The rule of Chekhov’s Gun is that if a firearm is introduced early on in a play, it must eventually go off. The rule of Spector’s Gun, I’m coining now, is to just avoid it.

You’ve probably seen posters around the city for Four Chords and a Gun, a new play — or at least, “not a f--king musical,” as they so boldly state — by comedic TV actor John Ross Bowie, , about the recording of the fifth Ramones album, 1980’s End of the Century, with infamous hitmaker Phil Spector. As the story goes, Spector’s arduously slow, repetitive process clashed so ferociously with the Ramones’s quick-and-dirty style, combined with Spector’s eccentric (read: dangerously narcissistic) personality and the mental health and addiction issues within the band, that Spector allegedly pulled a gun on Dee Dee when he tried to leave a session. Other accounts say he placed it on a soundboard. Others say there was no threat at all.

You can’t fault Bowie for thinking this situation might make for good drama: a room of music legends at war, manipulating each other while battling inner demons and with unhealthy coping mechanisms, all while engaging in the timeless struggle between artistic honesty and mainstream success and critiquing the impact of toxic masculinity that weighed on each of these men. I would have liked to have seen that play.

That is not what Bowie has produced. Nor is it what director Richard Ouzounian (the theatre critic at this paper until 2016) has investigated in the script. Bowie and Ouzounian are adamant that this dynamic between Phil Spector and the Ramones (Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Marky) is the focal point of the play, but we see astonishingly little of that conflict. We hear a few seconds of arguing offstage; band members exchange complaints. Johnny has an impressive tirade but since he spends almost all of his stage time doing so, it’s exactly 0% shocking. Most of the play takes place outside of the recording studio — before, during, and after the process — with scenes functioning primarily as expository devices to rattle off the real-life biographies of each character and trivia about the band.

And then there’s the gun. Oh, the gun. Bowie has stated that this is the element that is most intriguing to him as a writer, so it’s perplexing why he would intentionally cut off that suspense by having Spector reveal it in the first recording-session scene, when barely any tension has built up between the producer and the band. When Spector brandishes it later on, he might as well be holding up his own fingers — that’s how much of a threat he imposes. In fact, that would be one of the funnier moments in Bowie’s script, which tries to turn this story of rock ’n’ roll violence into comedy, and I could picture actor Ron Pederson as Spector nailing the absurdity perfectly.

And without any one true story of what went down between the Ramones, Spector and the gun, what Bowie does to incorporate Dee Dee (and his alleged work as a gay sex worker to enable his drug addiction) into the skirmish is inexcusable, and reeks of an unconfident writer desperate to shock — or worse, get a laugh. To this critic, a phrase came to mind invoking an entirely different ’70s rock band: Cheap Trick.

It also made me channel a Johnny Ramone-level of anger (and sympathy) on behalf of the gift of a performer, Paolo Santalucia, who works a miracle as Dee Dee as this production’s saving grace. From his first moments onstage, he makes awkward dialogue feel extremely natural, even charming, and as the band’s happy-go-lucky comic relief. He also gives Dee Dee heartbreaking pathos as someone who acknowledges but can’t surpass his drug problems. Watching him descend even further into it is painful for the audience. With Santalucia as his theatrical avatar, I would have been happy if the play was just Dee Dee delivering his famous line from the movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School — “All right, pizza!” — for 90 minutes.

That moment with Dee Dee, Spector and the gun, and the rest of the cast’s inability to shine as they so often do in other productions is indicative of a much larger problem in Bowie’s script and Ouzounian’s direction — these real people are flattened into caricatures with one dominant personality trait, dressed in chicly distressed jeans and shaggy wigs with the sheen of a fresh blowout: Neurotic Joey, Rageaholic Johnny, Drug-addled Dee Dee, and Alcoholic Marky, as Ouzounian has actually written in his director’s notes like they’re Disney characters. Pederson is a natural fit for Spector’s eccentricities, but leans too heavily on making them into gags rather than a veil covering his dangerous side. The other band members are handcuffed: Justin Goodhand by Joey’s OCD and lack of emotional expression, Cyrus Lane by Johnny’s stifled intensity or furious outbursts, and James Smith by Marky’s frequent naps — it’s hard to build a character when he spends half the action sleeping.

That brings us to Vanessa Smythe as love-triangle participant Linda — didn’t know there was a woman in the cast? Because there might as well not have been. This isn’t a comment against Smythe’s performance, but of Bowie’s dramatization of a real-life woman treats her as one-third of a love triangle between Joey and Johnny and nothing more. This play treats women as afterthoughts, problems, non-existent, or at its most excruciating, collateral damage. In 2003, Spector shot and killed actor Lana Clarkson in his home — a fact that would be notable in any story involving Spector but especially in one about his violent streak and tendencies to brandish a gun. Here, it’s a footnote in Marky’s conclusion. He doesn’t even say her name.

And while this statement is still hanging in the air, the rock show begins. Because while the play boasts that it isn’t a musical, which would obviously go against the style of the band that defines punk — the music and the attitude — it is followed by a short concert of the hits: “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Danny Says,” “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

A handful of fans in Ramones shirts were at the opening of Four Chords and a Gun, rocking out to the songs of these music legends, as a reminder of the legacy of these artists these real people, some of whom are still living today. In perhaps the truest testament to the play’s source material, I left the theatre riled up and angry, ready to unleash in the name of art, in need of sedation.

Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga

Four Chords and a Gun

Written by John Ross Bowie. Directed by Richard Ouzounian. Until April 28 at the Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay West. 4ChordsPlay.com or 416-973-4000.