Screen-to-stage adaptations are more common now — there are five currently running on Broadway — than they were in 1995. That’s when Victor/Victoria, a reworking of the 1982 film, had its premiere on the Great White Way. The stage musical retained its star, Julie Andrews, along with its mostly tepid score by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse (composer Frank Wildhorn contributed a few more bland songs after Mancini’s death in 1994). And it was mostly agreed upon by the critics that the stage version felt clunkier, weaker, and more washed-out than it had on film.

Uptown Players and director Cheryl Denson have put together a production that suffers from many of the same adjectives. The exception is two stellar performances, both at the top of my list for the year’s best. But for every moment of dazzling stage charisma exuded by one person, there are at least six other moments of tedium put forth by someone else. Add it all together, and the sum weighs down the individual parts.

It’s 1936 in Paris, and we are introduced to the glamorous nightclub world of Carroll “Toddy” Todd, a flamboyantly gay bon vivant played with vivacity and tenderness by Paul Taylor. Toddy meets and takes under his wing a penniless English soprano named Victoria (Ashley P. Gonzales). Together they devise the brilliant plan to turn Victoria into “the world’s greatest female impersonator,” a Polish count known as Victor Grazinski. The duo becomes the toast of Paris and soon catches the eye of visiting Chicago mobster King Marchand (G. Shane Peterman), who finds himself strangely attracted to “Victor.” King’s spurned lady, the platinum blonde bombshell Norma Cassidy (Whitney Hennen), refuses to let him go without a fight, while King’s hulking bodyguard (Gregory Hullett) is dealing with unfamiliar situations of his own.

If every actor played his or her role with as much oomph as Taylor and Hennen bring to Toddy and Norma, then this Victor/Victoria would be perhaps the best show of the year. Taylor quickly establishes himself as the heart of the production. He serves as the catalyst for the show’s best moments. With his finale appearance in an evening gown and sleek bobbed wig, he even provides the evening’s only satisfying bit of drag performance. Taylor gathers up the laughs as if they were bon bons, plucking each from the willing audience and savoring the sweet reward with wicked pleasure.

Hennen, meanwhile, pulls off the delightful trick of making a shrill-voiced gangster’s moll with a propensity for malapropisms seem like a character we’ve never encountered before. Her Norma is surprisingly endearing, to the point where we become convinced that King Marchand is a heartless bastard to have discarded her so easily in favor of Victor. Even when saddled with two of the show’s most uninspiring numbers, “Paris Makes Me Horny” and “Chicago, Illinois,” Hennen never lets her hilarious energy dip. Each time either she or Taylor appears onstage, the air starts to crackle with anticipation. They sparkle.

If only that fairy dust extended to the rest of the cast. As gender-bending Victoria, Gonzales seems comfortable in neither a tuxedo nor a dress. Her voice is superb, but the utter lack of magnetism she displays — especially during her big diva number “Le Jazz Hot” — makes Victor’s overnight success as a performer seem questionable.

Likewise, Peterman’s deflated presence completely belies King’s supposed macho clout. His voice, too, is excellent, but everything Peterman does when not singing falls flat. The chorus, who appear as everything from café patrons to cabaret backup dancers, struggles mightily with Vicki Squires’ frenetic choreography.

The twisting, turning plot reaches its zenith during an enormously complicated game of cat-and-mouse, played out on the set of adjoining hotel duplex suites designed by Rodney Dobbs. The main characters — plus one charmingly tipsy maid —s curry in and out of the rooms with comically exaggerated stealth and precise timing, each missing the next by only a hair. This scene epitomizes the magic that this Victor/Victoria is capable of, rather than the split personality that it displays the rest of the time.