozen fine voices and a piano.

It had a Broadway run a decade ago and has been playing around ever since. Its simple construct is a series of vignettes that keep Sondheim’s music front and center with no barriers between it and the audience. That is properly called “live theater.”

Meanwhile in the sporting world, the Manny Ramirez Show plays on with a new scriptanny bobble-heads sold out Dodger Stadium on July 15. And although they wouldn’t have packed the house, the real bobbleheads in this promotion belong to the massive health organization Kaiser Permanente and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.

In case you missed it, Kaiser Permanente signed on this year as the Dodgers’ “official health insurance partner.” In this capacity, it was also sponsor of Manny Ramirez bobble-head night — until Manny got caught cheating. Then, while remaining a Dodger partner, Kaiser Permanente quietly backed off sponsorship of the Manny bobble-head.

As protests go, this wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better than nothing. Then Kaiser was handed a chance to stand up and make a real statement about drugs and baseball — and blew it. Asked whether dropping sponsorship of the Manny bobble-head signaled disapproval with baseball’s less-than-draconian efforts to rid the game of performance enhancing drugs — certainly a health problem — Kaiser weaseled off with a spokesman telling a Los Angeles Times reporter: “We thought it necessary to pull out our sponsorship …when he was suspended for violating baseball’s drug policy” — then added, “I wouldn’t read into that. We took a single step for a single reason.”

As baseball’s “health partner,” Kaiser might reasonably have asked if sitting out 50 games represented an adequate punishment for a flagrant and contemptuous violation of the health rules that govern baseball’s drug policy. And Selig might want to re-think his answer to the same question.

So might a passel of drug-free pitchers wondering every time they face Ramirez if he is juiced up on performance drugs for which he got a slap on the wrist.

So Manny will continue to fill stadiums and give organized baseball the finger. Play ball!

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.